Suggestion: Changes to release process, release from branch

"Andreas K. Huettel" <[email protected]> Sun, 26 Jul 2026 18:59:56 +0900

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.lib.glibc.alpha
Organization	Gentoo Linux
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Hello everyone, 

even though the next release is now still quite far away, I would like to already
propose some (in my opinion) minor changes to the release process:

* No changes to the procedure during soft freeze and freeze, no changes to basic
  timetable

* With the hard freeze two weeks before nominal/last possible release date, 
  the release branch is made, and the master branch is re-opened for development.

* The release branch is treated as "machine testing, only important bugfixes, 
  minimal activity", basically as before master during that period.

* Once things are OK, the release is cut from the release branch.

This has several advantages. What comes to my mind:

* The master branch is open earlier for the backlog of accumulated patches again.

* There is less chance of stray commits being pushed at last minute.

* Distros can treat the branch point as a release candidate for testing purposes.
  We could even add a corresponding tag.

* Last but not least, this means we'd be handling releases similar to gcc and
  binutils.

What do you think?

Cheers, 
Andreas

-- 
PD Dr. Andreas K. Hüttel
[email protected]
Gentoo Linux developer 
(council, comrel, toolchain, base-system, perl, libreoffice)
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:Dilfridge

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