Hi all, Dian and I would like to discuss a few items regarding the upcoming Flink 1.12 feature freeze:
*A) Exact feature freeze day* So far, we've always said "end of October <https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FLINK/1.12+Release>" for the freeze. We propose (end of day CEST) October 28th (Wednesday next week) as the feature freeze time. We want to create RC0 on the day after the feature freeze, to make sure the RC creation process is running smoothly, and to have a common testing reference point. *B) What does feature freeze mean?*After the feature freeze, no new features are allowed to be merged to master. Only bug fixes and documentation improvements. The release managers will revert new feature commits after the feature freeze. Rational: The goal of the feature freeze phase is to improve the system stability by addressing known bugs. New features tend to introduce new instabilities, which would prolong the release process. If you need to merge a new feature after the freeze, please open a discussion on the dev@ list. If there are no objections by a PMC member within 48 (workday)hours, the feature can be merged. *C) When to cut the "release-1.12" branch off master?* In the last feature freeze, we had a pretty lengthy phase of maintaining the "master" and "release-1.11" branches with the same fixes. Therefore, I would like to propose an adjustment to the release process: We will have a stabilization phase on master, between the feature freeze and the branch cut. I expect this stabilization phase to last between 1 and 3 weeks, depending on the issues we find. Once all blockers are resolved, and no new blockers are surfacing, we can cut off the "release-1.12" branch and finalize the release. Is anybody in the community waiting for the cut off to happen sooner so that they can merge a big feature to Flink 1.13 ? (if that would be the case, then we can not have a stabilization phase) Let me know what you think! Best, Dian and Robert
