Open Stack

We're rapidly approaching the end of the Ocata cycle. There are several
deadlines coming up within the next few weeks, so please review the
schedule and make sure you understand how they affect your teams.

Focus
-----

This week begins Feature Freeze for all milestone-based projects.
No feature patches should be landed after this point. Exceptions
may be granted by the project PTL.

This week is the final release deadline for client libraries. The
deadline for client library releases is Thursday 26 Jan. We do not
grant Feature Freeze Extensions for any libraries, so that is a
hard freeze date. Any feature work that requires updates to client
libraries should be prioritized so it can be completed by that time.

This week starts the Soft StringFreeze. You are no longer allowed
to accept proposed changes containing modifications in user-facing
strings.  Such changes should be rejected by the review team and
postponed until the next series development opens (which should
happen when RC1 is published).

This week starts the Requirements freeze. After the milestone, only
critical requirements and constraints changes will be allowed.
Freezing our requirements list gives packagers downstream an
opportunity to catch up and prepare packages for everything necessary
for distributions of the upcoming release. The requirements remain
frozen until the stable branches are created, with the release
candidates.

Release Tasks
-------------

Prepare final release and branch requests for all client libraries.

Milestone-based projects should ensure that the membership of your
$project-release gerrit groups is up to date with the team who will
finalize the project release. Please coordinate with the release
management team if you have any questions.

This is a good time to review stable branches for unreleased changes
and prepare those releases, too.

Teams should prepare their documentation for completing the
community-wide goal of removing the use of deprecated Oslo libraries.
See https://governance.openstack.org/tc/goals/index.html for details
about how to communicate your status on the goal.

General Notes
-------------

The RC1 target week in R-3 is only 1 week after freeze. This is
different from our usual 2 week freeze period, so please stay on
top of reviews and minimize FFEs accordingly.

We will start the soft string freeze during R-4 (23-27 Jan). See
https://releases.openstack.org/ocata/schedule.html#o-soft-sf for
details

The release team is now publishing the release calendar using ICS.
Subscribe your favorite calendaring software to
https://releases.openstack.org/schedule.ics for automatic updates.

Important Dates
---------------

Ocata 3 Milestone, with Feature and Requirements Freezes: 26 Jan

Ocata RC1 target: 2 Feb

Ocata Final Release candidate deadline: 16 Feb

Ocata release schedule: http://releases.openstack.org/ocata/schedule.html