Moodle in English: Changes to Release Calendar

General developer forum

Hi, General Developers.

We have been following the General release calendar for a number of releases now, and releases have been smooth and mostly on-time. We have also recently instituted stricter processes for security issues where details of security issues are hidden until immediately before a minor release.

We have decided to change the Release calendar to bring minor releases in-line with major releases, rather than keeping them offset by one month, which will achieve tighter security still.

This would mean that the release calendar would appear as follows.

Release type	Frequency	Months
Major (eg. 2.x)	6 monthly	First Monday of May and November
Minor (Point) (eg. 2.x.x)	2 monthly	First Monday of July, September, November, January, March and May

Release calendar

This change has been made in consultation with our Moodle Partners, who rely on regularity.

Our support periods will remain the same.

We plan to post this more widely to the community in a week. Please let us know now if you can see any big problems with this change.

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+1, from my POV (as admin) it means:

2 less (minor) releases yearly to update to.
better sync of security issues.
1 more month to prepare major upgrades before the start of cycle (Spanish schools & institutes).

The only drawbacks I can imagine are:

Countries / implementations where the May / November releases fit worse.
2 months to get the first 2.x.1 releases may be too much (though we haven't had any "urgent" release in the last cycles).
2.5 dev cycle will be 1 month shorter, roadmap alterations?

Ciao

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As it happens, May / Nov is worse for the OU than Jun / Dec, at lease with our current release cycle, but if need be, we can adjust that.

Surely this change will not be introduced for 2.5? We ahve all been working to an April 22 feature freeze date, that was announced some time ago. I think we have to stick with 2.5 in June and then have 2.6 in November.

I agree 2.x.1 1 month after 2.x worked well, but I can't see a good way to keep that, and sychronise security fixes on all branches. I guess people will have to use weeklies if they want that sort of thing.

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I totally agree with Eloy. Generally making updates late august, having release in may let one month more, and time to test/document and traine users.

And like Tim about 2.5, one month less is probably not a good idea...

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Hmm, most core developers go on vacation in December/January or July/August. Maybe this change might result in more critical bugfixes included in .1 releases.

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My 2p.

From my POV as a developer in a UK FE / HE college, moving the December release to a month earlier increases our likelihood of getting the latest update out in time for the end of December / start of January, as we normally lack time and push the release back to mid-February (the half term, which is the next break in teaching and best option for system upgrades).

The June release being moved to May is of little consequence as we wouldn't do it then, but would instead wait until our summer break, do the upgrade then in time for the start of the new term / academic year in September. It does give us greater opportunity for staff training on any new features though.

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Hi, all.

Thanks to those who have responded. There doesn't seem to be any great objections except around the sooness of the change, which will need to be taken into account.

An amendment to the statement above: releases will happen on the second Monday of the relevant months, continuing the current schedule of Minor releases.

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I've seen changes made in release calendar.

But what about end support dates, for already existing and comming releases?

Will it stay "end december" for releases < 2.5 and "end november" for releases >= 2.5 ?

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Hi, Severin.

The support dates for past releases will remain the same. We may end up with a couple of extra point releases at the end of support periods depending on security issues.

For future releases the support period will still be 12 months from the release date.

Thanks to Tim for sharing the code-freeze date here.

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For those other developers who, like me, are not telepathic:

They have moved the target release date for 2.5 to 13th May.
So, the code freeze is now 1st April

So, if you were planning to finish features for 2.5, you now have 3 weeks less than you thought. Thanks.

P.S. did not acutally require telepathy to learn this, but it did require Andrew Nicols to point out where it was burried in the chat logs: https://moodle.org/local/chatlogs/index.php?conversationid=12151

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Thanks for the information, Tim! It appears that I am not telepatic either. Was aiming at Moodle Tracker date that still has 03/Jun/13 as a release date for 2.5...

Yuliya

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