What tasks must a FreeBSD Release Engineer do during the release process?

Here are some ideas:

1. Post an announcement to developers@FreeBSD.org as well as the general public announcing the code freeze time

1. When that day comes, the release engineer commits to svnadmin/conf/approvers to implement the hard freeze

1. The release engineer commits to bump the name of X.Y-STABLE to X.$(Y+1)-PRERELEASE, and post a note

1. After a few days, post BETA1, ask the community for testing

1. Once BETA1 is built, notify security-officer@FreeBSD.org for freebsd-update build.

1. Decide whether we want to go with BETA2 here.

1. A date is set for RC1, at RC1, create release branch, bump FreeBSDversion on stable/ and releng/ trees (releng/ is now named as '-RC1'), and unfreeze stable/ saying it's back to “code slush” and at this stage, release notes shall be finalized.

1. A date is set for RC2 (typically, one week per RC), bump version, build, announce, etc. All installation related bugs must be shaken out at this stage. For each RC, notify so@ for new freebsd-update build.

1. Final release: bump version, do final test build, tag, checkout from tag, do the real final build.

XinLi provided most of the ideas on this page.