Maintenance releases solve problems and fix bugs. They do not typically add new features or content. However, there might be an exception in case of blockers or critical releases.

Issue selection

Maintenance releases for current development branch are made every 6-8 weeks. Issues for maintenance releases can be nominated by:

  • Customers by raising a support issue for a particular bug.
  • Developers by assigning the fix version to a reported issue.
  • Community by raising an issue on the mailing list of forum and convincing developers to set the fix version.

Priority

As a rule, all blockers and critical issues related to a release have to be solved or re-rated prior the release. An open blocker or a critical issue is a reason for postponing the release.

All issues in the changelog for given maintenance release are solved according to their priority. Issues with same priority are solved according to a preference of developers assigned for the release. Issues that include patches or JUnit tests are treated preferentially.

Process

When the release date for given release is approaching and there are no open blockers or critical issues, all development is stopped. Upon passing review and QA, developers perform the release and make the released artifacts public.

All developers are free to provide fixes for issues, they discover or need to fix in course of other work they are performing even if such issue was not planned for the maintenance release as long as they observe the process and make no commits once the development of given maintenance release was stopped.

Past maintenance releases

See Releases.

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