ReleaseEngineering/DevelFreezePolicy

Development Freeze Policy

As of the development freeze for a release, no new features, major version bumps, or other such development changes are allowed for packages already in the Fedora collection (new packages can still be reviewed, added in CVS and built). The purpose of the development freeze is to help ensure that changes have adequate time to be tested as well as to provide some focus on bug-fixing for the release.

If you think that you need to break the development freeze, then you should ask for approval prior to breaking the freeze. To do so, send an email to rel-eng@fedoraproject.org with the following information.

• A description of what you want to change
• Rationale for why the change is important enough to be allowed in after the development freeze.
• Impact of *not* accepting the development at this point of the schedule.
• Information on what testing you've already done on the development to help reduce the risk.

The release team will evaluate the request and provide feedback. If the feature is rejected, then you'll have to wait for the next development cycle to begin to get the change into Fedora packages. Disputes over rejected changes can be escalated to FESCo If your development change is approved, you'll need to provide the release team with the build nvr of your package so that they can tag it for the freeze tag.

Approval will come in the form of +1's. Two +1's (without any negative feedback) are necessary to build. If there is negative feedback, conversation will ensue and a new vote will be issued.

Note that ignoring the freeze process can lead to your package not getting tagged for the freeze tag, and thus not pushed to rawhide and the final release.