FreeBSD 8.4 Release Process
Introduction
This is the release schedule for FreeBSD 8.4. For more information about the release engineering process, please see the Release Engineering section of the web site.
General discussions about the pending release and known issues should be sent to the public freebsd-stable mailing list.
Schedule
| Action | Expected | Actual | Description |
| Initial release schedule announcement | - | 08 February 2013 | Release Engineers send announcement email to developers with a rough schedule. |
| Code freeze begins | 08 March 2013 | - | Release Engineers announce that all further commits to the stable/8 branch will require explicit approval. Certain blanket approvals will be granted for narrow areas of development, documentation improvements, etc. |
| BETA1 | 11 March 2013 | - | First beta test snapshot. |
| releng/8.4 branch | 18 March 2013 | - | Subversion branch created, propagated to CVS; future release engineering proceeds on this branch. |
| RC1 | 26 March 2013 | - | First release candidate. |
| RC2 | 05 April 2013 | - | Second release candidate. |
| RELEASE build | 12 April 2013 | - | 8.4-RELEASE build. |
| RELEASE announcement | 19 April 2013 | - | 8.4-RELEASE press release. |
| Turn over to the secteam | - | - | releng/8.4 branch is handed over to the FreeBSD Security Officer Team in one or two weeks after the announcement. |