**draft**
Note: please refer to previous discussion Business-level Requirements for TF Release Process
What is the purpose of release planning?
The purpose of release planning is to create a plan to deliver an increment to the product. It is extremely important especially in a community where there are lots of developers from different companies, countries. The release plan will help us to coordinate our common effort to achieve agreed goals and to deliver proper, coded, tested, and working as an expected increment of product. To achieve that, we need to act in accordance with agreed rules, time schedule and milestones.
Release Frequency
Proposal is to have a community release every 6 months.
Intially due to absence of release definition and process, community release needs to be aligned with some Contrail commerical release. Once Community establishes its own independent release definition and process, all commerical release including contrail can be aligned to community release.
This alignment is necessary to allow migration between community and commercial release. As long as this alignment is maintained, Commercial release can follow any other release frequencies.
Release Life Time & Support
Community will be actively supporting any release for up to 9 months, where any bug fixes will be committed and made available.
LTS release: Community recognising a need to have Long term support release, will look forward to introduce a mechnism to term a community release as LTS release. where any LTS release will be actively supported by community for upto ?2/3 years?
Next Community Release
Aligning with Contrail commerical release to begin with we have following options:
Release Process
Release process is outlined as follows