Development and Release CycleΒΆ
Mantid makes 3 point releases per year. The list of current milestones, along with their expected release dates, is shown at https://github.com/mantidproject/mantid/milestones. The rough structure of the development cycle is shown in the following figure:
Each release is divided, roughly, into:
a 3 month development period where new features and bugfixes are developed
a 3 week code freeze where the code is tested and prepared for the next release
during the freeze a 2 week beta-test period is given to users to test the upcoming release candidate (deployed in the form of a nightly build).
Feature development occurs on the master branch. At the code freeze, once all pull requests marked for the release have been merged, a new branch is created for the next release. Fixes found during testing are merged to the release branch and the master remains open to changes not destined for this release.
The maintenance period generally overlaps with the tail end of the code freeze. All maintenance tasks occur on the master branch and should not disturb the release branch.