8.0 Release Plan

Authors:

Project Steering Committee

Last Updated:

2021-12-07

Background

The purpose of the following document is to outline the proposed timeline for the upcoming MapServer 8.0 major release. Users planning on upgrading to 8.0 are also recommended to review the MapServer Migration Guide, as it will be updated for the 8.0 release.

Planned Dates

We will plan for 1 beta and 1 release candidate (RC) over a 3 week period after the code freeze (each Friday). This will lead us to a final release sometime around 2022-01-28:

Release	Date
Feature freeze:	Fri. January 7, 2022
8.0-beta:	Fri. January 14, 2022
8.0-rc1:	Fri. January 21, 2022
8.0 (final):	Fri. January 28, 2022

Ticket List

Please see the 8.0 Milestone on GitHub for the latest list of active tickets assigned to the release. You can also see a list of major features to be added on the wiki.

Release Manager

Jeff McKenna will act as release Manager (MS RFC 34: MapServer Release Manager and Release Process), as discussed during the 2020-07-07 PSC meeting.

Branches

• branch-8-0 will be created when the first RC is made available

• until then, all code changes should be made into main

Q/A

Feedback and testing is welcome anytime during the 8.0 release process.