Release Schedule for 22.05

[dasJ]

This is a GitHub issue now to make it editable which is not the case on Discourse.

	Date	Branches Affected	Events
✔️	April, 03	-	Ask ecosystems for desired changes, in "Feature Freeze"
✔️	April, 17	staging-next, staging	Restrict breaking changes to Release Critical Packages
✔️	May, 01	staging-next, staging	Restrict all breaking changes: allow only non-breaking updates and Desktop Manager changes
✔️	May, 07	master	(Day before ZHF) merge staging-next into master, prep for ZHF
✔️	May, 08	master	Begin ZHF, Focus on minimizing regressions in PRs targeting master
✔️	May, 15	master	Merge first staging-next fixes into master; begin second staging-next cycle
✔️	May, 15	staging	Unrestrict all breaking changes; new changes will not be present in master before branch-off
✔️	May, 22	master	Merge second staging-next fix cycle
✔️	May, 22	staging-next	Unrestrict all breaking changes; new changes will not be present in master before branch-off
✔️	May, 22	master, 22.05	Perform Branch-off, create release channels, create new beta / unstable tags
✔️	May, 22	master, 22.05	ZHF transitions to "backporting" workflow
✔️	May, 22	22.05	Prepare for release, finish remaining issues
✔️	May, 30	22.05	Release! Also, ZHF ends
✔️	June, 30	-	Release Retrospective Meeting

[Artturin]

The release wiki is available at https://nixos.github.io/release-wiki/

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/results-from-the-survey/18592/2

[Mindavi]

Is anyone up for marking all packages that are not building at the end of ZHF as broken? Would be lovely if we could go all the way this time 🙂, even though it's quite a lot of work. I don't think I'll manage to do everything on my own though, so doing it together with some others would be nice.

Also, what would be the best moment to do this be? Towards the end of ZHF?

(Give me a thumbs down if you don't like this idea, I've seen it discussed before but last time it didn't happen afaik)

[vcunat]

At/after the end and ideally before forking (but could be merged to both afterwards).

[roberth]

Branches affected: [...] 22.05

Are we changing the name of the release branch?
This used to be the name of the tag, which is a footgun NixOS/release-wiki#13:

the tags have caused confusion and security
problems when user configurations accidentally reference
the tag instead of the release branch.

Releases are never final.

[shlevy]

The nixpkgs manual should be updated to note that staging and staging-next are sometimes restricted by the release process. As-is the docs suggest it's basically always OK to merge tested changes into staging and always OK to merge staging into staging-next if staging-next is not being used.

[davidak]

It would be great to get #175128 in, improving the documentation of installing NixOS.

Please help to review.