How are the release schedules calculated?

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I’ve been trying to work out how to operate the tools in releng/tools/schedule in order to estimate when the GNOME 41 development milestones and freezes will fall.

Empirically, (northern hemisphere) autumn releases happen in weeks 36-38, which this year would put the releases on 8th, 15th or 22th September. Armed with that knowledge, I’m now trying to work out whether the .schedule files are calculated by hand, or generated by a machine with offsets from that release date. The README just says:

after creating a new .schedule file

so I guess they must be hand-calculated. Is that right?

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@mcatanzaro is the one generating them usually, no idea how.

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Yup.

That’s really all there is to say, but my post must be at least 20 characters. Hi!

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Hi!

So how do you go about this calculation? Do you pick a week based on other events in various calendars, and then work backwards using the same intervals between milestones? (I know that 40 rejigged these a bit.)

I spent some quality time with datetime.timedelta and came out with (assuming the lower-bound of a week 36 release, and the intervals between milestones in 40):

  • T-10½ weeks: .alpha tarballs on June 26
  • T-4½: .beta tarballs on July 31, frost commences
  • T-1½: .rc tarballs on Aug 28
  • T-½: .0 tarballs on Sept 4
  • T-0: release on Sept 8
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Yup.

That looks like a reasonable schedule if we were going to release on September 8. I think we’ll more likely do September 22, so all your milestones would be pushed back two weeks. There is no super scientific process here other than to try to pick a date that should hopefully work well for both Ubuntu and Fedora.

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