Django 1.7 Roadmap
This document details the schedule and roadmap towards Django 1.7.
What will be in Django 1.7?
Whatever gets committed by January 20th 2014!
Django 1.7 will be a fully time-based release; any features completed and checked in by the feature freeze deadline (January 20th 2014) will be included. Any that miss the deadline won't. The Django core team has a couple of major features we'd like to merge:
- Migrations (Andrew Godwin) [completed]
- GSoC composite fields (Michal Petrucha and Andrew Godwin) [not completed]
- GSoC validation refactor (Chris Medrela and Russell Keith-Magee) [completed]
- Custom field lookups (Anssi Kääriäinen) [completed]
Minor features and bug fixes will be committed as they are completed. If you have submitted a patch, be sure the flags on the Trac ticket are correct such that it appears in the "Patches needing review" filter of the Django Development Dashboard. Better yet, find someone to review your patch and mark the ticket as "Ready for checkin".
Schedule
Major milestones along the way to 1.7 are scheduled below. See Process, below, for more details. The dates are subject to change as necessary.
Update June 17, 2014: We hope to release RC1 within the next week or two if no major release blockers come up. As always, continued testing of the stable/1.7.x branch by the community with help ensure a great release.
January 20, 2014 | Django 1.7 alpha; major feature freeze. (released Jan. 22) |
March 6, 2014 | Django 1.7 beta; complete feature freeze. (released March 20) |
late June/July | Django 1.7 RC 1; translation string freeze. (released June 26) |
2+ weeks after RC1 | Django 1.7 final (or RC 2, if needed). |
Process
Any code not complete by feature freeze dates simply won't make it into 1.7.
Andrew Godwin, as the release manager, will be in charge of keeping the schedule. He'll keep track of who's working on what issues so that bug reports can be efficiently routed; he'll also nag developers who are in danger of missing deadlines. Marc Tamlyn will serve as a backup release manager.
Feature freeze / Alpha 1
All major features must be committed by the Alpha 1 deadline. Any work not done by this point will be deferred or dropped.
Beta 1
Beta 1 marks the end of any feature work. Only bug fixes will be allowed in after this point.
RC 1
RC 1 will become 1.7 if no bugs are found; there is a total code freeze after this point, unless a new RC is needed.
RC 1 also marks string freeze; translators will have two weeks to submit updated translations for inclusion in the final release.
Release
Django 1.7 final will ship two weeks after the last RC. Hopefully we'll only need a single RC, so, the final release will follow roughly a week after RC 1. If blockers are found, another RC will be released instead.
How you can help
The only way we'll meet these deadlines is with a great deal of community effort. To that end, here's how you can help:
Read the guide to contributing to Django and the guide to Django's release process.
These guides explains how our process works. where to ask questions, etc. It'll save everyone time if we're all on the same page when it comes to process.
Work on patches and triage tickets.
Attend a sprint (in person or in IRC).
Test the release snapshots (alphas, betas) against your code and report bugs.
We need lots of testers if we're to have a bug-free release. Download a snapshot or a git checkout and give it a try!