Hi everybody,
it's that time of year again: we should look into cutting a release. Not because there's anything noteworthy that we should bring out (although there certainly is), but because we have a 6-monthly cadence of giving our tree a new number and pushing out tarballs and press releases.
I plan to do the release on or shortly after May 11, and this announcement is in accordance to the process detailed on https://doc.coreboot.org/releases/checklist.html, so we're at the "~2 weeks prior to release" point right now.
As such, there are a number of things I ask of you (all of you subscribed to the list, but since you're reading this mail, yes, I mean you, personally!):
1. If you have anything big that you want to get in before the release, it's on you to maintain the changes responsibly and responsively so that it all works out in time. I'll gladly help coordinate things but I'm not interested in last-minute heroics, so get in touch with me ASAP.
2. Please try to postpone riskier refactorings and the like until after the release (unless they're ready to land in the next few days), so that people have a solid foundation to test their hardware on. Which gets us to the next point:
3. Please test your coreboot-supported gear if you can, report and/or fix issues, and upload fresh reports to the board-status repo. While we have no quality requirement for releases - they're _really_ only about giving the tree a new number, a release is a good opportunity to verify that what we have in the tree is still functional, with only limited work required to pin-point new issues (bisections since 4.11 should take 12 steps or less at this time).
4. Please check the preliminary release notes in Documentation/releases/coreboot-4.12-relnotes.md and add whatever happened since 4.11 that you think is noteworthy. If in doubt, push a change to gerrit and see what your fellow developers think about it.
Thanks, Patrick Georgi