title: “Release Plan for Gerrit 3.12” tags: news keywords: news permalink: 2024-10-03-gerrit-3.12-release-plan.html summary: “Release Plan for Gerrit 3.12” hide_sidebar: true hide_navtoggle: true toc: true

High Level Release Plan

DateActivity
Mar 31Create stable-3.12 branch, Release 3.12.0-rc0
Apr 7Release 3.12.0-rc1
Apr 14Release 3.12.0-rc2
Apr 21Release 3.12.0-rc3 - Feature freeze deadline.
Apr 28Release 3.12.0-rc4
May 5Release 3.12.0-rc5 - Release freeze
May 12Release 3.12.0-rc6 (*)
May 19Final release of 3.12.0

(*) WARNING: An additional release candidate, 3.12.0-rc6, was created to include a critical fix (Change 473702) that prevents duplicate reply comments from being published when applying a Fix. Furthermore, the stable-3.11 branch was merged into 3.12 before the final 3.12.0 release. This merge introduced additional changes that also need validation, making a new release candidate necessary.

Gerrit Hackathon

There are plans for Gerrit hackathon in May in Germany (the exact location has not been decided yet), but most likely not soon enough to support this release.

There is a gerrit-3_12-release Discord channel dedicated to anyone willing to help with the development, testing and documentation of this release.

Switch to Java 21

Gerrit v3.12 has dropped support for Java 17; Java 21 is mandatory and set as the target source-code level.

End-to-end Testing

We plan to use the Gatling e2e test framework for Git, developed by GerritForge and Ericsson to test the stability of the release on a production-like setup.

GerritForge, who is also offering Gerrit-as-a-Service on Google Cloud Marketplace, will be testing the scalability of Gerrit v3.12, particularly with medium to large-sized projects and in a multi-primary setup with Kubernetes on GKE.

End of Life for Gerrit 3.9.x

Per the support policy mentioned in the project homepage, after 3.12.0 is released, 3.9.x will reach the end of life and will no longer be actively supported.

Support for 3.10.x and 3.11.x will continue as usual. Users of 3.9.x or earlier are recommended to upgrade to one of these versions.