Django 1.2 release schedule

Posted by Russell Keith-Magee and James Bennett on March 9, 2010

Those of you that have been paying attention to the Django release roadmap will have noticed that the original estimated release date for Django 1.2 final has passed, but we haven't actually made a final release.

Although Django's release cycle is generally date-based, we also try to keep our release dates flexible to account for bugfixing time. At the beginning of the development sprints at PyCon a few weeks ago, over 300 tickets were still open on the Django 1.2 milestone. Now it's down to 120 (we've been clearing out, on average, about ten tickets a day), but that's still a lot more than we're comfortable shipping; as a result, we're pushing back the final 1.2 release a bit.

Some of the tickets still open for 1.2 are documentation or translation updates; these will be dealt with before the final 1.2 release. Others are minor bugs or edge cases which are difficult to trigger or unlikely to cause serious problems in actual deployment; these tickets will likely be bumped to a pure-bugfix release in the 1.2 series, or to 1.3 as warranted.

Over the next couple of days, the Django core team will be reviewing all of the currently-open tickets, and identifying those which:

  • reveal a significant flaw in a feature added during the 1.2 cycle, or
  • have the potential to cause data loss or other serious consequences in actual deployment.
  • Tickets which don't meet these criteria may be removed from the 1.2 milestone, or may simply be left out of the final release. We won't forget about these issues -- they'll still be in Trac, and they will be addressed -- but bugfix work prior to the 1.2 release will focus in major issues fitting the criteria above.

    We're sensitive to the fact that during the Django 1.2 release cycle, we haven't paid as much attention to bugs and smaller features as we have done during previous releases. To address this, we're considering making Django 1.3 a "feature light" release -- that is, we will spend more time focussing on little features and long standing bugs, rather than adding lots of big features like we have done with Django 1.2. Once 1.2 lands, we'll have some more details about our exact plans for the 1.3 cycle.

    Until then, we'll be posting here every few days to give you a status update, letting you know how many tickets remain, any problems we foresee, and to provide an updated estimate of the 1.2 final delivery date.

    So: there are 120 tickets remaining, but quite a few of these of these will be bumped from the final release. It's difficult to know exactly how much work is left before we do the final ticket cull, but our first-cut revised estimate is for an RC1 release around March 22, with a final release around March 29. This is, for those of you who were following along during the early parts of the 1.2 cycle, roughly consistent with extra time added to the release schedule for the 1.2 alpha and beta milestones.

    As always, any assistance preparing, reviewing or testing patches is most welcome; the more help we get, the sooner we can release. If you want to help out, check out the 1.2 todo list, find something that sounds interesting and dig in!

    Back to Top