Understanding Liferay 6.2 Release Candidates

The 6.2 release is very very close. Those who have talked with the core team about it know that we have been working hard since the 6.1 release to increase the predictability of the releases and at the same time keep increasing the product quality. You have probably already seen that we have released 6 milestones during this time and 2 betas recently. My goal with this blog entry is to explain the last phase of the release cyle: The Release Candidates.

Quoting from WikiPedia:  "A release candidate (RC) is a beta version with potential to be a final product, which is ready to release unless significant bugs emerge". We released the first release candidate (RC1) last Friday and our QA department has been evaluating it in coordination with other stakeholders. The conclusion is that it is still not ready to be called final. So we will build a new releae candidate (RC2) this Friday and repeat the process. We will keep doing this, building one RC every Friday until one is approved as final.

How many Release Candidates will we have? The answer is "it depends" :) What I can say is that everybody involved in the release is working very hard to make the next RC the final one. So RC2 could be the final or we might need a few more (specially since it's the first time we follow this process and there is fine tunning to be done along the way). 

Note that you can help too. Download RC1 now and/or RC2 when it comes out and help test it, upgrade your portlets, etc. Check out the beta 6.2 documentation as well as you do so. There is a new Wiki Page called Known Upgrade Issues to 6.2 Release Candidates where you can add the issues you find or suggestions you have for other people or read what others have written. We really appreciate your help! 

See you soon at the Symposiums and events world wide to celebrate the release!

Update (Oct 30th, 2013): RC6 has resulted to be a very good release and we wanted to make it GA, however there were a very small number of issues we found that we wanted to fix. So we've decided to change slightly the original plan and are just going to fix those issues and release GA directly (skipping a public RC7, although we are really doing an RC every day since Monday). We will most probably start building GA this Friday. Yeah!! :)

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Hi Jorge,
with RC5 the cycle stopped?
Nope, RC6 was already created and should be available in SourceForge soon. Sometimes the upload takes a long time.