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# 3 Release Scheduling Goals Going Forward

Here are the current scheduling goals for the Project:

- To release a new major release every 18 months;

- To release a new minor release every 4 months;

- To provide prebuilt packages for the most recent minor release of each major version;

- To provide security updates and other critical bug fixes for the last several minor versions of each major version (termed security branches).

Due to the large number of possible combinations of installable versions, it is not possible to support every version indefinitely; this is due somewhat to the availability of machine resources but primarily due to the amount of volunteer effort that is available.

Interested readers should also see:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/releng/index.html#schedule

  The Release Engineering Schedule

http://www.FreeBSD.org/security/security.html#supported-branches

  The Security Branch Schedule

These documents go into much greater depth about the background and rationale behind the decisions regarding the supported branches and the lifetime of each branch.

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Release Scheduling In The Past |  | How Do These Factors Affect My Decision?

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