In an effort to provide a longer quality control window for quarterly releases the Linaro Toolchain Working Group will be making some changes to the release process starting with the forthcoming 2015.04 products.

Little will change for the consumers of TCWG products.

The current monthly source release of the 'stable' Linaro GCC source archives posted to releases.linaro.org will move to snapshots.linaro.org and will be designated 'monthly snapshots'.

The exact location will be announced when the 2015.04 Toolchain component source archive release notes are posted to this mailing list.

These monthly snapshots will continue to have branch merges, performance fixes, security fixes, and correctness fixes applied on a monthly basis.  They will also continue to have validation across a variety of common ARM targets performed (per backport) against them.

TCWG will introduce the concept of a 'release candidate source archive' and 'release candidate binary toolchain archive' six weeks before the projected release date of the Quarterly Binary Toolchain Release.  For example, the 2015.05 Quarterly Binary Toolchain and Quarterly Source Archive will be based upon the 2015.04 source archive snapshot.

Release candidate source and binary archives will be posted to snapshots.linaro.org.

This release candidate will receive the scrutiny of internal and external stakeholders for six weeks and give an opportunity to evaluate the forth-coming Quarterly Binary Toolchain Archive and Source Archive Release.  Problems found with the release candidates will result in the availability of incremental release candidate archives. 

The official quarterly release will be posted to releases.linaro.org.

Please direct any questions or concerns to this mailing list or to me directly.

--