Proposed schedule for JDK 18.3

[mark.reinhold at oracle.com]

Here is a proposed schedule:

  2017/12/14  Rampdown Phase One
  2018/01/11  All Tests Run
  2018/01/18  Rampdown Phase Two
  2018/02/22  Final Release Candidate
  2018/03/20  General Availability

The milestone definitions are the same as for JDK 8 [1].

There's no "Feature Complete" milestone since, in the six-month model,
every feature must be complete before it's integrated.  The main
development line is, in effect, always feature complete.  The set of
features in the release contains all, and only, those features that
are integrated ahead of Rampdown Phase One.

(What does it mean for a feature to be "complete"?  I'll propose a
 detailed definition shortly.  It'll be along the lines of what the
 milestone has always meant for past releases: A complete feature
 includes, at the very least, all necessary code, specification text,
 and unit tests.)

Comments from JDK Committers are welcome, as are reasoned objections.
If no such objections are raised by 18:00 UTC next Wednesday, 18 October,
or if they're raised and then satisfactorily answered, then per the JEP
2.0 process proposal [2] this will be adopted as the schedule for JDK
18.3 (or whatever we wind up calling it).


- Mark


[1] http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk8/milestones#definitions
[2] http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~mr/jep/jep-2.0-02.html