Tentative schedule (dates may change):
Feb. 1	Snapshot of the tree taken
Feb. 25	Docs due to GDP from release coordinators
Feb. 25	Snapshot frozen for beta
Feb. 29	Docs finalized
Mar. 3	Beta1 released
Mar. 14	Final upload
Mar. 17	Release

Public beta releases play a major role in the Release Engineering team's revamped plans for 2008.0. Releng lead Chris Gianelloni said he hoped beta releases would increase community participation as well as the quality of the final release. These feature-complete public betas will require the earlier development of release materials, another component of the 2008.0 changes. To ensure sufficient time for beta testing, a mandatory 2-week testing period will follow the beta release.

A comprehensive testing checklist will be developed on the gentoo-releng mailing list, as will a list of which details of testers' machines and environments they should turn in to developers. In the past, testers often provided insufficient information to releng developers because of vague instructions. Now, a new form will include all of the required questions and details. "Sadly you almost want a beta that phones home as to what it was successfully run on," said Tom Gall. Christian Faulhammer suggested using a hardware reporting tool such as app-admin/hwreport.

More news on the 2008.0 release will appear over the next few days.