Julia 1.6 is shaping up to be a beast of a release, however, we are already significantly overdue with starting the release preparations. Therefore, we are announcing a (soft) feature freeze already at November 8th. The term “soft” here means that if something that has been worked on for a long time is not 100% ready by the deadline, it can probably still go in. But don’t start working on new features for inclusion into 1.6.
Also, in order to get people testing things on a 1.6 alpha as soon as possible, as well as allowing disruptive changes to be merged into master, we will likely branch quite soon, perhaps even sooner than the soft feature freeze. Features merged after the branching, which are supposed to go into 1.6, will just be backported to that branch.
Suggestion: For the benefit of those of us who catch up on Discourse only once a week, would it be possible to send future feature-freeze announcements also to the Announcement category, such that we just have to set the notification level there to at least “Watching First Post” to get a timely warning email? (I regularly see feature-freeze-in-one-week announcements about a week late.)
Yes. 1.6 is currently expected to become the LTS once 1.7 is out. (we don’t declare LTS right away since anyone that wants an LTS definitely wants at least 1 patch release)