Release engineering for FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE. Major releases are always a lot of work, but this is probably the biggest release in 20 years due to the new base system distribution system landing. (We're switching from "here's a tarball containing everything" to "here's 500 packages", with resulting changes in the build process, download/update mirrors, installer, etc.)
Target is 2025-12-02 00:00 UTC.
Given that this is a major release, there are fairly wide error bars on that; it could be as much as 3 weeks earlier if the first release candidate turns out to be perfect, and of course it could be later if things go badly (but I very much hope to get it out by the end of 2025).
Definitely a massive job. Some FreeBSD developers have stepped up to volunteer tremendous amounts of help (and also the FreeBSD Foundation has paid staff helping out with parts of this) but my best guess is that I'll be spending around 300 unpaid hours making this release happen; I've been doing pretty much full time hours on this in September and I'm really hoping that once pkgbase moves from "need to implement the stuff which isn't implemented yet" to "need to iron out some bugs" I'll have time for other things... like my paid job, Tarsnap.
What's the ETA?