CF Release dev process

the highest cf-release [1] tagged version number is the source of truth for the latest release. the cf-release master branch should have a commit associated with that tag. for example, as of July 9th, 2014, cf-release v173 [2] was the most recently release.

the release-candidate branch [3] is the last pipeline segment before a final release is pushed to production and tagged with an incremented release number. the release-candidate branch is where you can review all of the changes that will be deployed next if nothing else changes. the runtime team typically continually updates the release-candidate branch until they are ready to promote to production, which ideally happens at least each week. sometimes the team is unable to release weekly because of blocking issues that would put project stability and user experience at-risk. in such cases, the team typically holds the release until the issues are resolved. occasionally, the runtime team creates multiple releases a week. ideally, over time the releases are going to become more frequent and there will be smaller time gaps between releases.

[1] https://github.com/cloudfoundry/cf-release

[2] https://github.com/cloudfoundry/cf-release/tree/v173

[3] https://github.com/cloudfoundry/cf-release/tree/release-candidate