Milestones and Release Candidates

The platform group supports the use of milestone and release candidate public builds in line with the Eclipse Foundation Project Handbook which states:

Milestone builds and release candidates are not themselves official releases. Per the Eclipse Foundation Development Process, milestone and release candidate builds are intended to be consumed by a limited audience to solicit, gather, and incorporate feedback from leading edge consumers. A predictable schedule for the delivery of milestone builds is especially valuable when the period of time between formal releases spans multiple months.

Project teams should include at least one milestone build during every release cycle. The timing of milestone and release candidate builds should be included in release plans.

Such builds should be released to Maven Central to avoid loss of the release due to time based purges of releases from the Jakarta Staging Repository. Such builds should also only depend on other milestone or release candidate builds to avoid users having to incorporate both the public Maven repository as well as the Jakarta staging repository in their build configuration.