This is just a proposal at the moment, and not an agreed policy.

We declare a feature freeze on a Subversion branch of the project when it is approaching time for a release and we want to limit the number of changes made in order to simplify the QA process before release. The feature freeze is declared by an email to the mailing list.

Once a feature freeze is declared, the following should not happen:

• New features being added to the code,
• Refactoring of any part of the code,
• Changes to build.xml other than bug fixes,
• Changes to .jar file dependencies other than bug fixes.

These rules are not meant to be absolute, but it is expected that anyone wanting to deviate from them make a proposal on the mailing list first.