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+# Release Series Lifecycle
+
+
+## End Of Life On An Old Release Series
+
+Here are the steps that the maintainer should take when an old Tor release
+series reaches End of Life.
+
+Note that they are _only_ for an entire series that has reached its planned
+EOL: they do not apply to security-related deprecations of individual
+patch versions.
+
+
+### 1. Preliminaries
+
+1. A few months before End of Life:
+   Write a deprecation announcement.
+   Send the announcement out with every new release announcement.
+
+2. A month before End of Life:
+   Send the announcement to tor-announce, tor-talk, tor-relays, and the
+   packagers.
+
+
+### 2. On The Day
+
+1. Open tickets to remove the release from:
+   - the jenkins builds
+   - tor's Travis CI cron jobs
+   - chutney's Travis CI tests
+   - sbws' Travis CI tests
+   - stem's Travis CI tests (but see
+     https://github.com/torproject/stem/issues/51)
+   - tor's scripts/git/gist-list-tor-branches.sh script
+
+2. Close the milestone in Trac. To do this, go to Trac, log in,
+   select "Admin" near the top of the screen, then select "Milestones" from
+   the menu on the left.  Click on the milestone for this version, and
+   select the "Completed" checkbox. By convention, we select the date as
+   the End of Life date.
+
+3. Replace NNN-backport with NNN-unreached-backport in all open trac tickets.
+
+4. If there are any remaining tickets in the milestone:
+     - merge_ready tickets are for backports:
+       - if there are no supported releases for the backport, close the ticket
+       - if there is an earlier (LTS) release for the backport, move the ticket
+         to that release
+     - other tickets should be closed (if we won't fix them) or moved to a
+       supported release (if we will fix them)
+
+5. Mail the end of life announcement to tor-announce, the packagers list,
+   and tor-relays. The current list of packagers is in ReleasingTor.md.
+
+6. Ask at least two of weasel/arma/Sebastian to remove the old version
+   number from their approved versions list.
+
+7. Update the CoreTorReleases wiki page.
+
+8. Open a ticket (if there is not one already) for authorities to
+    start rejecting relays that are running that release series.
+    This ticket should be targeted for at least a month or two
+    after the series is officially EOL, unless there is an important
+    reason to un-list relays early.
+
+9. (LTS end-of-life only) Open a ticket (if appropriate) for updates to the
+    set of required and recommended subprotocol versions.  (For the process
+    here, see proposal 303.)
+
+10. (LTS end-of-life only) Open a ticket to remove no-longer-needed
+    consensus methods. (For the process here, see proposal 290.)
+
+11. (All EOL) Open a ticket to grep for obsolete series names (e.g., "0.2.9"
+    and "029") in tor, chutney, sbws, fallback-scripts, and so on. These
+    should be updated or removed.
+
+12. Finally, make sure this document is up to date with our latest
+   process.
+
+## Starting A New Release Series
+
+Here are the steps that the maintainer should take to start new maint and
+release branches for a stable release.
+
+Note that they are _only_ for an entire series, when it first becomes stable:
+they do not apply to security-related patch release versions.
+
+(Ideally, do this immediately after a release.)
+
+1. Start a new maint-x.y.z branch based on master, and a new
+   release-x.y.z branch based on master. They should have the same
+   starting point.
+
+   Push both of these branches to the master git repository.
+
+2. In master, change the version to "0.x.y.0-alpha-dev". Run the
+   update_versions.py script, and commit this version bump.
+
+3. Tag the version bump with "tor-0.x.y.0-alpha-dev". Push the tag
+   and master.
+
+4. Open tickets for connecting the new branches to various other
+   places.  See section 2 above for a list of affected locations.
+
+5. Stop running practracker on maintenance and release branches:
+   * Remove "check-best-practices" from the check-local Makefile
+     target in the maint-x.y.z branch only.
+   * Delete the file scripts/maint/practracker/.enable_practracker_in_hooks
+     in the maint-x.y.z branch only.
+   * Merge to release-x.y.z, but do not forward-port to master.
+
+6. Finally, make sure this document is up to date with our latest
+   process.