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+
+
+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 entire series that
+has reached its planned EOL: they do not apply to security-related
+deprecations of individual versions.
+
+### 0. Preliminaries
+
+0. A few months before End of Life:
+   Write a deprecation announcement.
+   Send the announcement out with every new release announcement.
+
+1. A month before End of Life:
+   Send the announcement to tor-announce, tor-talk, tor-relays, and the
+   packagers.
+
+### 1. 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 (#)
+   - stem's Travis CI tests (#)
+   - tor's scripts/git/* scripts
+
+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. Update the git/hooks
+
+9. Finally, make sure this document is up to date with our latest
+   process.
+
+10. 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.
+
+11. Open a ticket (if appropriate) for updates to the set of
+    required and recommended subprotocol versions.
+
+Starting a new release series.
+------------------------------
+
+(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, including:
+
+    - Jenkins CI
+    - travis cronjobs
+    - chutney travis configuration
+    - Tor's scripts/git scripts.
+
+5. Remove "check-best-practices" from the check-local Makefile
+   target in maint-x.y.z branch only. Merge to release-0.xy.z but do
+   not forward-port to master.
+
+6. Finally, make sure this document is up to date with our latest
+   process.