The Release Process (Symfony Docs)

This document explains the process followed by the Symfony project to develop, release and maintain its different versions.
Symfony releases follow the semantic versioning strategy and they are published through a time-based model:
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The Symfony project is an open-source community-driven development framework. There is no roadmap written or defined in advance. Every feature request may or may not be developed in future versions based on the community. Symfony Core Team members can help move things forward if there's enough interest.
The full development period for any major or minor version lasts six months and is divided into two phases:
During the development phase, any new feature can be reverted if it won't be finished in time or if it won't be stable enough to be included in the current final release.
Check out the Symfony Release to learn more about any specific version.
Starting from the Symfony 3.x branch, the number of minor versions is limited to five per branch (X.0, X.1, X.2, X.3 and X.4). The last minor version of a branch (e.g. 5.4, 6.4) is considered a long-term support version and the other ones are considered standard versions:
After the active maintenance of a Symfony version has ended, you can get professional Symfony support from SensioLabs, the company which sponsors the Symfony project.
Our Backward Compatibility Promise is very strict and allows developers to upgrade with confidence from one minor version of Symfony to the next one.
When a feature implementation cannot be replaced with a better one without breaking backward compatibility, Symfony deprecates the old implementation and adds a new preferred one alongside. Read the conventions document to learn more about how deprecations are handled in Symfony.
This deprecation policy also requires a custom development process for major versions (7.0, 8.0, etc.). In those cases, Symfony develops two versions at the same time: the new major one (e.g. 7.0) and the latest version of the previous branch (e.g. 6.4).
Both versions have the same new features, but they differ in the deprecated features. The older version (6.4 in this example) contains all the deprecated features whereas the new version (7.0 in this example) removes all of them.
This allows you to upgrade your projects to the latest minor version (e.g. 6.4), see all the deprecation messages and fix them. Once you have fixed all those deprecations, you can upgrade to the new major version (e.g. 7.0) without effort, because it contains the same features (the only differences are the deprecated features, which your project no longer uses).
The minimum PHP version is decided for each major Symfony version by consensus amongst the core team and documented as part of the technical requirements for running Symfony applications.
Throughout each Symfony release's support lifetime, all released versions of PHP including new major versions will be supported. In this way, the maximum supported version of PHP for a maintained Symfony release is the latest released one that is publicly available.
For out-of-support releases of Symfony, the latest PHP version at the time of EOL is the last supported PHP version. Newer versions of PHP may or may not function.
As an exception to the rule, bumping the minimum minor version of PHP is possible for a minor Symfony version when this helps fix important issues.
This release process was adopted to give more predictability and transparency. It was discussed based on the following goals:
The six-month period was chosen as two releases fit in a year. It also allows for plenty of time to work on new features and it allows for non-ready features to be postponed to the next version without having to wait too long for the next cycle.
The dual maintenance mode was adopted to make every Symfony user happy. Fast movers, who want to work with the latest and the greatest, use the standard version: a new version is published every six months, and there is a two-month period to upgrade. Companies wanting more stability use the LTS versions: a new version is published every two years and there is a year to upgrade.
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