Last updated May 1, 2013.
Drupal core's issue thresholds are used to manage technical debt. During Drupal 8's development, feature completion and clean-up phases, the issue thresholds are:
- Critical bugs, across D7 and D8: no more than 15
- Major bugs, across D7 and D8: no more than 100
- Critical tasks, across D7 and D8: no more than 15
- Major tasks, across D7 and D8: no more than 100
When the issue thresholds are exceeded, core temporarily enters a period of restricted development:
- New features will not be committed, since new features tend to add technical debt.
- Relatively minor patches that touch a lot of files (e.g., coding standards clean-ups) will also not be committed until thresholds are met, to ensure that more urgent bug fixes are able to target a relatively stable code base.
As soon as issue counts are again under thresholds, these patches can be accepted again. This means that the best way to get a feature in is to help keep major and critical counts down.
For more information, see the explanation of the Drupal core release cycle and frequently asked questions.
Polish phase threshold reduction
During the polish phase, the critical thresholds will be reduced week by week until they reach zero, as follows:
- July 1: 14 critical bugs and tasks
- July 8: 13 critical bugs and tasks
- July 15: 12 critical bugs and tasks
Continuing on to...
- September 2: 5 critical bugs and tasks
- September 9: 4 critical bugs and tasks
- September 16: 3 critical bugs and tasks
- September 23: 2 critical bugs and tasks (DrupalCon Prague)
- September 30+: 0 critical bugs and tasks
(There is no plan to reduce the thresholds for majors at this time.)
Frequently asked questions
See the release cycle FAQ.