# 25.05 Release retrospective

**URL:** https://discourse.nixos.org/t/25-05-release-retrospective/68350
**Category:** Development
**Created:** [August 22, 2025, 3:37pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/25-05-release-retrospective/68350 "2025-08-22T15:37:14Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![leona](https://discourse.nixos.org/user_avatar/discourse.nixos.org/leona/32/37281_2.png) [@leona](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/leona)
#### Post date: [August 22, 2025, 3:37pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/25-05-release-retrospective/68350/1 "2025-08-22T15:37:14Z")

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I’m sorry that I’m publishing this late, but here are the notes for the retrospective we did for the 25.05 release.

- hexa: Infrastructure Interaction fine

- leona + hexa: Documentation improvements

### Discussion about timing and collaboration

- leona: Release Manager selction process should starting earlier to have more time for changes to the release process

- hexa: Release Management should be a Team and not a Single person story

(leona: I agree with the proposal of 0x4A64. I’ll discuss this with the 25.11 RM and then see how we want to proceed)

### Tag Situation

- leona: Tag Name situation was confusing. The release-wiki says to use `branch-off-25.05` for the tag at final release. I did it the old way. Will reopen the issue / push for discussion

### Branch-Off

- Grimmauld: Situation that all breaking changes were restricted and no breaking changes were possible for a few weeks was annoying

- leona: One solution would be do branch-off together with breaking changes restriction. We would need more Hydra capacity for that one tho. Also risk for more changes not being backported

- Grimmauld: Using staging as unrestricted would be an idea

- leona: This wouldn’t work as there is a branch missing for the staging runs until branch-off

- leona: A new change was this time that we created the staging-25.05 channel with staging unrestriction already