VTK 9.6.0 Release Planning

Announcements
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VTK Release Plan

As announced in this post, VTK now follows a regular (calendar-based) release plan.

  • Expect a minor release every 6 months with intermediate patch releases in between, as needed.
  • Depending on the features added to the release, the release may become a major release.
  • The master and release branches will split one month and a half before the scheduled release date. Please ensure that all feature branches are merged before the split.
  • A proposed detailed release plan will be announced a few weeks before each release.

Following this schedule, the next planned releases are as follows:

  • VTK v9.6.0 is planned for December 2025
  • VTK v9.7.0 is planned for June 2026
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Here is the precise planning for VTK v9.6.0 release:

  • 12/12/2025: Release split, no new features will be going into VTK 9.6.0 after this date
  • 12/12/2025 to 01/17/2026: Release candidates are published and tested. Critical bug fixes are integrated into the VTK release branch.
  • 01/16/2026: VTK 9.6.0 is released.
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Split has been delayed a bit and will happen on december 16.

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Split is ongoing and should be done by today’s end. please hold off on merging until then.

Once this is done, we will be in release candidate phase.

Please make sure to ping the release team ( @sankhesh or myself @mwestphal ) for approval (+1 or +2) before merging or backporting to release branch.

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Split has been done and VTK 9.6.0-RC1 is available in the gitlab repositiory as a tag.

Sadly the wheels have not been generated, this will be fixed for RC2.

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Deprecation update have just been merged in master, you can now deprecate using VTK_DEPRECATED_IN_9_7_0

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VTK v9.6.0-RC2 is available on gitlab and the python wheel have been generated this time:

We will of course delay the full release a bit.

2 Likes
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We are a bit late, we expect VTK v9.6.0-RC3 to be tagged on January 30th (tomorow) and the full release should happen on February 9th.