PowerShell Core 6 Release Candidate

Steve

November 17th, 2017

PowerShell Core 6 Release Candidate

Last year, we announced that PowerShell was not only Open Source, but also cross platform. The finish line is in sight and we recently published the Release Candidate for PowerShell Core 6!

PowerShell Team ♥ Community

It has been an amazing experience for the team working with the community on PowerShell Core 6! Being able to work openly and transparently meant that we could address customer concerns much more quickly than in the days of Windows PowerShell. The contributions from the community have also enabled PowerShell Core 6 to be more agile and richer in capability, particularly for cmdlets. In fact, the community has contributed just over half of the pull requests (PRs)!

This really shows the benefit of Open Source and an active community and we certainly wouldn’t have gotten as far as we have without such a passionate and helpful community!

Roadmap to General Availability and the Future

When the PowerShell Team started working through all the work required to publish a release, we also created a branch for the eventual PowerShell Core 6.0.0 final release. There are still some issues and work items needed to be completed for the GA (General Availability) release. General Available simply means a supported release (replaces the legacy term Release to Manufacturing!).

This means that any changes merged to the master branch will show up in the 6.1.0 release. I encourage the community to continue to make contributions to PowerShell Core with the expectation that it will be part of 6.1.0 and not 6.0.0. Only issues (and associated pull requests) approved for 6.0.0 GA with milestone set to `6.0.0-GA` will be taken for the 6.0.0 release.

If you find any deployment or adoption blockers, please open issues on GitHub (or up vote existing ones with a thumbs up) and mention me (using `@SteveL-MSFT`) so I will be notified and those issues will be triaged and a decision will be made if we need to make or take a fix before 6.0.0 GA.

We are currently targeting having the GA release on January 10th, 2018.

The first PowerShell Core 6.1.0 beta release will be published after PowerShell Core 6.0.0 GA and we plan to continue a 3 week cadence for beta releases. Note that if you use the install-powershell.ps1 script to install daily builds, it will be from the master branch (aka 6.1.0) and not from our 6.0.0 Release Candidate or GA.

PowerShell Core 6 Support

PowerShell Core 6.0.0 will adopt the Microsoft Modern Lifecycle for support. Essentially, this means that barring any critical security fixes, customer are expected to install the latest released version of PowerShell Core. In general, if you find an issue, please open it on GitHub. We’ll be providing more information on the specifics of this lifecycle and what it means for PowerShell Core soon.

Thanks to everyone for their support and contributions!

Steve Lee Principal Engineer Manager PowerShell Team