Draft for Plasma 6.6 schedule

[Martin Riethmayer]

Hi everyone,

as discussed on Matrix (plasma-devel), I've drafted a release schedule 
for the Plasma 6.6 release:

6.5.80	repo and feature freeze	2026-01-01
6.5.90	6.6 Beta 1	2026-01-15
6.5.91	6.6 Beta 2	2026-01-29
TAR		2026-02-12
6.6.0		2026-02-17
6.6.1		2026-02-24
6.6.2		2026-03-03
6.6.3		2026-03-17
6.6.4		2026-04-07
6.6.5		2026-05-12
6.6.6		2026-07-07

Things to note:

- The schedule is based on the 3-releases-a-year model, thus I aimed for 
6.6.0 to be about 4 months after 6.5.0 (scheduled for 2025-10-21).
It's also based on the release of the "best matching" frameworks 
release, which influences the date of Beta 1 (i.e. Beta 1 "will usually 
happen on Thursday following the corresponding KDE Frameworks release" 
[1] ), which could in turn make 6.6 depend on FW 6.22. Those two kind of 
influence each other.

- Required Qt version could be Qt 6.10, as that is supposed to be 
releases in early October. CI has to be updated in time and admins have 
to be notified about this if Qt 6.10 is chosen over 6.9.
Qt 6.11 is currently scheduled to be released in March 2026, so isn't an 
option[2].

- I have not taken into consideration any release schedules of distributions

Let me know your thoughts on this, I'm happy to adjust the schedule or 
(if no objections come) to put it on the wiki and the phabricator calendar.

Best regards

Martin


[1] https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Plasma_6#Beta
[2] https://wiki.qt.io/QtReleasing