At the recent Dev Meeting in Brussels we discussed release management processes and schedules. The recommendation from the meeting was to explore the creation of a Release Management Team (RMT) with the skills and authority to keep us on schedule. That has now been discussed and agreed by the pgsql-release list.
The key role of the RMT is to smooth the process of making difficult decisions, by providing a fair voting process and also minimising the personal nature of any tough calls that might be required. The RMT will seek to avoid unnecessary delays through more careful management of the outstanding task list and the committers and patch authors who are on the hook to resolve release blocking items. The RMT doesn't do all the work, people will still need to fix their own code, as before.
For the next release there will definitely be no CF in July 2016, possibly not one in Sept either. The RMT will decide when it is time to branch the tree for this coming 9.6 release and also when to move through the stages of the release process: Beta1 to BetaN, ReleaseCandidate and Production.
The RMT is aiming towards a production release in September 2016.
For the 9.6 release, the members of the RMT are Álvaro Herrera, Robert Haas, and Noah Misch.
Please give them your full support in making this another high quality release for PostgreSQL.