25.02 Release Plan

[eordentlich]

Release Checklist for v25.02:

Status	Task	Start	End	Owner
Pre-release
	Verify 25.02 RAPIDS nightly pip packages work in Databricks AWS (align with RAPIDS burndown)	2025-2-10	2025-2-11	@eordentlich
	Create 25.04 branch spark-rapids-ml	2025-2-10	2025-2-10	@NvTimLiu
	Automerge from 25.02 to 25.04	2025-2-10	2025-2-10	@NvTimLiu
	Enable Jenkins builds (premerge) for 25.04 spark-rapids-ml	2025-2-10	2025-2-10	@NvTimLiu
	Update RAPIDS dependencies to 25.02 nightly	2025-2-11	2025-2-11	@eordentlich
	Update spark-rapids-ml package versions to 25.02	2025-2-11	2025-2-11	@eordentlich
	Update RAPIDS dependencies to 25.02 release	2025-2-16	2025-2-18	@eordentlich
	Burndown (no new features for current release)	2025-2-28	2025-2-28	Team
Staging release
	Make 25.04 the default branch	2025-03-13	2025-03-13	@eordentlich
	Enable static scanning on the new 25.02 branch	2025-03-13	2025-03-13	@eordentlich
	Run benchmarking script on Databricks AWS	2025-03-03	2025-03-04	@eordentlich
	Merge all remaining branch-25.02 PRs	2025-03-13	2025-03-13	Team
	Create a PR (not squashed) to merge from branch-25.02 to main. Needs review from repository owner	2025-03-13	2025-03-13	@YanxuanLiu
	Trigger the release candidate for spark-rapids-ml Jenkins job on the main branch and deploy to PyPI Test	2025-03-13	2025-03-13	@YanxuanLiu
	QA testing with Snapshot	2025-03-01	2025-03-13	@johnzhong
	Deliver release candidate to QA	2025-03-13	2025-03-13	@YanxuanLiu
	QA testing of release candidate	2025-03-13	2025-03-19	@johnzhong
Release
	Tag the release and deploy the staging artifacts to PyPI	2025-03-20	2025-03-20	@YanxuanLiu

[YanxuanLiu]

Thanks @eordentlich , we'll start to use new auto-release jobs from 25.02 release.