OK, here's a strawman proposal for the 2.11 release cycle, based on aiming for a 5 Dec release date and working backwards with the same cadence as 2.10.
2017-10-31 Soft freeze -- all feature changes must already be in a pull request that's been sent to the mailing list 2017-11-07 Hard freeze, tag rc0 2017-11-14 Tag rc1 2017-11-21 Tag rc2 2017-11-28 Tag rc3 2017-12-05 Release (or rc4 if we need it) 2017-12-12 Release if we needed an rc4 That makes softfreeze in 3 weeks time. I'd rather not push the times back any further because we end up in serious risk of running into the christmas holiday period. (I'm still unconvinced by the 1-week softfreeze schedule.) thanks -- PMM