The merge window is a

software development process In software engineering, a software development process is a process of dividing software development work into smaller, parallel, or sequential steps or sub-processes to improve design, product management. It is also known as a software devel ...

which is sometimes used by large projects. The merge window is a period of time that occurs directly after the release of a new version of the software. During this time, many patches are

merge Merge, merging, or merger may refer to: Concepts * Merge (traffic), the reduction of the number of lanes on a road * Merge (linguistics), a basic syntactic operation in generative syntax in the Minimalist Program * Merger (politics), the comb ...

d and hence have a long time to get scrutinized and tested before the next release. The

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ope ...

has used the merge window process since July 2005 with the release of version 2.6.14. Since then, every 2.6.*, 3.* and 4.* release has been followed by a two-week merge window. This causes much work for the project maintainers who have to merge all the patches. The process may be split up with people who inspect, approve and merge the patches.

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Development process of u-boot
Version control Software project management {{software-stub