Status of Bazel 8.6.0

• Expected first release candidate date: 2026-02-09
• Expected release date: 2026-02-16
• List of release blockers

To report a release-blocking bug, please add a comment with the text @bazel-io flag to the issue. A release manager will triage it and add it to the milestone.

To cherry-pick a mainline commit into 8.6.0, simply send a PR against the release-8.6.0 branch.

Task list:

• Create release candidate
• Check downstream projects
• Create draft release announcement
• Push the release and notify package maintainers
• Update the documentation
• Update the release page