Re: status of 7.0

On Sat, 7 Jul 2007, Paul Eskello wrote:

> I was wondering when to expect 7.0 release ? Did I miss the schedule. Any 
> showstoppers ? when to expect RC1 ?
>
> Just curious.
>
> Have a great weekend.

Ken may respond in a more detailed form, but the current stage is that we are 
waiting for the feature set to finally settle and some known outstanding 
issues to resolve themselves, at which point we'll cut a first beta in the 
next 2-4 weeks.  As a precursor to that, monthly snapshots will likely get 
built and released in the next couple of days.  Hopefully testing and feedback 
from that will allow us to nail down a more specific schedule for the release 
itself.

At this point, the imperative for developers is to wrap up any remaining 
outstanding features and work on testing and bug fixing.  Likewise users :-). 
We often find that even early adoption sites only really start testing during 
the RC cycle, and that's far too late to make larger changes that may be 
required to address some sorts of stability issues.  Getting people doing 
testing the whole way through the cycle makes a big difference in the 
effectiveness of the test cycle.

There are some really great features in 7.0, and it's wonderful to be at the 
polishing and testing stage finally :-).

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge