Bazaar 0.18 Weekly Update - Feature Freeze begins

[Ian Clatworthy]

All,

Current trunk status: frozen for pre-release.
Release candidate date: 10-Jul-2007.

A big thank-you to everyone who has worked on 0.18 to date. I'm pleased
to say things look *much* better right now than they did 2 days ago. We
have reviewed and merged 20+ changes in that time and the pending merge
queue, while still bigger than I want, is reasonable again. (See below
re what I still want to see land in coming days.)

As of now, FeatureFreeze begins. Please only submit merges to PQM if:

1. They address bugs registered in Launchpad and have a priority of
   critical or high. (If you find a bad bug and fix it, that's
   fine. I'd *really* like/expect it to be registered though.)
   Even in this case, remember rule #2 ...

2. They are clearly low risk. Documentation and additional tests
   are nearly always welcome and fall into this category.

Note in particular that submitting changes remains as welcome as ever in
this coming week. Changes can be submitted and reviewed in that time:
they just can't be merged into the trunk unless they meet the
guidelines. See http://bazaar-vcs.org/FeatureFreeze for further details.

OK, so here's what I'm still after this week:

1. Robert, John and other interested parties to agree on pyrex policy
   and get John's work in this area landed. We'll undoubtedly have some
   packaging refinements to sort out but let's give it a go. In the
   absolute worse case, we can remove the pyrex stuff at the last
   minute with limited harm and increased knowledge re the issues.

2. Martin's lock changes.

3. Test suite stuff. Vincent has some patches in the queue I want
   to see make it. One relates to strace. Another cleans up some
   blackbox tests. Some UserWarnings need to go (hi spiv!).

I'm also open to a fix/improvement to "bzr info" to show related
branches. It looks like there is agreement to add that back in to the
default output and I want to keep the UI for that command good in this
release.

My larger commit refactoring received feedback from Aaron but no full
review from anyone. It won't make it though I can easily pull out the
bit (1 line from memory) for a more visual status bar if requested.

As always, if anyone has any thoughts, feedback or questions, don't
hesitate to let me know.

Cheers,
Ian C.
(0.18 Release Manager)