Alpha 1 freeze ahead

[Steve Langasek]

Dear Ubuntu developers,

Now that you've all gotten comfortable with your shiny new 9.04 release,
we're rolling right along to the first milestone of the Karmic cycle - with
Karmic Alpha 1 targeted for next Thursday, May 14.

This first milestone again happens before UDS, so again the targets are
modest: merging the installer for Karmic, and making sure things are in an
installable state.

We will continue to use a "soft freeze" for main for the Karmic Alpha
milestones[1].  This means that developers are asked to refrain from
uploading packages between Tuesday and Thursday which don't bring us closer
to releasing the alpha, so that these days can be used for settling the
archive and fixing any remaining showstoppers.

The "list" of bugs targeted for alpha-1 can be found at:

  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/karmic/+bugs?field.milestone=12709

Per the policy described at <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RCBugTargetting>, this
list is used for tracking bugs that are blockers for the alpha 1 milestone -
so as you can see, the list will be quite short (and is currently empty). 
If you know of bugs that should be considered blockers, please nominate them
for release and set the milestone target for those bugs.  If you have
questions about whether a bug should be considered a blocker, please
contact a member of the release team[2].

Beyond that short list of bugs that are blockers for Alpha 1, we have those
bugs that are listed as release-critical for karmic as a whole:

  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/karmic/+bugs

If you aren't among the small group of people who have milestoned bugs
assigned to you, please consider helping with those bugs, using your best
judgement with regard to the alpha freeze when uploading fixes.

Please also help us to get the archive in a consistent state for the alpha,
as described on
<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDevelopment/PackageArchive#Consistency>.

Finally, if you know of new features in Karmic that you think should be
highlighted for Alpha 1, let a member of the release team know so that they
can be added to the technical overview at
<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KarmicKoala/TechnicalOverview>.

Cheers,
-- 
Steve Langasek
On behalf of the Ubuntu release team

[1] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2008-January/000363.html
[2] https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-release/+members