The 1.6.1 release.

[Rob Browning]

While I sympathize a great deal with the concerns that Thien-Thi has
raised here recently, and I think they should be taken seriously both
now and in the future, my personal feeling is that we need to get a
release out, and we need to do it now.  1.5.5 is a *dramatic*
improvement over 1.3.4 and 1.4, and it's my opinion that these
advantages substantially outweigh the current disadvantages.  I also
feel that to the extent that we can focus all our efforts on a
narrower target, we'll be better off.

So I propose that unless there's something seriously wrong with 1.5.5,
we release 1.6.1 in the next week to week and a half, but we do this
with the expectation that we are likely to have very frequent point
releases as we discover any problems -- I will make it a priority to
upload a new point release as soon as possible after anyone commits
important fixes, with particular importance placed on new NEWS
updates, bug fixes, new documentation regarding transition issues, or
other documentation improvements.

In parallel with this, I'd like to see us continue to pay close
attention to the same issues in the 1.7 tree, trying to keep in mind
the things that will be important to any user migrating from 1.6 to
1.8 in (hopefully less than) a year or so, and if we can design
practices and tools that will make this easier, so much the better.

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org, @linuxdevel.com, and @debian.org
Previously @cs.utexas.edu
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