Release status 1.6.1 (2002-05-16)

[Rob Browning]

OK, finally finished dealing with various real-life issues and back to
working on the release.

I have finally integrated the new release policy into
workbook/build/release.txt.  It's in the "Policy" section and is
nearly identical to the first copy I posted here.  If you didn't see
the previous copy, then please look at the file, especially if you
have CVS write access.

Two notable changes are that the waiting period after a beta release
before we declare that Guile is ready for a stable release has been
extended from one to two weeks (as per ttn's suggestion), and it has
been noted that in addition to the release manager, members of the
maintainer committee are expliticly allowed to make changes to a
stable branch without talking to the release manager beforehand.  Of
course keeping in touch with the release manager is still strongly
advised :> I have also updated various other files in tasks/ and bugs/
to refer to the new release policy so that people will be more likely
to remember it.

While I was working on release.txt I also reformatted the file as an
outline, but there's still a lot of cleaning up to do, and in general,
I agree with ttn that migrating some of those steps into a well
documented script (or scripts) is probably a good idea.

OK, on with the release status.

Items blocking release 1.6.1:
-----------------------------

NOTE: if you're working on something that's NOT listed below, please
contact me.  If something is neither in the 1.6.1 section of
workbook/tasks/TODO nor marked release 1.6.1 critical in
workbook/bugs/, then I may release without it.

  (1) document libtool conventions [rlb]

  (2) make sure all bugs have required headers

      What are the required headers?  i.e. how would this TODO item be
      satisfied?

  (3) bugs/instructions-to-distributors [rlb]

      I'll handle this one -- I'll either have full fledged
      instructions by the release, or I'll include some information
      and a request for packagers to contact guile-devel before
      packaging.  This will depend on how far I get before all the
      other release critical bugs are finished.

  (4) bugs/COPYING-is-wrong [rlb]

      Umm, COPYING is now the GPL in CVS.  Perhaps I should fix that :>


So I'll take care of three of the four.  I'll plan to fix them shortly
-- probably in a day or so, after I finish some other non-Guile
things.  If anyone else wants to fix (4) and has the time, feel free
to.

Thanks

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org, @linuxdevel.com, and @debian.org
Previously @cs.utexas.edu
GPG=1C58 8B2C FB5E 3F64 EA5C  64AE 78FE E5FE F0CB A0AD