[ANNOUNCE] X11R6.9/X11R7 Release Candidate 3 ready for testing

[Kevin E Martin]

We are pleased to announce the availability of the third full Release
Candidate (RC3) for the upcoming X.Org Foundation release of X11R6.9 and
X11R7.  RC3 includes many bug fixes and updates.  We have tagged both
the monolithic and modular trees and have prepared tarballs for you to
test.

The X11R6.9-RC3 tarball was created from the traditional monolithic
source tree and can be found here:

  http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/X11R6.9-RC3/

X11R7-RC3 is based on the new modularized source tree and as such there
are individual tarballs for each module component in the tree.  The set
of tarballs can be found here:

  http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/X11R7.0-RC3/

We ask that you please test _both_ the modular and monolithic trees.
Any problems that you find should be filed in freedesktop.org's
bugzilla:

  https://bugs.freedesktop.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=xorg

If the bug is critical to fix before the release, then mark it as a
blocker of the release bug (#1690) and also bring it up on the X.Org
mailing list <xorg at lists.freedesktop.org> to draw the attention of the
other developers to it.

The release managers will be going through the blocker bug list to
determine which bugs are critical to fix before the release and which
bugs will be handled after the release.  Note that it is much more
likely that a bug will be fixed if there is a patch attached to the bug
and an explanation of why the bug is critical to fix before the final
release.

At this time, the critical action we need from everyone is testing.  The
testing plan for this release can be found here:

  http://wiki.x.org/wiki/X11R6970Testing

Please read this page to find out what needs to be tested and how to run
the X Test Suite.  Note that for us to move forward with the release, we
need feedback on what works and what doesn't based on the tests outlined
in the testing plan.  Please test now.  We would like to hear about both
successes and failures.

The full schedule (from http://wiki.x.org/wiki/X11R6970ReleasePlan) is
listed below:

  4 Jul 2005: Feature freeze for the monolithic source tree
  1 Aug 2005: RC0 (Release Candidate 0)
 18 Oct 2005: RC1 (Full release candidate)
  9 Nov 2005: RC2 (Code Freeze)
  2 Dec 2005: RC3
  9 Dec 2005: Copy ,v files from monolithic to modular tree
 14 Dec 2005: Finalize tree (only documentation changes allowed)
 21 Dec 2005: X11R6.9/X11R7 Release

This gives us 1.5 weeks to test the code and fix the remaining critical
bugs before the release is finalized, so please test now!

Thank you for your help with making this a successful release!

Alan Coopersmith
Adam Jackson
Kevin E. Martin