[ANNOUNCE] X11R6.9/X11R7 Release Candidate 1 ready for testing

[Kevin E Martin]

We are pleased to announce the availability of the first full Release
Candidate (RC1) for the upcoming X.Org Foundation release of X11R6.9 and
X11R7.  This release marks the completion of the development cycle for
the modular source tree.  We have tagged both the monolithic and modular
trees and have prepared tarballs for you to test.

The X11R6.9-RC1 tarball was created from the traditional monolithic
source tree and can be found here:

  http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/X11R6.9-RC1/

X11R7-RC1 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-RC1/

Now that RC1 has been completed, we are moving into the testing and bug
fixing phase.  We ask that you please test _both_ the modular and
monolithic trees.  If you find any problems, please file bugs in fdo's
bugzilla (https://bugs.freedesktop.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=xorg) and
mark them as blockers of the release bug (see below) so that they can be
tracked.  Also, we encourage you to discuss any issues you encounter on
this mailing list.

For those looking for known issues to work on, please see the list of
current blocker bugs on the release bug:

  https://bugs.freedesktop.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1690

For those looking for some ideas on how to test the release, please see
the following message:

  http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2005-July/008552.html

In addition to running the test suite, we also encourage you to test
your standard desktop and any applications you use (including OpenGL
apps) on various graphics cards and hardware platforms.  We would like
to hear about both successes and failures.

The plan is that by the time we reach RC2, we will have either fixed all
of the blocker bugs or determined that they are not fixable during this
release cycle.

Until we tag RC2, anyone is allowed to check in bug fixes.  Once we tag
RC2, however, getting patches included will require approval of the
release managers, so if you have bug fixes that you would like to see
included in the release, please check them in ASAP.

Also, note that the tree is closed for new features.  If you have any
questions about whether a particular patch would be considered a bug fix
or a feature, ask one of the release managers to review the patch.

Lastly, since the modular development cycle has now been completed, we
can return to our original timetable.  We have updated the schedule on
the release plan page (http://wiki.x.org/wiki/X11R6970ReleasePlan) as
shown here:

  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)
 30 Nov 2005: RCfinal
  7 Dec 2005: X11R6.9/X11R7 Release

This gives us three full weeks to test this release and fix bugs before
RC2, so please test early and often!

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

Alan Coopersmith
Adam Jackson
Kevin E. Martin