[development] gearing up for Drupal 6 beta 4

[Gábor Hojtsy]

Hello World,

Drupal 6 beta 4 is planned to be released this Wednesday. Sorry for
the small delay (it was actually promised to be out at the end of the
previous week or earlier this week), but we do a coordinated release
with security fixes included. Thankfully this short delay allows us to
fix even more critical bugs in this (hopefully) last beta version.

  http://drupal.org/project/issues?projects=3060&versions=97368,184399,175832&priorities=1&states=1,16,8,13,14,15

There are 11 open critical bugs and 1 open critical task. The sooner
we solve these, the sooner we get Drupal 6 out and the sooner we can
add new features to Drupal (7). I know how many of you would love to
do new features, and so do I. Please understand that it is quite hard
to say no to cool new stuff, but we need to focus entirely on fixing
bugs, or otherwise we are just moving around in a circle instead of
going forward. (Most cool new stuff patches introduced bugs some of
which we still are about to resolve, and introducing new bugs at this
stage is no fun).

As I said earlier, the mostly constant state of the critical queue
(ie. no new bugs getting in) looks like a good sign of the system
going strong. So the next step is hopefully an RC1. I hope that we can
reach this stage sooner then later. We have been in feature freeze
mode for long enough that your frustrations about not getting shiny
new features into the release can be turned into feverish bug fixing
in the criticals queue. Unfortunately the constant state of the
criticals queue (ie. not much progress on the issues) also tells us
that not many people find this bug hunting that fun. But thankfully
most issues are awaiting your testing and reviews, so you don't need
to be the bug hunter. Testing patches is easy! :)

Until the RC1 hits the website, string modifications are also accepted
in the name of usability improvements. After that, the interface
strings are frozen, and translators will be asked to start
translations. We changed lots of stuff since Drupal 5, even through
the betas, so poor translators will have quite some work to do.
Hopefully everything changes for the better.

Summary:

 - do not work on big new stuff and/or behavior modifications for
Drupal 6, unless fixing a critical **bug**
 - if you'd like to help Drupal 6 getting out, focus on the issues on
the link above
 - unless major bugs appear, we plan to move on to RC1 (this could be
in a few days to a week or two)
 - translators hold off your work still for a short while until RC1

Ps. I created an unpublished release announcement for beta 4, which
privileged users can go and edit, if you think anything needs to be
fixed. It is in full HTML mode as all the previous announcements.
Don't forget about switching on saving a new revision, when you edit
the node: http://drupal.org/drupal-6.0-beta4

Happy bug fixing to all!
Gabor