A quick update:  3.7 should be moving to beta tomorrow (Saturday).  I 
delayed moving to beta for a bit because there were some enhancements 
that I wanted to make sure we got in... mainly the BitstreamVera fonts 
which required the endianess fixes, the remaining ANSI additions and the 
horizontal scrollbar enhancement.

These are all ready now, so the next batch of updates will include the 
bump from 3.7alpha to 3.7beta at the end.  Beta means that we'll only 
include fixes for the remainder of the 3.7 release.  Beta will last 6 
weeks, then 2 weeks for gamma, then 3.7final will be released.

The alpha stream for the next release (3.8 or 4.0) will be opened when 
3.7 moves to gamma.  We could do it earlier, maybe halfway through beta, 
but we need at least some time during with 3.7beta is the only choice 
available to ensure that it gets tested.

Before we open the update stream for the next release, we also need to 
decide whether it will be called 3.8 or 4.0.  Personally, right now I'm 
leaning toward calling it 4.0, because the m17n work will require that 
the .changes file has a new encoding, so we might as well do the 
.sources file at the same time and not have them be different 
encodings.  A new .sources/.changes encoding seems like a significant 
enough change to justify a new major version number.  Besides, the 
.changes file is getting pretty big, we've been on 3.x for a long time 
now, etc.  (We could also update the out-of-box look and content, too.)  
We don't know when/if we're ever going to do a major VM overhaul which 
will require a new image format (which would be the other reason to move 
to a new major version), so I don't think we should wait around forever 
for that before we bump the version number.  3.0 didn't have an image 
format change, either. :-)  Besides, there's nothing stopping us from 
moving to 5.0 after 4.0/4.1 if we decide we're ready to go for the image 
format change.

Or, we could use the occasion of having 4.0 be the next release to go 
for whatever VM overhaul needs to be done (if any), and have the image 
format change in this next release.

Thoughts?

- Doug