Hi All,

Apologies for the belated reply on the issue but things have been moving 
quickly (and somewhat unexpectedly) on a variety of fronts so that I didn't 
have the time to write an earlier message on the subject.

Marcus recently posed the question of whether those people who have an 
interest in a stable release with m17n would be willing to step up for 
making it happen. Unfortunately he didn't wait very long for an answer 
before posting changes into the unstable stream which really don't go too 
well together with a stable m17n release that should be in sync with 
Squeakland as far as possible.

After some talking with Michael and Ned, we would nevertheless like to 
propose that we (e.g., the Squeakland people) manage the release of the 3.8 
release under precisely the initial assumptions of it basically being "the 
m17n release" and not much more.

To this effect here is what we'd like to propose: "We" (that is Michael, 
Ned, Yoshiki, me and whoever else wants to join) filter the appropriate 
enhancements and fixes that have already been posted in the unstable stream 
and repost them into the stable 3.8 stream. This will address most of the 
issues that needed to be addressed for 3.8 and should take no longer than 
two weeks (the goal would be to have the release out in six weeks at most).

This in turn would mean we go beta as of YYY after which only fixes (and no 
further changes from unstable) will go in. For the fixes, we'd propose the 
following mechanism: We will "address" every reported bug in Mantis, which 
means *you* have to put the bugs there if you want them fixed. "Addressing" 
the bugs means that we will look at the issues and possibly ask for help in 
fixing them but we will NOT promise to fix any of bugs ourselves (again it 
is *your* responsibility to help with fixing the issues). However if there 
is a fix for a bug we *will* look at it and either accept, modify, or reject 
it (or ask for improvements). In any case, by the end of the process every 
bug that has been reported will have been looked at and some resolution will 
have been found. And of course, help is more than welcome.

Given the number of open bugs at Mantis we expect to complete this phase 
around mid november. After which we can immediately open 3.9 alpha and start 
to put in the things that would remain in the unstable queue.

Please let us know what you think about this proposal. What we're trying to 
achieve is a release that is in sync with Squeakland as much as possible 
without introducing some more "experimental" changes at this point (e.g., we 
really don't want to impose large changes to the Squeakland users at this 
point).

Cheers,
  - Andreas