News from the 5.0 sharp end

[Alistair Crooks <agc%netbsd.org@localhost>]

A quick update from the sharp end of the 5.0 branch:

We branched 5.0 on October 31st UTC (just!).  And yes, I branched from
HEAD, and my apologies for doing it [excuse list deleted - agc].  From
now on, the release engineering team manages the 5.0 branch. 
Development continues in the HEAD of the CVS branch, and any changes
should get checked into the HEAD, and pulled up to the branch. 
Because we had an extended period just before branching in which we
tried to stabilise the HEAD, we are hoping that this part of the
release will go much more quickly.

We have a number of critical PRs which need to be fixed before we
release 5.0.  The core team and release engineering monitor this list
every week.

+ release engineering would really like to hear the results of your
  testing.  It's you that can help us make 5.0 even better than it is
  right now.  Even something simple like "Installed on $X computer and
  is currently running great!". We can't track everything ourselves,
  and direct reports from individuals are very helpful in assessing
  the state of the tree.

+ progress in the last week has been good - some great pullups to the
  branch have been made, including pullups to improve FP stability on amd64,
  and to point to binary packages on the project ftp server, amongst
  many, many others. Please see the source-changes mailing list for a more
  detailed list of these pullups.

+ We still need to knock some critical PRs on the head - if you could
  help out with any of those, please see the PR list mentioned later on
  in this mail; if you could, we'd be very grateful

+ the 5.0 PR list is at

        http://releng.netbsd.org/pr-list.html

+ the latest binary snapshots are available from:

        http://releng.netbsd.org/cgi-bin/builds.cgi

+ the next steps, after we've fixed all the critical PRs, is to
  start on the Release Candidates (RCs). 

My sincere thanks to Soren Jacobsen for helping out with this mail,
and for doing all of the 5-0 pullups to date.

With best wishes,
Alistair