I see in Jabber someone suggested doing the release on Monday. I think it's not realistic for these reasons:
1. The pre2 still has no windows exe. What's up with it? This is CRITICALLY important because after pre1, Bob switched to the new libraries, which are very different (e.g. include gtk-wimp). So we currently have NO prerelease for the users to test these libs (apart from daily builds). It's a pretty drastic upgrade and I insist that we need AT LEAST TWO full prereleases, each with sufficient time allowance, to minimally test it.
2. To illustrate the above point, I just found a crash bug on Windows 98 (Russian) with the latest daily build, Inkscape0507151800.zip. Namely, when I use the Open dialog to go to a directory with a Russian name, opening any file from there crashes it. What's worse, it remebers that initial directory in the prefs, and when I do File>Open next time, it crashes immediately. The program becomes simply unusable until you delete your prefs file.
I then tested the same on a WIn2k (Russian) system, there it works fine. However I don't think we can release it with such a bug even if it only affects Win 98 non-English versions.
Here's what I get in an error box when it crashes:
Pango-ERROR **: file shape.c: line 75 (pango_shape): assertion failed: (glyphs->num_glyphs > 0) aborting...
Then I get another box with:
Runtime Error! Program: C:\INK-LATEST\INKSCAPE.EXE
abnormal program termination
Then I get yet another box with two messages:
Pango-ERROR **: file shape.c: line 75 (pango_shape): assertion failed: (glyphs->num_glyphs > 0) aborting...
Pango-WARNING (recursed) **: Couldn't load font "MS Sans Serif 7" falling back to "Sans 7" aborting...
And then again the "Runtime error" box (so 4 boxes in total before it finally dies).
I then tried to get a backtrace but I could not, because when run from gdb (included with the build), it crashes right on startup:
C:\ink-latest>gdb.exe inkscape.exe GNU gdb 5.2.1 Copyright 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc. GDB is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License, and you are welcome to change it and/or distribute copies of it under certain conditions. Type "show copying" to see the conditions. There is absolutely no warranty for GDB. Type "show warranty" for details. This GDB was configured as "i686-pc-mingw32"... (gdb) run Starting program: C:\ink-latest/inkscape.exe
Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault. 0x01c89fb1 in ?? () (gdb) bt #0 0x01c89fb1 in ?? () #1 0x00000187 in ?? () #2 0xc95e2824 in ?? () Cannot access memory at address 0x54890187 (gdb)
All this worked fine in the builds with previous libraries (without gtk-wimp).
3. And last not least, the "freeze on quit with Transform dialog" but seems to be harder than it seemed at first. Looks like there's not much progress there. And looks like if it's fixed, the fix will involve some pretty deep and dangerous changes, so it will need to be tested for quite some time.
4. Smaller issues: nsis patch not committed yet (waiting for a Windows-savvy tester?), and the new About is not in CVS yet.