Let's plan on entering the Hard Freeze today, at GMT 2000 (about 6.5 hrs from right now).
The release wardens for this release will be Kees (drb) and Peter (pjrm). Their job is to do final QA of the codebase, review all of the last minute changes to ensure that nothing has been broken, and to review/apply any patches that people wish to add prior to the release.
At this time, please refrain from directly checking in code to the codebase, but instead post to the patch tracker. If you have any outstanding bug fixes, translations, or tutorial updates, please submit them ASAP. Kees and Peter will review and apply the patches they deem necessary for the release.
When they are satisfied with the state of the codebase, they'll announce it is ready for release, and apply the official 0.42 tagging. This normally takes a few days.
After it has been tagged, we will allow a day or two for packagers to create and test packages, and then announce! :-)
Bryce