Hi all,

We have just this evening reached our bug fixing goal. There is one must-fix bug (see below) but I think it may be out of date anyway.

Thus, tonight we are officially moving into Hard Freeze, the final phase in the release cycle before Inkscape 0.44 is released.

From this point until release, DO NOT COMMIT anything to SVN without

approval from our Release Wardens (Jon Cruz and Aaron Spike). If you have bug fixes to contribute, please post them to the patch tracker and notify them.

Jon and Aaron, you two now have absolute authority over the codebase between now and when 0.44.0 is tagged. Use this time to review the codebase for any last minute bugs, must-fix bugs that we've missed until now, or other flaws that should be fixed before release. When you feel things are ready, create the 0.44.0 tag. We will split into the stable 0.44 and development 0.45 branches at that point.

I would encourage you two to try to complete the Hard Freeze within a week. Ideally, it should only take a few days to check and finalize everything, so that should be doable. If it looks like it'll take longer, let's discuss some alternate plans.

Here is the status for the remaining bugs I know about:

* We have just a single must-fix bug left (#1489175 "Win2K: Crash on Startup: entry point FreeAddrInfo not found"), however from the limited information on that bug, it sounds like it's probably out of date, so I'm not going to worry about it. You can take a look at it and decide what to do about it. #1489175

* There's some snapping bugs that haven't gotten attention, that you may want to review. They weren't included in the must-fix list due to lack of owner. #1488128

* We've gotten a bunch of reports from Debian Unstable users about Inkscape failing to run. This affects users of both old 0.43 and 0.44pre1. Dunno if this is a distro issue, or a gtk issue, or what, but probably needs more analysis. #1497837

* There are still some font issues related to the new font control. If you feel these have not been adequately addressed, consider disabling the font rendering in the font selector for this release, or other actions to hide the issue until post-release. #1494337

There's probably others, but you can decide the ones you care most about. Remember though, at this point the game is to minimize the impact of the bugs, rather than to see them fixed. This may mean hiding the symptoms (or trading them for more tolerable bugs), or simply list them as known issues, and put them on the must-fix list for 0.44.1.

Bryce