[Also posted to http://www.inkscape.org]

We've made huge progress towards the Chill goals, and are now ready to move into the Frost phase.

Development is winding down, although we are granting a few frost exceptions to allow continued work for another week or so in specific areas (see below). 'make distcheck' issues have been sufficiently resolved (thanks Ted and Aaron!) Bug report triaging has gone smashingly well. The About Screen contest has kicked off. We still need to put some attention into the release notes, tutorials, and other docs, but I doubt there's any issues preventing us from moving ahead.

In the Frost phase, our objectives are as follows:

* Complete frost exception development work. * Focus should be on bug fixes, packaging, documentation, and translation work, all of which may be committed to SVN normally. * Gain some candidate submissions for the About Screen contest. * Release Notes should be >90% filled in. * Bug Hunt (details TBD) * Post inkscape-0.46-alpha.tar.gz

The length of time we stay in Frost mode is driven by how long the Bug Hunt takes, but is expected to take on the order of a few weeks.

The Frost Exceptions for remaining features are as follows:

1. Angled guidelines, by J.B.C.Engelen (ETA Dec 23rd): Underlying code is complete, and guidelines are rendering, but it needs a UI to allow manipulating them. 2. Python module packaging (lxml, numpy) for OSX, by jiho (ETA ___): Needs wider testing. Needs someone to build PPC packages. 3. Compilation of lib2geom on OS X 10.3 (Panther), by John Faith (ETA ___): An error is preventing builds for Panther versions of Inkscape. If this can't be resolved before release, the alternative is to drop support for this OS version. 4. Font Spec Implementation, by Gail Carmichael (ETA Dec 27). Refactor patch to include some code review changes by Bulia. Also, the patch needs wider testing. 5. Win32 Uninstaller improvement, by Adib (ETA Jan 3). Fix current installer to not bug user for each changed file. 6. PDF, PS export improvements, by Adib (ETA Jan 3). Implement blur as bitmap, and display a dialog with options for text-to-path, blur-as-bitmap, alpha-as-bitmap. 7. Clone Tiling dialog, by Tavmjong Bah (ETA Dec 23rd): Add a few options to Shift, Scaling, and Rotation tabs. Also some small changes for default values for turbulence and composite filters.

Feature changes in SVN for things not on this list should be done on a branch. Any feature work not in this list committed to SVN during the Frost period may be reverted by any developer. Bug fixes, translation work, documentation updates, and packaging development may continue to be committed as normal, no permission needed yet.