Hey All,

It's almost time we move on to Feature Freeze, at this point I'm saying let's put it out there as November 30th. I had delayed it to get in a couple new features and the reason I'm not just saying it's today is to leave it open for John Smith for a shortcut editor akin to GIMP's (if it can be completed in time).

The current list of bugs milestoned for 0.49 is at 50... and that is quite high. Can people help reduce this number some? My guess is things like the tutorial updates for 0.49 are not likely to make it for example.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bugs?field.searchtext=&orderby=-imp...

The real issue though is that we currently have 13 blocker bugs, all but one of which are regressions caused by the new renderer or rendering cache.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bugs?field.searchtext=&orderby=-imp...

In addition to these blockers, we still have a security bug that is blocking 0.48.4 and will also block 0.49.

Please focus efforts on fixing bugs rather than enhancing features at this point. The two exceptions to this are for the shortcut editor and the newly committed symbols dialog, polishing things like this is good.

String Freeze will go into effect on November 30th at this point, but I HIGHLY recommend translators get started now if they haven't started already (as was previously recommended).

Unfortunately, it does not look like we're going to be able to get the release out this year as originally hoped. At the current rate I hope we can get it out in Q1 of next year.

Sorry for not giving an update sooner. I hope all is well with everyone!

Cheers, Josh