R devel - Mar 2008 - R 2.7.0 scheduled for April 22, prereleases in progress

This is to announce that we plan to release R version 2.7.0 on Tuesday
April 22, 2008. The following information is mainly for developers,
package maintainers and repository maintainers.

The planned procedure is

Mar 25: "Grand Feature" Freeze  2.7.0 alpha
Apr  8: Feature Freeze          2.7.0 beta
Apr 15: Code Freeze             2.7.0 RC
Apr 22: Release                 2.7.0

GFF: No major restructuring past this point
FF:  Feature set complete, only bugfixing from now on
CF:  Only critical bugfixes and platform build issues

Maintainers of recommended packages should notice that as they become
part of the final R tarball, we expect them to follow a similar freeze
pattern (and beware of potential CRAN delays, so please do not cut it
too close to the deadlines).

Notice that the main structural discontinuities occurs at GFF:

The SVN repository is affected as follows
    The trunk version is set to "2.8.0 Under development (unstable)".
    A new branch, R-2-7-branch is created.

This also implies new version numbers for "r-devel" and
"r-release-branch", in the sense of

http://developer.r-project.org/SVNtips.html 

Also, "r-release-branch" needs to have its tag updated.

Repository maintainers may need to revise directory structures
accordingly.

"R 2.6.2 Patched" will be closed to further development at GFF (as all
the release branches, it can be reopened if the need arises, we just
don't anticipate such a need.)

The source alpha/beta/RC tarballs will be made available daily
(barring build troubles) by a cron job running at 4AM CET, and the
tarballs can be picked up at

http://cran.r-project.org/src/base-prerelease/

a little later.

The various freeze points are marked by changes to the VERSION file
this is also done automatically by a cron job which runs just after
midnight on the relevant days.

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             ?ster Farimagsgade 5, Entr.B
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     PO Box 2099, 1014 Cph. K
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph:  (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)              FAX: (+45) 35327907