Heads up: 2.6 release freeze next week!

[Kurt Taylor]

Happy New Year everyone!

Just a reminder, next Monday, January 7, 2019, we will tag a 2.6
release candidate for our first release as a community.

As we agreed in the release planning working group, we will have a
short 3-day window of sanity testing and then branch. You need to be
planning on testing the tag during this time to make sure everything
looks good on your platform. Unless there are serious problems
(unlikely), we will branch the release so that master can continue
merging patches.

The remainder of the 4-week release window, until February 4, 2019,
will be set aside for companies to test. This time should also be
spent making the documentation current and complete. Patches against
this pre-release branch will be accepted only if they have minimal
impact, such as documentation, or they are critical to basic
functionality. At the release date, it will be tagged 2.6 and go into
maintenance mode and very few patches will be allowed to be
back-ported.

Please contact your release planning working group representative for
questions, or contact me directly. If your question is general in
nature, find me on IRC or ask here on the list so everyone may
benefit.

Thanks for all the hard work you have put into this release!
Kurt Taylor (krtaylor)