I'm still seeing some important changes outstanding and in flux and no real stability window what do people think about shifting the schedule by 4 days. So the branch would be created on 10/7 (My evening time GMT-7) instead of 10/3. Having to deal with backports right off the bat is not really gaining us anything and will likely result in a less productive test window.
Do you think things will be less in flux then? I doubt that. I would say branch it and bring in only any necessary bug fixes. Any features would need to wait for 10.1.
There is no necessity to collect new features at the very tail end of the release time. That is not a good practice either. It is better to let new features mature for the two month time than to release less certain features at the least minute.
