In chatting with Philip and Julian today, we got to pondering which bits we have left to complete before we branch 1.7.x, and start cutting pre-releases. The major concerns folks had a couple of months ago have largely been addressed, and it feels like we're in the mop-up stage.
We've still got bugs (we'll always have bugs), but I think getting more testing via the pre-releases is important at this stage, and I see branching as a step toward cutting pre-releases. I do not think we need to have trunk in a releasable state before branching, but I would like to find a way to start doing pre-releases relatively soon-ish. I suppose we could cut alpha releases directly from trunk, but that would be a break with precedent, and doesn't really feel good. If the branch is not in a releasable state, I'd propose we cut alpha or beta releases, and release them along with a list of known issues, similar to what we did for 1.5. This would allow more testing. Voting rules on the branch could be relaxed up until the first release candidate, also similar to 1.5, in an effort to get changes on to the release branch with as little friction as possible. This feels like something that could happen before the end of the month, but I'm sure others have insight into what is blocking the branch, so please speak up. -Hyrum
