The third alpha release of Ubuntu 9.04 is planned for this Thursday. From the Ubuntu developer mailing list:

The third Jaunty alpha release is planned for this Thursday, January 15.

But don't let that deter you if you have something great and immodest that you're planning to dazzle us with this week!

Jaunty Alpha 3 will again use a "soft freeze" for main. This means that developers are asked to refrain from uploading packages between Tuesday and Thursday which don't bring us closer to releasing the alpha, so that these days can be used for settling the archive and fixing any remaining showstoppers.

The "list" of bugs targeted for alpha-3 can be found at:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/jaunty/+bugs?field.milestone=2211

Per the policy described at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RCBugTargetting, this list is used for tracking bugs that are blockers for the alpha 3 milestone - so as you can see, the list is currently quite short. If you know of other bugs that should be considered blockers, please nominate them for release and set the milestone target for those bugs. If you have questions about whether a bug should be considered a blocker, please contact a member of the release tea].

And of course, please also consider helping with the bugs already listed there if you have the time.

Beyond that short list of bugs that are blockers for Alpha 3, we have those bugs that are listed as release-critical for jaunty as a whole:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/jaunty/+bugs

If you aren't among the small group of people who have milestoned bugs assigned to you, please consider helping with those bugs, using your best judgement with regard to the alpha freeze when uploading fixes.

Please also help us to get the archive in a consistent state for the alpha, as described on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDevelopment/PackageArchive#Consistency

Finally, if you know of new features in Jaunty that you think should be highlighted for Alpha 3, let me or another member of the release team know so that they can be added to the technical overview at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/JauntyJackalope/TechnicalOverview

Cheers,
--
Steve Langasek
On behalf of the Ubuntu release team