The first alpha release of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala is targeted for next Thursday, May 14.

Now that you've all gotten comfortable with your shiny new 9.04 release, we're rolling right along to the first milestone of the Karmic cycle - with Karmic Alpha 1 targeted for next Thursday, May 14.

This first milestone again happens before UDS, so again the targets are modest: merging the installer for Karmic, and making sure things are in an installable state.

We will continue to use a "soft freeze" for main for the Karmic Alpha milestones. 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-1 can be found at:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/karmic/+bugs?field.milestone=12709

Per the policy described at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RCBugTargetting, this list is used for tracking bugs that are blockers for the alpha 1 milestone - so as you can see, the list will be quite short (and is currently empty). If you know of 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 team[2].

Beyond that short list of bugs that are blockers for Alpha 1, we have those bugs that are listed as release-critical for karmic as a whole:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/karmic/+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 Karmic that you think should be highlighted for Alpha 1, let a member of the release team know so that they can be added to the technical overview at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KarmicKoala/TechnicalOverview

Cheers,
--
Steve Langasek

Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 1 freeze ahead