The GNOME release team are receiving a small avalanche of hard code freeze break requests. Maybe people can inately sense that the 2.8 release cycle is two weeks shorter than normal.

This stage in the release cycle usually scares me senseless. We have to weigh up a) fixing fairly serious bugs, with b) the risk of introducing worse bugs by accident. Fixers for crashes almost always get accepted. The number of serious bugs that are being fixed at the last moment reinforces my suspicion that GNOME 2.7/2.8 has not been tested as much as normal.

This time we have lots of Evolution patches to look at as well. The Evolution team at Novell/Ximian are doing a great job of adapting to the GNOME release process along with the tough in-house procedures that they seem to follow already. It can't be nice for them to have to ask people like me for permission to apply patches, but I'm glad that they already know how to make software stable.

Anyway, yadda yadda, GNOME 2.8 is on schedule for September 15th. GNOME says they are going to do it, and then they do it. People like that.