> > > Should we plan some soft freeze before that? >
Good question! :-) We do not want to encourage/enable the rush to commit stuff before the 1st May cut-off. IMHO we should be comfortable leaning towards saving any significant commits for the next dev cycle. How do we create the correct incentive? If we don't feel that we have achieved stable trunk this dev cycle then a soft feature freeze during April makes sense to me. IMHO a need to first cut alpha1 instead of going straight to a beta1 is an indicator we have not achieved stable trunk; I'd rather not see a long testing run on the release branch before rc1. And I think this is necessary if we want GA by July. So for me this boils down to… are we (and will we be) comfortable making the first cut 4.1-beta1 ?