Getting 2.4 Released

[John Ralls]

Some years ago my wife worked in the Release Engineering group at a major networking company. She frequently said that software wasn't released, it managed to escape.

It seems to me that we need to push 2.4 closer to the fence so that it can escape.

What needs to be done to make the next test release a "release candidate" that we can safely recommend to ordinary users that they can try it out without risking their data? (FWIW, I've been using 2.3.15 regularly without incident, but there are lots of features that I don't use.)

There are two bugs with priority higher than normal (and 976 total bugs, a few of which date back 8 years). Database backend locking is one of them, the other is an older bug about transaction dates getting screwed up when the computer's time zone changes. There are 76 marked "major" or higher severity, but several of them are quite old and don't seem that severe. 

Can we use bug status to answer the "what needs to be done" question? Are the two high priority bugs the only ones that need to be fixed before escape?

Regards,
John Ralls