We had some problems on Friday with a Mac checkin for bug 187508. I approved the checkin because it looked like a fairly safe patch that was going to solve one of our most frequently reported Mac issues. Unfortunately, until we got a null check landed, this caused the Mac builds from Friday morning to crash. The fix went in but the next Mac build failed to complete (some build machine issue, I believe.) Mac builds take forever and by the time Chase had the problem sorted out and the next tinderbox cycle completed it was already pretty late in the evening.
We still have a few bugs left on the blocking1.8a6+ list. We've got patches in review for all but one or two of those so we're looking pretty good on the blocker list.
Other than that Mac problem and the remaining blockers, the builds we've been testing (Tracy, Sarah, Marcia, and myself) are feeling good enough to ship as an alpha. As long as we don't find anything new and major or don't see any serious regressions from the remaining blocker bug fixes.
Oh, and I'm still going through the blocker nominations. A quick scan of the summaries and keywords doesn't lead me to believe that we've got a significant number of alpha blockers there. We'll see after I get into reading the full reports (hopefully today and tomorrow).
We are also having some difficulty with talkback and our build systems. Chase and Jay are working on that and will hopefully have it sorted out by Monday.
If you know of any bugs that should block this alpha release, please nominate them. I'm mostly looking for recent regressions -- things that were working in 1.7.x and aren't working on the current trunk builds, as well as any new code that is so broken it would discourage our testing community from pulling down the A6 release and testing it out.
If all goes well, I think we can have this release out early in the week and let our developers move on to Beta work.
