Today we made some really good progress on the release, with patches submitted for all of our remaining blockers. By the time I left the office (about 7:30 PM) we had reviewed and approved patches for all of the blockers except one.
If all of these patches make it into tomorrow morning's builds, and our testing doesn't show any new regressions, I think we'll call it done.
There's significant pressure from developers to get the tree open for Beta development and the one remaining blocker may be moved out and landed early in the Beta cycle.
If in the morning, we don't have all of the approved patches landed, I'll do what I can to chase down the remaining ones (which would also give a window of opportunity for the one outstanding fix to land,) get a new round of builds from Chase, and as soon as those test out, we'll open the tree to new development.
Alphas aren't supposed to take a long time; we schedule a few days of freeze to get them stabilized and we try not to interrupt the development efforts too much so I hope we can wrap this up and let our coders get back to landing code tomorrow.
