Today (last night at midnight, actually) the Mozilla development trunk (the place that all Mozilla 1.8, Firefox 1.1 and Thunderbird 1.1 development is taking place) has closed to normal checkins. During this "freeze" period, all changes that impact the Mozilla application suite will require an extra layer of evaluation from drivers@mozilla.org (in addition to the normal required reviews.) Drivers will be evaluating fixes for inclusion into 1.8a6 based on the risk that the change introduces to the applicationon and an assesment of the need to get the code in (either to fix a critical bug, or to get a piece of code landed in time for the more widespread testing that a milestone release gets.)
During this week, drivers will also be attempting to focus attention on the most severe problems, with a focus on fixing regressions, and trying to get the builds into sufficiently usable condition that we can call it an "alpha" release. If all goes well, we should have something ready by the end of the week or early next week.
If you know of bugs (especially recent regressions) that should block the release of this alpha or if you have a change that really needs to make the alpha in order to get sufficient testing before beta and eventually final, please get that on drivers' radar by either nominating the bug as a blocker -- using the "blocking1.8a6?" flag or by requesting approval to land the patch using the "approval1.8a6?" patch flag.
If you have questions about how the freeze process, drivers' approvals, or branching, etc. work, feel free to ask and I'll try to answer questions in the blog comments.
