UDS Lucid has shown the tremendous committment of the Ubuntu community to making 10.04 a rock-solid LTS release. Now it's time to begin to deliver on that promise. Lucid Alpha 1 is scheduled for this coming Thursday, December 10.

Alpha milestones in Ubuntu use a "soft freeze" for main, which means that developers are asked to refrain from uploading packages between Tuesday and Thursday which don't bring us closer to releasing the alpha, so that these days can be used for settling the archive and fixing any remaining showstoppers.

The list of bugs targeted for alpha-1 can be found at:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/lucid/+bugs?field.milestone=21443

Per the policy described at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RCBugTargetting, this list is used for tracking bugs that are blockers for the alpha 1 milestone - so as you can see, the list will be quite short. If you know of bugs that should be considered blockers, please nominate them for release and set the milestone target for those bugs. If you have questions about whether a bug should be considered a blocker, please contact a member of the release team-

Beyond that short list of bugs that are blockers for Alpha 1, we have those bugs that are listed as release-critical for Lucid as a whole:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/lucid/+bugs

If you aren't among the small group of people who have milestoned bugs assigned to you, please consider helping with those bugs, using your best judgement with regard to the alpha freeze when uploading fixes.

Please also help us to get the archive in a consistent state for the alpha, as described on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDevelopment/PackageArchive#Consistency .

There's also plenty that can be done to help packages that aren't included on the CDs: https://merges.ubuntu.com/main.html shows over 200 package merges still outstanding in main for lucid, and https://merges.ubuntu.com/universe.html shows close to 400.

Finally, if you know of new features in Lucid that you think should be highlighted for Alpha 1, let a member of the release team know so that they can be added to the technical overview at
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LucidLynx/TechnicalOverview

Cheers,
--
Steve Langasek
On behalf of the Ubuntu release team