'nom' branch is now default, rakudo release status

[Patrick R. Michaud]

I've just now switched the Rakudo repository on GitHub such that
the default branch is now "nom" instead of "master".  The nom
branch is where nearly all significant Rakudo development has taken
place over the last several months -- over 1,800 commits since
being forked from the 'master' branch back in April.

In order to avoid confusion with git's conventional use of
the "master" branch name, I've now renamed "master" to "ng" (the
branch's original name from early 2010).  However, most
Rakudo developers will likely refer to the version of Rakudo
in this older branch as either "2011.07" or "Beijing",
these being the tagnames of the final compiler release from 
that particular branch.

We have not as yet created a 2011.08 release based on nom.
After much useful discussion and contributions from people
on #perl6, I feel that there are still too many feature 
regressions and some performance regressions that really need 
to be addressed before making a release.  Ultimately, it comes 
down to something like "It's far better to explain and justify 
delaying a release than to issue a release that we know will 
cause problems for our clients."

I don't want to specify an exact date for the next release;
certainly it will occur within the next two weeks.  As in
previous announcements, we continue to recommend using the 
Rakudo Star 2011.07 release until the releases from the new
development line are ready.

We did discuss the possibility of simply creating a 2011.08
release from the old branch, but since it would be essentially
identical to the 2011.07 that doesn't seem to serve much purpose
other than to fill a slot, so we've decided against that.

Today I'm planning to begin updating the perl6 RT ticket queue 
to reflect things as they stand after the branch rename.  I
expect many tickets to be closed due to the many fixes that 
nom brings.  New incoming tickets will now be evaluated against
the 'nom' branch, and it's okay to file tickets for regressions 
from 2011.07.  (Perhaps cut us a little slack for a week or two 
on this, though.)  More details on the RT ticket queue will be 
described in an upcoming message.

Comments and questions can be sent to the perl6-users at perl.org and
perl6-compiler at perl.org mailing lists, or join us on IRC 
freenode/#perl6 and ask there.

Pm