1.4 release in one week

[Christoph Otto]

Hi all,

The 1.4 release of Parrot will be happening one week from today on July 21. 
I'll be doing a dry run during the week and will aim to cut the actual release 
early Tuesday morning PDT.  I'll be sending out an "all clear" message on 
parrot-dev and making a note in the topic of #parrot when it's safe to break 
stuff again.

Anyone with branches going into 1.4 should merge them before Saturday. 
Deprecated features should also be removed before Saturday to ensure that we 
have a few days to flush out any new bugs and get some solid testing. 
Starting Saturday, we should make an extra effort to perform HLL and smoke 
testing.  Since this is a supported release and it'll be with us for a while, 
we need to be sure there aren't any surprises.  I also encourage anyone with 
unusual platforms (i.e. not Ubuntu/x86) to submit or commit updates to PLATFORMS.

This release is a deprecation point; according to our support policy[1] any 
deprecations listed in DEPRECATED.pod when the release is cut may be removed 
any time after the release is made.  If you know of any features that should 
be deprecated, now is the perfect time to file a tt and add it to DEPRECATED.pod.

Finally, please add any significant items to NEWS.  I'll be trolling through 
the last month's commit messages looking for anything relevant, but I could 
easily miss something.

Thanks,
Christoph

[1] docs/project/support_policy.pod