2.11 Release on Tuesday Dec 21

[Andrew Whitworth]

The 2.11 release of Parrot, the last developer release before the big
3.0, is happening on Tuesday December 21st. Our goals for this week,
as agreed yesterday at #parrotsketch are as follows: Deprecations,
Close tickets, and merge the html_cleanup branch and maybe the
embed_api2 branch too.

For deprecations and "experimental" items, in the beginning of the
release cycle I sent out a list of things that I thought we could
tackle. Here is that list again, with current status:

https://trac.parrot.org/parrot/ticket/1633 (CodeString PMC) CLOSED
https://trac.parrot.org/parrot/ticket/1561 (Auto-vivification of
nested aggregates) some movement, but still open
https://trac.parrot.org/parrot/ticket/1697 (open and close opcodes) no movement
https://trac.parrot.org/parrot/ticket/1207 (find_lex will not throw
exceptions) CLOSED
https://trac.parrot.org/parrot/ticket/1540 (in-place string opcodes)
has a patch that should be reviewed/applied
https://trac.parrot.org/parrot/ticket/1580 (GZipHandle PMC) CLOSED
https://trac.parrot.org/parrot/ticket/1564 (ParrotInterpreter.getpid
method) no movement
https://trac.parrot.org/parrot/ticket/1581 (GC_SYS_NAME option to
interpinfo_s_i opcode) no movement
https://trac.parrot.org/parrot/ticket/1629 (find_codepoint opcode) CLOSED
https://trac.parrot.org/parrot/ticket/1635 (finalize opcode) Agreed to
leave it experimental at #ps 23-Nov-2010
https://trac.parrot.org/parrot/ticket/1506 (PMC Attribute allocation
functions) CLOSED
https://trac.parrot.org/parrot/ticket/1564 (Parrot_getpid function)  no movement

So we've dealt with several of these, and it looks like we could close
several more. The experimental items probably need to be brought up at
#ps or here on the list before we can close them, so I will try to
raise some of those in the next #ps (which will be too late for this
release).

In terms of tickets, we have 578 tickets currently open. I would
*really* like to get this number lower if possible. If we could close
28 tickets this week, we could get down to a nice, even 550.
Low-hanging fruit should be picked. Anything that could be turned into
a GCI task should be. Those students are extremely productive!

The html_cleanup branch is looking good, though there is a little bit
more work to do before it's mergable. Testing there would be a big
help.

The embed_api2 branch needs codestd fixes, POD documentation for many
of the new functions, and lots of functional testing. Volunteers
welcome!

I think we will want to do a FEATURE FREEZE STARTING SUNDAY to make
sure we get plenty of testing done, ESPECIALLY testing for Rakudo and
other HLLs. Anything that isn't ready to push/merge by Sunday evening
waits until after the release. Please let me know if you are working
on a branch that could merge between now and then.

Thanks everybody for the great work this month! Let's put out the best
possible release on Tuesday.

--Andrew Whitworth