[RELEASE] 4.2.0 announcements and preliminary tarballs

[Benedikt Meurer]

Hello everybody,

First: The complete freeze has been delayed until 2005/01/10 12:00h 
(CET) for two reasons: a) some translations aren't perfect yet and b) 
probably new default wallpaper. Release Tag will be moved on 2005/01/09 
after all translations and the wallpaper has been committed. Besides 
that, xfce_4_2 is frozen now and in good shape.

I created source tarballs and Fedora RPMs today, without any problems, 
and so I don't expect other packagers to have problems, but please check 
them before 4.2.0 final tarballs are created. (the tarballs are only 
meant for packagers and porters, _NOT_ for general use!)

I've put up a site dedicated to Release Engineering for 4.2.0 with the 
links for the preliminary tarballs and announcement texts here:

  http://www.xfce.org/~benny/releng.html

I'd like to invite everybody to help in improving the release 
announcements (esp. native english speakers to check the texts). In 
addition, we are looking for people to translate the release 
announcements into different languages, atleast the "short announcement" 
(Part I) and the "website announcement" (Part II).

To make 4.2.0 a perfect release its necessary to coordinate the 
announcements, cause thats the first thing most new users will read and 
it makes up the initial impression, which is important to gain 
perfection :-). We'll therefore coordinate who sends an announcement to 
which news site. See the releng page for news sites that are already 
covered by other users, and drop me a short note if you want to send an 
announcement to another site. When sending the announcement, please use 
the official text (from the releng page, the announcement will be marked 
"official" when done) or a translated version and be sure to wait until 
the xfce.org website is updated and a mail about Xfce 4.2.0 has been 
sent to xfce4-dev@/xfce at xfce.org.

For the record: Release date is 2005/01/16. The time may differ from the 
original plan, depending on spare time of the people involved in the 
last release steps.

Thanks to everybody who is willing to help in the 4.2.0 final steps, and 
lets hope that everything wents as smooth as possible. ;-)

regards,
Benedikt