[Rd] 1.7.0 scheduled for April 16

[Peter Dalgaard BSA]

We have now (actually a few days ago) declared a "Grand Feature
Freeze" on the development sourcs, meaning that we might still add
functionality and fix bugs, but we will not do any further major
changes. 

It should be noted that there has been a couple of quite big changes
compared to the 1.6.x series, notably namespaces and the methods
package. Also, many more packages are now loaded by default. This
would be a good time for package writers to  adjust their packages to
work with 1.7.0 if necessary.

Two important dates in the near future:

March 26:

    Feature freeze, simultaneously on base and recommended packages.
    It is assumed that all recommended packages pass their checks at
    this point. The API should not be touched.
    
    Start making R-1.7.0beta.tgz packages automatically available and
    encourage people to do test builds. 


April 9:

    Code freeze. Only critical and/or trivial bugs fixed from this
    time onwards. Configure/make should only be touched in
    emergencies. 

Obviously, we cannot be sure that all changes before the final code
freeze will be compatible with all packages, so please keep checking
the beta versions as much as you can, especially if you are on one of
the rarer platforms.

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907