The Narwhal is ready to do a bit of spyhopping!

Alpha 1 is set for next Thursday, Dec. 2nd [1]. This first milestone is important
for testing the new kernel on a variety of hardware, as well as the result of
the autosyncs from Debian and first wave of merges and package updates.

Alpha milestones in Ubuntu use a "soft freeze" for main[2], which means that
developers are asked to refrain from uploading packages between Tuesday and
Thursday which don't bring us closer to releasing the alpha, so that these
days can be used for settling the archive and fixing any remaining
showstoppers.

The list of bugs targeted for alpha-1 can be found at:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?field.milestone=33571


Per the release critical bug targetting policy[3] , this list is supposed
to be used for tracking bugs that are blockers for the alpha 1 milestone.
If you know of bugs that should be considered blockers, please nominate them
for release and set the milestone target for those bugs (to denote them as
release-critical). If you have questions about whether a bug should be
considered a blocker, please contact a member of the release team[4]. The
list will be given a good scrubbing to conform to policy[3] early next week,
so expect some changes.

Beyond the list of bugs that are blockers for Alpha 1, we have those
bugs that are listed as release-critical for Natty as a whole:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/natty/+bugs

If you aren't among the small group of people who have milestoned bugs assigned
to you, please consider helping with those bugs, using your best judgement with
regard to the alpha freeze when uploading fixes.

Please also help us to get the archive in a consistent state for the alpha,
as described in:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDevelopment/PackageArchive#Consistency.

There's also plenty that can be done to help packages that aren't included
on the CDs: https://merges.ubuntu.com/main.html shows about 130 package
merges still outstanding in main for natty, and
https://merges.ubuntu.com/universe.html shows about 50.

Finally, if you know of new features in Natty that you think
should be highlighted for Alpha 1, let us know so that they
can be added to the technical overview that will soon be available
at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NattyNarwhal/TechnicalOverview.
Workarounds for known bugs that won't be fixed in time for the
Alpha 1 release are also most welcome.

Thank you,

Kate Stewart
On behalf of the Ubuntu release team

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NattyReleaseSchedule
[2] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2008-January/000363.html
[3] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RCBugTargetting
[3] https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-release/+members