For those of you not subscribed to the development mail list and are curious, (why are you not subscribed if you are interested?) the conditions for Dries rolling a release candidate are now announced below.

The short answer is, it depends on how many bug fixes are submitted and how many people help review them. Possibly as early as next week if the level of critical bugs continues to go down as they are fixed and a base level of stability is met.

If you are a module developer, now is the time to start playing with CVS so you can look at what will be necessary to update your contributed modules for everyone to use and get started.

For everyone's benefit, this page has been updated to help with module upgrades. Now, Jeff Robins was distracted by curiosity and boredom and wrote a module to help evaluate and semi-automate the process.

If you are dependant on and use some contributed modules, please contact the module maintainer if you are able to help. You can also attach a patch to that projects issue and perhaps take some of the workload off and get your preferred contributed modules updated sooner than later.

Some main areas of interest off the top of my head;

• forms api
• search improvements
• revisions improvements
• some AJAX stuff (depending on the variety of definitions of AJAX)
• UI improvements at various spots and levels
• blocks can now be assigned to various regions (left|right|header|footer|main -depending on theme support).

Here is the email announcement from Dries in full:

Hello world,

- I opened up the use of the DRUPAL-4-7 tag for contributed projects
(not for core). Thus, if you maintain a module, theme or
translation, you can create a DRUPAL-4-7 branch. Because Drupal HEAD
and Drupal 4.7 are still one and the same, it's probably premature to
branch your project (unless you want to rewrite your project for
Drupal 4.8.0). Also, the DRUPAL-4-7 tarballs won't be packaged for
another week or so.

- I haven't released a Drupal 4.7 release candidate yet because I
feel we're still dealing with too many (critical) bugfixes. We need
a base level of stability and confidence before we can roll out a
release candidate. Nonetheless, Drupal HEAD is getting more and more
stable every day so keep reporting and fixing those bugs. It is the
one path to a Drupal 4.7.0 release (candidate). I think we might be
able to roll a release candidate as soon as next week.

- As of tomorrow, I'm not likely to make any more API or database
changes, unless deemed important. (I might make an exception for
some of the pending patches/work but I'm not likely to consider _new_
patches that add _new_ functionality.) I'll be more strict, and that
implies that some patches will not make it into Drupal 4.7.0.

- In good tradition, I plan to upgrade Drupal.org to the release
candidate as soon as possible. I'm currently waiting for the
simplenews.module to be "forms API"-ified, and I have yet to port
some drupal.org specific modules/pages (eg. the one that generateshttp://drupal.org/mailing-lists/). Chances are that the
cvslog.module needs more work as well -- haven't checked. As soon we
can upgrade, we'll be able to roll out the improved search module.
All in all, it's probably going to take another 2-3 weeks though
before we can attempt to upgrade drupal.org.

--
Dries Buytaert :: http://www.buytaert.net/

Here's one way you can help to test things. Things get done by people doing them so dig in, help out and have fun.

-sp
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain