I mean, unless someone says otherwise... 2.3.24-rc01-incubating is already downloadable at http://www.apache.org/dist/incubator/freemarker/, but as policy says to wait 24 hours before announcement, we do. As it's not a stable release, I don't plan to make it available on Maven Central, only in https://repository.apache.org/service/local/staging/deploy/maven2, though I can be convinced otherwise.
After the announcement, I also want to release 2.3.24-rc01-incubating on sourceforge.net. Is that practice OK with the ASF? Around the end of February the final release will be voted on, so please try to make 2.3.24-rc01 fail. Especially the new features. I will be very busy at workplace until the end of March, so any help is highly welcome. For 2.3.24, http://freemarker-online.kenshoo.com/ will need an outputFormat dropdown. (A locale and incompatibleImprovements dropdown would be useful too.) Anyone? After 2.3.24, I think it's time to focus heavily on 3.0, because otherwise FM has just no chance to be sexy/interesting enough to pick up enough contributor activity to survive. As I said earlier, I don't want 3.0 to be a complete rewrite, instead I plant to gradually transform the code, keeping the battle tested parts and the familiar 2.x idioms where reasonable. But surely quite a few parts will have to be trashed and rewritten, and especially at the beginning the commit diffs will be overwhelming. This will be a lot of work BTW. If no one will help at least with tooling, testing, it might happens too slowly. And of course it doesn't mean that 2.3.25 shouldn't go on. It certainly won't be a feature heavy release though. -- Thanks, Daniel Dekany
