I'm cancelling this vote in favor of a vote on rc2. rc2 includes some documentation clean-up and changes on top of rc1.
I also added (in that thread) more color on the general contents of this release. 0.8.1 is a maintenance release, but because the 0.8-branch will be the last branch to support scala 2.9, we've elected to add some larger features and optimizations that otherwise might not have made the cut. The larger changes (H/A mode for the scheduler and shuffle file consolidation) are not enabled by default to avoid major changes for people upgrading from 0.8.0. - Patrick
