Philip indicated yesterday on IRC that all local move features he wanted to get to implemented for 1.8 now have code written. So now we're all waiting for the "local moves" yellow light on roadmap.html to turn green.
I think we're at the point where we need testing by real users. We've got some test coverage in our test suite that indicates things are all well. But the test suite is somewhat removed from the actual use cases which local moves are supposed to improve. For instance, we haven't yet seen a single off the mill Java developer hit the 'refactor' button in an IDE and then update the working copy. I expect that there are bugs lurking in the implementation of local moves, and I also expect that we can still improve the user interface a bit. But to get there we need some feedback from the outside world about what does and what doesn't work. I think now is the time where we should either start cutting 1.8 alpha releases from trunk, or branch 1.8 and then start issuing alpha releases from the branch. In either case we should ask the community to build binaries and ask our user base to help test them. (I don't expect alpha builds to be used in IDEs, however many users could try to update refactored working copies with the command line client and report back. This would also be a good test for the 'svn upgrade' code.) What do you all think? If we start cutting alpha releases from trunk there will be less overhead with committing fixes, which means we might stabilise the code a bit faster. However, it might be worthwhile to force fixes through the backport review process to make sure we get more eyes on them, which means we might stabilise the code even more at the expense of potentially delaying the final dot zero release a bit further. I'd be happy of course to drive the initial alpha releases as soon as we've decided on whether to make them and how we are going to manage them.
