[Python-3000] Release 3.0a1 Countdown

[Guido van Rossum]

Tomorrow (Friday August 31) I want to do the 3.0a1 release. I want to
do it early in the day (US west coast time). It's going to be a
lightweight release -- I plan to put out a source tarball only, if
Martin wants to contribute an MSI installer that would be great. I
plan to lock the tree Friday morning early (perhaps as early as 6am
PDT, i.e. 15:00 in Germany). So get your stuff in and working (on as
many platforms as possible) by then!

I'll spend most of today writing up a what's new document and release
notes. I'm still hoping that the following unit tests that currently
fail everywhere can be fixed:

test_mailbox
test_old_mailbox
test_smtplib

(test_sundry now passes BTW, I don't see any tests being skipped unexpectedly.)

I've set up a task list on the spreadsheet we used for the sprint.
Here's the invitation:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pBLWM8elhFAmKbrhhh0ApQA&inv=guido@python.org&t=3328567089265242420&guest

Use the tabs at the bottom to go to the "Countdown" sheet and you can
watch me procrastinate in real time. :-) Don't hesitate to add items!

Some other things I expect to land today:

Thomas Wouters's patch for the ref leak in the ABC cache (issue 1061)
Thomas Wouters's noslice feature
issue 1753395 (Georg)
possibly more work on PEP 3109 and 3134 (Collin)

Also I'd appreciate it if people would check the buildbots and the bug
tracker for possible issues.

Thanks everyone for the large number of improvements that came in this week!

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)