By now I think it's obvious to everyone that we're behind on the 1.1 release. We
(the core devs) have talked it over, and we're going to revise the
plan for 1.1. In a nutshell:

* Model validation will be dropped for 1.1 (it'll ship in 1.2 instead).

* All other "must-haves" will be moved to "maybes."

* The schedule slips a month: Django 1.1 will now be targeted for the week of
  April 13.

Full details follow.

Model validation
----------------

The work on model validation simply isn't yet at a point where we feel
comfortable merging it into trunk, and the work remaining to be done isn't
trivial. There's a number of pervasive problems causing major
backwards-incompatibilities which need to shake out, and after that it needs a
*lot* of testing.

I can't stress enough how grateful we are to the folks who put so much work into
this -- Honza and mrts especially. The failure here is by no means on their
part; the failure is ours for not providing more guidance. I'm the right person
to blame for this feature missing 1.1: I should have found more time to devote
to this work.

We'll keep developing on this in parallel with the 1.1 release -- I'll be
working to get a merge of the work done by Honza, mrts, Malcolm, and me into an
SVN branch where it can get more eyes -- and we should be in good shape to get
this in shortly after 1.1. I've already talked to a few folks who want to focus
on this at the PyCon sprints next month. It's looking like model validation and
1.1 will be like aggregation and 1.0: a feature nearly done that just needs
another release cycle for full maturity.

Again, many thanks to those who've worked on this, and I'm sorry we couldn't
make your work pay off for Django 1.1.

Other features
--------------

All other features on the to-do list are going to be considered "maybe"
features. If they're done by the beta release and feature freeze (see below)
they'll make it into 1.1; otherwise they won't. In retrospect we bit off more
than we could chew here, and most of these aren't really make-or-break features
anyway.

I think with some focused work over the next few weeks we should be in good
shape to get most of these done, though; many of them already have a patch in
pretty good shape already.

New schedule
------------

We've reorganized the schedule to give more time, and also to take
advantage of the PyCon sprint days (3/29 - 4/2). We'll release the
beta just before PyCon, sprint on fixing as many bugs as possible
during PyCon, and push out the release candidate just after PyCon.

Dates:

* Alpha: 2/23 -- ship what we've got now plus a couple of small fixes to be
  checked in this week.

* Beta: 3/20 -- feature freeze.

* Release candidate: 4/2 -- total freeze and string freeze for translators.

* Final release: 4/13, or ten days after the last RC if we need to do another.

Let's do it!

Jacob