On April 24th, the Subversion development community released the first official release candidate for Subversion 1.5.  You can see the official announcement in this mailing list post.  You will notice that this release is labelled as RC4, and you might be wondering if you missed the RC1-3 announcements.  The answer is no, this is the first official release.  We go through an internal review period before we post any release.  Committers build and test the release and then either vote to approve or veto the release candidate.  In each of the first three tries someone saw something they did not like and so we vetoed the release.  Since version numbers are cheap, we simply increment when we try again.  That way, there is never any confusion about what someone is using.

Anyway, this is the biggest milestone for the release, short of the final GA.  The release of this release candidate can start the official soak period, which lasts a minimum of four weeks.  You can read about our release-stabilization process in the hacking guide we host on the web site.  As part of getting to this release candidate stage, we now have the release notes finalized, and you can see those online as well.  There is a lot of good overview information about the release in that document.

As we have been doing throughout the 1.5-development lifecycle, CollabNet is providing binaries for this release.  We want to make it as easy as possible for users to test the release and provide us with feedback.  Please provide the feedback, including positive feedback, as it helps us know that people are actually testing the release candidate during the soak period.  Sometimes if we do not get much feedback we will extend the soak period a little longer in order to allow time for people to try it.  So if you find bugs, please report them, and if things are working out well, then tell us that too so that we know you tried it.  Feedback can be reported on our forums on openCollabNet, or on the Subversion users mailing list on tigris.org.

In addition to getting the Subversion binaries, you can also try our new graphical merge client for Subversion 1.5 (based on Subclipse) and we also have links to the 1.5 release for TortoiseSVN and other tools.  It would be great if you could also try these tools out and give us and the developers your feedback.