Arch Linux release engineering

I don't think I've ever seen so much anxiety/impatience/hope/buzz for a new Arch Linux release. (this is because of 2.6.28 with ext4 support).
The last release was 6 months ago, which is not so good.. also the arch-installer project has been slacking for a while. But the Arch devs have been very busy and many things going on. You know how it goes...

That's why some new people have stepped up to help out on a new release:
Today, we are on the verge of a 2009-01 release (though that has been said so many times lately ;-) and together with Aaron we have started a new project: the Arch Linux Release Engineering team.
Members of this team are Aaron himself, Gerhard Brauer and me.

Our goals:

• coordinated releases following the rhythm of kernel releases (that's a release every 2-3 months baby!).
• anticipate the availability of the kernel in the testing repo's instead of having to wait for it to go to core before building alpha/beta images
• migration to AIF as the new Arch installer (woot!)
• testing. Leveraging the possibilities of AIF as an unattended installer, we should be able to script full installations and health checking of the resulting system.
• involving the community more? releasing "testing iso's" ? not sure about that. we'll see...

We also have:

• arch-releng mailing list
• Release Engineering bugtracker

Oh yeah AIF is mirrored @ http://projects.archlinux.org/ and available packaged in the official repo's!