Today is the biggest release day we've had yet! (Unless you count the times we've released twice in one day due to critical errors. 
) But seriously, in a code sprint at the local Chick-fil-a today, Lyle and I took care of the remaining release blocking issues and some other low hanging fruit. Lyle went off to package up the 2.0-RC7 release and I felt inspired enough to package up a long overdue 1.8 release for Drupal 5.
The 1.8 release includes 50 commits that have been primarily minor bugfixes and typo fixes since our 1.7 release in January 2009. It also includes the tax report module that has been in the 2.x branch for some time.
The new release candidate for 2.0 includes about the same number of commits just in the last month. A couple weeks ago we announced our plans to just focus on a particular set of issues, and that strategy worked out quite well. Issues fixed related to attributes, stock, product kits, role promotions and file downloads, the price handler system, anonymous checkout, and more! We really wanted to polish off some of these bugs that weren't huge on their own but together represented broken critical functionality for the affected systems. I'm quite pleased with the results!
Next step is for everyone to update and report any remaining bugs you find. We intentionally didn't get to every reported issue, so be sure to search the issue tracker before posting anew. We've tested fresh RC7 installs and RC6 to RC7 updates with no troubles. We'll continue to fix the minor issues we can get to for the next two weeks, and then we'll package up a 2.0 and have a party.
In other news, the Meta Tags module was finally forced to make a release due to a security problem. This means our patch to fix its compatibility with Ubercart is now in an official release, so that issue should disappear for everyone who updates the module. Now if only someone could uncover a critical bug in i18n...
Even better, though, is the fact that the updates to the price handler system in conjunction with recent commits to the UC VAT module mean we'll finally have a good working solution for VAT (and other robust tax systems). As I mentioned in our 2.0 Release Plans, we're now entering a waiting period of two weeks before we call this a 2.0. If there are any minor API tweaks that need to be made for VAT compatibility, they need to be reported in the next week for us to address them before the final release. In other words... a lot of people have been asking for it, so we need you now to help test it.
That's all for now... if all goes well, I'll have a daughter and we'll all have an Ubercart 2.0 in two weeks (listed in order of awesomeness and importance). 
(For those who tweet, you can follow Ryan on Twitter for immediate baby and Ubercart release announcements.)
