Barry has been making wonderful progress with Mailman 3.0 and has just announced the second alpha release.
This may leave some of you wondering what's happening with the Mailman 2.x series, so this note is for all interested Mailman users, developers and translators to give an idea of what to expect in Mailman 2.x in the coming months.
Within the next few days, I plan to release Mailman 2.1.12rc1. This release contains several minor bug fixes since 2.1.11 and is updated for compatibility with Python 2.6. It will not work with Python older than 2.4.
In the absence of "show stopping" bugs, the only changes between this and the final 2.1.12 release will be translation updates. I expect to release the final by the end of January.
After January, my focus will be on Mailman 2.2. This branch was originally intended to be an overhaul of Mailman's GUI, but that work is stalled and will be deferred to Mailman 2.3 or 3.0. The focus of Mailman 2.2 will be ongoing maintenance of the 2.x series and several small new features that have not been added in the 2.1 branch because of i18n considerations.
I hope to be able to release a 2.2 beta before the end of March, 2009.