LS, Today we had a MonetDB meeting about the release. We decided to have a release now, but without Pathfinder. For the Pathfinder release with updates, multi-documents and soap the realistic time-frame becomes *september* (well, maybe maybe august), but there will be a feature freeze around SIGMOD (june 25). We anticipate a long testing and debugging stage. Sorry, but this is reality. No SIGMOD release. As MonetDB/SQL and the alpha Monet5 do not want to wait any longer just to roll through the accumulated new features and fixes, there is also an imminent release. As we release always all components to keep compatability and the test web easily manageble in a single Stable an single Current branch, the new release will include the *stable* branch of pathfinder. There will be a (very) small porting effort to make stable-pathfinder work on head-monet. However, one of the tasks ahead for a pathfinder release anyway is bug-fixing. Thus, we can take this opportunity to identify quick-win bugs in pathfinder and release those. We can also look at the bugs fixed in pathfinder in the past period, and ask ourselfves whether rollling them through is useful and little work. I guess the freeze for the direct release is only within days, and I recommend you all not to spend much time on it. At least the new pathfinder will contain the BATuselect fix in the serialization (admittedly not as fast as Jan R.'s current implementation but still better than before). As the experiences with it have been positive, I propose this time to build pathfinder with burkowski enabled. Thus we can point the guy who wants windows with burkowski (and other like him) to the new binary release. Note that the functionality is by default still disabled; you need to set a configuration switch to yes to turn it on. Peter