The endgame of a major software release is always an exciting time. Even when you build some slack into the schedule for the inevitable surprises, Murphy often strikes in brand new ways that manage to absorb that slack, and sometimes more.

So it is with Mustang Java SE 6.

Since the previous schedule adjustment, which Ray Gans described back in January, we’ve been working toward a final release date in late October. Following the second beta release in June, the code freeze for the release candidate was to have been at build 96 a few weeks ago.

Unfortunately about fifty showstopper bugs remained after build 96, and the incoming bug rate is a bit higher than we’d like, so the freeze date was moved out two weeks to build 98 (last Friday) and two additional weeks of testing were added. Nobody likes schedule slips, but shipping a high-quality release is more important than hitting a particular date. (In a future entry I’ll talk more about what constitutes a “showstopper.”)

With these changes the release candidate will now ship at the end of October and the final release will ship in the first week of December. (It won’t be in the last week of November due to the Thanksgiving holiday here in the U.S.) We’re also continuing to work with our PC OEM partners to ensure that the Java SE 6 JRE will be included on new PCs at the time of the Windows Vista launch.

For those interested in the details, here are the showstoppers fixed in build 97:

Build 98 contains fixes for these bugs: