OK, so we are doing a new base stable release at version 1.18.0
I committed that version number bump to the stable branch so we can
test it and add any tweaks needed. Do we have a definite date for
the formal release?
Presumably we want to do a new unstable release using the same code
at 1.19.0, skipping the 1.17.0 in order to get back to the situation
people seem to expect, where the latest unstable release is the odd
minor version number after the latest stable release? If so, this
could be done by little more than a change to the version number on
trunk.