Plans for Octave 6.1 release

[Rik]

All,

We are trying to get in the habit of making more frequent releases of
Octave, at least yearly.  Traditionally the release is in late December or
early January.  I have worked as the release manager for the last four
releases, but don't have time to reprise that role this year.

The first question is whether there is someone on the Maintainer's list who
does have the time and inclination to be the manager this year?

The checklist of instructions is at etc/RELEASE.CHECKLIST and the
accompanying bug fix template is at etc/RELEASE.BUG_FIX_LIST. 
Traditionally I have placed these as pages on the Octave Wiki at
https://wiki.octave.org/Category:Development so that everyone could see the
status, and make changes without requiring excessive permissions.  I have
started things off by performing action item #1 : updating gnulib repo.

If no one has enough time to be manager then we will fall back to doing a
point release in January with the expectation that it will require a minor
release shortly thereafter because there has been less checking.  This
would be in keeping with modern practice which is to release every six
weeks and rely on users for bug testing.  The Octave code base, even on the
development branch, always compiles and almost always passes 'make check'
so this is acceptable.

--Rik