I've been *so* keen every day for more than a week now to release 1.7 THAT VERY MORNING, but every day we just keep finding more and more bugs to fix.
Eloy and I just bumped the version number to 1.7 Beta 2, because it feels like we have reached a sort of plateau now.
I would like to have a final release by Tuesday 7th at the very latest.
In the meantime, could we really have some concentrated testing and particularly patches from developers for existing bugs in 1.7? If you don't have access to CVS just post them to the tracker as attachments. Make sure you mark new bugs with "Affects versions" as 1.7 so it gets on the above list.
The worst area currently is the AJAX course formats, which are not near production quality at the moment (here is the AJAX bug list). At the moment we have 1.7 set with AJAX off by default (look under Admin/Miscellaneous/Experimental) and the feature deferred, but wouldn't it be good to have it working in 1.7? The two developers who know anything about it are not available right now (original author was a Google SOC student and Vy is now on holiday), so your help would really be appreciated solving remaining issues.
The other big areas are of course the Roles and the new database support. Please test thoroughly on real data (eg copies of production sites), trying different combinations and so on, to see if things work as expected. If you're game, you could even upgrade your production site already to get more realistic feedback (Moodle.org has been running 1.7 for a couple of weeks, for example).
Lastly, even if you're not a developer, you can help with testing resolved bugs to confirm those things are fixed.