I was planning on working on the 1.18 release last week, however most of my time was absorbed with Contest related work, meaning this didn't happen.
As of writing this email, there are 27 outstanding revisions tagged as 1.18 [1]. 26 are new, one is fixme. All revisons don't have to be merged to the REL1_18 branch at this point. Any major bugs that have been in fixed (that are applicable in 1.18) should be backported if they haven't been already. Helps limit the number of duplicate bug reports we may get.
On the bug front, there are numerous outstanding bugs, not all of these need to be fixed for 1.18 [2][3]. Please feel free to remove them from being tarball blockers
The intention is to push a beta out this week (today? maybe.. Certainly by the end of the week)
Certainly, if anyone knows of anything that really "needs" to be in the beta, please let me know ASAP.
Sam
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/tag/1.18
[2] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28425 - Tarball bugs
[3] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29876 - WMF Deployment related bugs