Hi,
I agree with Alex about postponing to post-SimRel (early January realistically), it's usually better to not tie Tycho to SimRel and to release shortly after it. The benefits are
* We can include new features of ECJ (eg support for new Java versions)
* It's less stress around SimRel deadline, Alex and I already deal with a bunch of project inclusion in SimRel and this is taking us a lot of attention and time around the deadlines; we basically don't have resources to add Tycho to the list of project to stress about before SimRel
Also, releasing Tycho just before SimRel is not that profitable as projects that are part of SimRel are not very likely to change their build just before SimRel: they're more in a stabilization phase where adopting new build stuff doesn't really fit.
For the specific case of new Maven artifact support, it's actually a good thing that m2e gets released first. Curious people will be told to try Tycho snapshots until we release it; and will maybe report bugs about it, so that it gives a bit more chance for next Tycho release to be really covering this story perfectly.
If you're interested about doing the release work for Tycho soon, please open a ticket to Sonatype OSSRH repository to register yourself as an admin of the Tycho Nexus repo those, which we use for staging/promoting releases.
Cheers,
