Those who fervently watch the jenkinsci-dev@ list, like I do, may have caught Daniel Beck's email today which quietly referenced a significant milestone on the road to 2.0 which has been reached: the first 2.0 release candidate is here!

The release candidate process, in short, is the final stabilization and testing period before the final release of Jenkins 2.0. If you have the cycles to help test, please download the release candidate and give us your feedback as soon as possible!

The release candidate process also means that changes targeting release after 2.0 can start landing in the master branch, laying the groundwork 2.1 and beyond.

Compared to the 2.0 beta release, the first release candidate has a number of fixes for issues discovered in the alpha and beta process. Most notable perhaps is the stabilization of a system property which configuration management tools, like Puppet/Chef/Ansible/etc, can use to suppress the user-friendly Getting Started wizard. Since users of those tools have alternative means of ensuring security and correctness of their Jenkins installations, the out-of-the-box experience can be skipped.

Based on our rough timeline this gives us a couple weeks to test the release candidates and get ready for a big exciting release of 2.0 at the end of April!