“No more than two or four weeks”, or was it three or four or two or three?
I’ve seen the live presentation, and well… news are exactly the same as in FOSDEM 2017: RC keeps being a “few weeks away”, as it was in February 2017 
Oh well, I forgot the first point: DigiKey has donated a considerable amount of money to the project (is that disclosed anywhere?), so the RC presumably has to be not too far this year? 
Where did you get the idea that it was close to release last year?
Why do you think digikey sponsoring has anything to do with a release?
The reason we can be optimistic this year is because the feature freeze happend two month ago. So it will not take that much longer till all the major bugs are fixed. (Unless something extremely bad is found)
Because that is what Wayne said last year… 
I remain confident that we will see RC1 sometime in 2018… just add 9 months to whatever Wayne says
Release is probably going to be anything up to 9 months, but a RC1 can happen as soon as JP Charras finishes renaming files. This looks like it might be at a nice round 12,000th commit.
The confirmed critical bugs seem to be gone, but it would be madness to release a RC when you are planning mass renaming and restructuring directories
From Stambaugh’s own words, as already pointed
I’m quite sure DigiKey is a commercial company, being a customer.
I think there’s a good interest (on their side) in seeing KiCAD released for their updated integration of BOM/order management.
You know, the old contract for which “I pay, you do” translated to the idyllic open source world as in “I donate (and I strongly hope you’ll do)”. I beg your pardon for my cynical pragmatism, really 
Well on the mailing list he always stated that he first wants to include the sym lib table stuff and that it is nowhere near finished. (Until he came forward at the end of summer with his merge request)
This IS good news
12100 commits now and the commit rate is increasing, between a continuing file renaming and a lot of work on Eagle import
From https://lists.launchpad.net/kicad-developers/msg34024.html:
“As soon as the few crash bugs are resolved, I will pull the trigger on the stable branch and release rc1.”
BTW, the board editor has finally received a main menu overhaul. The toolbar-only-action problems will mostly be gone, I think, and menu items are grouped (hopefully) more logically. It will take some time to be used to it, but it’s for the better. Try it as soon as you can if you are a nightly build user!
5.0 branch is here! This means 5.0 rc1 will be available soon (just has to be built and packaged)
So like… tonight? That would be cool.
A big change on Ubuntu, but as the footprint libraries are changed, you will need to update fp-lib-table in .config/kicad from /usr/share/kicad/template
Always rename the old file as a fp-lib-table-bak first
The notice about the availability of the RC1 will be on the blog?
Wayne mentioned somewhere on the mailing list that he plans to make a blog entry. Not sure when he will find time for it. (I think he is currently quite busy with getting kicad ready for the final v5 release.)
I’m new to PCB design and I’m about to build a DC-DC converter. So I’m wondering, I have Eagle 6.5 available and KiCad 4.0.7. Now I see that KiCad 5 is about to be released. Which one should I use to get going as fast as possible? Should I even use the KiCad 5 RC? I’m worried that version 4 might be too “dated” already.
Thanks.