As I recall the biggest issue was the absence of unit tests. Sean did
not want to release the package as such because there could be strange
behaviours.
Yes, unit tests were the biggest missing piece that held us back for
almost 2 years. The code is somewhat fragile.
We also didn't have anyone on the team who was intimate with foreign
character sets, which is why most of the non-US i18n problems were never
fixed, even though many of them had/have patches in the bugs DB.
Sean is correct. Most of the bugs have been fixed in CVS, but they've only been tested with default character sets. Especially results with multibyte charsets are greatly undefined.
I could doo it the old way, roll several alpha/beta/RC's, and wait for new bugs to flow in, and go from there, but las that is no replacement for unit-tests.
Cipriano Groenendal