Even though we have several issues not fully resolve in 8.6 and the embedded kit is slightly broken, I'd still like to proceed with alpha1 either later today or tomorrow. Is there anything that should hold this up? In general we'll be a little light on 8.6 features as we continue to work on 8.4.x issues, but we have added OSGI bundles, Cassandra connectivity via a contribution, and a base implementation of conformed tables, so this does seem to warrant an initial release. Steve