On making releases..
Linux 2.6.27 was release today, and it's always a somewhat anti-climactic thing.
The whole point of a release is that it should be something reasonably stable. Stable enough so that people can take that release and use it as a base for the stable tree, which in turn tends to be a base for most Linux distributions. It doesn't have to be perfect (and obviously no release ever is), but it needs to be in reasonable shape.