The first Drupal 7 alpha release was released in December 2009. [Drupal 7.0 Alpha 2 released recently got released](
http://drupal.org/drupal-7.0-alpha2). Once Drupalistas are able to upgrade their Drupal 6 installation to Drupal 7 successfully the community is switching to Beta releases, but at the moment [there are a number of open issues regarding the upgrade that must be fixed first](http://drupal.org/project/issues/search/drupal?status[]=Open&issue_tags=D7+upgrade+path). Then, after all the [critical bugs](http://drupal.org/project/issues/search/drupal?version[0]=156281&status[0]=1&status[1]=8&status[2]=13&status[3]=14&priorities[0]=1&categories[0]=bug&categories[1]=task) are fixed the first release candidate will be released. According to the creator of Drupal Dries Buytaert [there are currently about 150 remaining bugs that need to be fixed](
http://buytaert.net/drupal-7-status-update-and-release-plan).
There is still more than one month left before the [April 19 DrupalCon San Francisco](
http://sf2010.drupal.org/), and Dries is hoping that a first Release Candidate can be released for the conference however he notes that these bugs are hard to fix because only few programmers from the Drupal community have the required expertise to solve them. He also urged the community to "encourage and mentor new people to help fix some of these difficult bugs" in order for Drupal to be released on the second quarter of 2009.
Should a release candidate not be released for the DrupalCon, I am pretty hopeful that during the coding sprint after the conference we can reach the release candidate status.
