Eli Zarestskii has announced that barring any difficulties coming to
light, the Emacs 26.1 RC1 should be released next week. Zarestskii
expects that that will be followed in short order by the release of
Emacs 26.1 itself.
Relative newcomers to Emacs will see this as simply the usual yearly
release that has become standard for software in our industry. Those
of us who have been around a bit longer know that it wasn’t always
this way for Emacs. Major releases could be years apart and came when
they came. Thanks to recent maintainers—especially John and Eli—we now
have a more predictable (and frequent) release schedule.
It’s good to remember that this is a lot of hard work and it’s all
done by volunteers. Guys like John, Eli, and the other contributors
have families and real jobs that need attending to but still make time
to keep the Emacs project going and flourishing. We all owe them a lot
of thanks.