communication re: 4.8.1

[Jack]

I see that version 4.8.1 has been released.  The way I discovered this  
is that there was a new bug just submitted against that version.   
That's not the right way for a member of the team to get this  
information.  An announcement to this list (preferably even before the  
release) would be appropriate.  A note on the home page might also be a  
good idea.

In this case, I don't know of any reasons that the release should not  
have happened, and I know we have been waiting for a long time for  
this.  It would still be nice for the core team to know about it before  
bugs get filed.

Final question - when did we start releasing files compressed with  
7zip, rather than gzip or xz?