Today, Yusuke Endoh posted to the ruby-core mailing list noting that matz has admitted him as a Ruby 2.0 "release manager" and as part of his work, he has come up with a tentative schedule for Ruby 2.0's release. You can read the full post here.

I've been admitted as a 2.0 release manager by matz. I'll do my
best. As my first work, I'd like to announce a rough plan for 2.0
release. Anyone who is interested in 2.0, especially who is thinking
about feature proposal, should check it out.

Yusuke Endoh

The short version of the timeline?

• August 2012: 'Big feature' freeze. Any proposals and specs for 'major features' should be wrapped up for late August 2012 otherwise they will be deferred.
• October 2012: Feature freeze. A more conventional feature freeze.
• February 2013: 2.0 Release. The final version of 2.0 would, hopefully, be released.

A release in February 2013 would have historical significance by being the 20th anniversary of Ruby's creation. Note that Yusuke corrected the date to February 24, 2013 in a later posting.

Another note, confirming what Yugui had already said, is that Ruby 2.0 is to be "100% compatible" with Ruby 1.9.3.

If you want to learn more about Ruby 2.0, I recommend Ruby Inside's last post, Ruby 2.0 Implementation Work Begins: What is Ruby 2.0 and What’s New? where I summarized the anticipated new features in Ruby 2.0.

Thanks to Ruby guru Steve Klabnik for the heads up on this news. Follow him on Twitter, it's worth it.