This is our first development release on our road towards GNOME 2.18.0, which will be released in March 2007. And I can tell you that GNOME 2.17.1 tastes good. Go download it. Go compile it. Go test it. And go hack on it, document it, translate it, fix it.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2006-October/msg00055.html