astropy v8.0.0b1 ready for testing

[Thomas Robitaille]

Hi everyone,

A beta release of the core astropy package for the v8.0.0 is now available and ready for testing! I decided to do a beta release before a release candidate since there are extensive changes to some parts of astropy in this release, and calling it a release candidate would be wishful thinking :)

If you are interested in trying it out, you can install this release candidate by doing:

pip install astropy --pre

or

pip install astropy==8.0.0b1

You can find the documentation corresponding to this release at:

https://docs.astropy.org/en/v8.0.x

including the full list of changes for this release:

https://docs.astropy.org/en/v8.0.x/changelog.html

as well as a 'What's new in v8.0?' page:

https://docs.astropy.org/en/v8.0.x/whatsnew/8.0.html

We would appreciate if you could try out this beta release and report back any success or failure via the following wiki page:

https://github.com/astropy/astropy/wiki/v8.0.0-RC-testing

For example, you can try running the test suite as mentioned on the wiki page. In addition, if you maintain any packages that use astropy, please check that your package(s) works well with this version and let us know if there are any issues or whether everything works fine. There is a section to list packages that work/don't work at the bottom of the wiki page. Please also open an issue in the astropy core package issue tracker for any issues you encounter (and open separate issues for each problem you run into).

If you use conda, be sure to either remove the existing conda astropy package or make a new environment before installing the RC. Note that there are no conda packages for the beta release.

Thanks!
Tom (release manager for v8.0.0)