Important information regarding the upcoming v5.2 release

[Thomas Robitaille]

Hi everyone,

This is not just a reminder about the feature freeze date, so please read on!

As you will likely know based on previous emails to this list, we will be transitioning the astropy core Python code to be formatted by Black as part of the v5.2 release cycle. In order to minimize disruption, we should aim to have as many pull requests merged or closed by the end of tomorrow (28th October) as possible - and that includes features, bug fixes, documentation fixes, and so on. So this is a call to anyone who has a PR open to try and make sure this is finalized as soon as possible, and a call to sub-package maintainers to please help push open PRs over the finishing line (including pushing commits to PRs and/or rebasing as needed if the original author is not responsive).

PRs not merged by the end of tomorrow may be challenging to rebase in future, so it's important to make sure PRs opened by people who are not core developers be paid particular attention to so that we aren't asking new contributors to deal with that rebasing.

See the following email for a detailed calendar of the next couple of weeks

https://groups.google.com/g/astropy-dev/c/g1u57uhKdgM

The important points are:

• No PRs adding features should be merged between 28th October and 16th November, regardless of their milestone - this is because there will not be a v5.2.x branch until 16th November.
• No PRs changing any Python code (including bug fixes) should be merged between 2nd November and 16th November unless they touch only sub-packages that have already been formatted using Black.

Please let me know if you have any questions!

Cheers,

Tom

[Thomas Robitaille]

Hi everyone,

The whole of the astropy core package has now been reformatted using
Black. A big thank you to William Jamieson for
opening/updating/rebasing all the PRs relating to this, and thank you
also to everyone who participated in the reviews of those PRs!

I have created the v5.2.x branch and removed the special branch
protection I had added prior to the Black transition, so any
maintainers can once again merge pull requests in the core package.
Note that at this point, we are back to the regular feature freeze
process, which means that only bug fixes/documentation improvements
should be milestoned as v5.2, and any PR milestones as v5.2 should now
include the backport-v5.2.x label. Any PRs adding new features should
be milestoned as v5.3.

Depending how things go, I plan to try and do a first release
candidate either later this week or early next week.

Thanks!
Tom