[ANN] Flint 2.9 beta release (testing required)

[Bill Hart]

Hi all,

We have finalised the new flint-2.9 release up to the point of beta
testing [1], and so now we value your help testing as usual. There are
many new features, speedups and bugfixes which you can find in the
NEWS file.

There are some changes internal to the build system and there are some
changes that make this version not 100% compatible with previous
releases, including:

* reordering the elements in some structs, e.g. fmpq_poly (making it
binary incompatible)
* reordering the arguments to fmpz_divisor_sigma (which will require
changes to code using this function)
* previously deprecated function macros have been removed entirely

Therefore we recommend testing to check for any issues.

Once build reports start coming in and new issues seem to settle down
we'll issue the first release candidate and start working towards the
final release.

Tarballs for 2.9.0-beta1 can be downloaded from GitHub [1].

The trunk branch has now been designated 2.10 provisionally so work
can continue there whilst bugfixes can be backported to the new
flint-2.9 branch as usual. The beta release is tagged as 2.9.0-beta1
within the flint-2.9 branch.

Best Wishes,

Bill.

[1] https://github.com/wbhart/flint2/releases/tag/2.9.0-beta1