Two months after the release of OCaml 5.1.1, the set of new features for the
future version 5.2.0 of OCaml has been frozen. We are thus happy to announce the
first alpha release for OCaml 5.2.0.

This alpha version is here to help fellow hackers join us early in our bug
hunting and opam ecosystem fixing fun (see below for the installation
instructions). More information about the whole release process is now available
in the compiler repository at https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/blob/trunk/release-info/introduction.md,

and we will try to propagate this information to ocaml.org shortly.


The progresses on stabilising the ecosystem are tracked on the opam readiness
for 5.2.0 meta-issue at https://github.com/ocaml/opam-repository/issues/25182.

The full release is expected around April.

If you find any bugs, please report them on OCaml's issue
tracker (https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/issues).

If you are interested in the ongoing list of new features and bug fixes, the
updated change log for OCaml 5.2.0 is available on
GitHub at https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/blob/5.2/Changes.

Installation Instructions
-------------------------------

The base compiler can be installed as an opam switch with the following commands
on opam 2.1 and later:

     opam update
     opam switch create 5.2.0~alpha1

For previous version of opam, the switch creation command line is slightly more
verbose:

    opam update
    opam switch create 5.2.0~alpha1 --repositories=default,beta=git+https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-beta-repository.git

The source code for the alpha is also available at these addresses:

* GitHub: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/archive/5.2.0-alpha1.tar.gz
* OCaml archives at Inria: https://caml.inria.fr/pub/distrib/ocaml-5.2/ocaml-5.2.0~alpha1.tar.gz

Fine-Tuned Compiler Configuration
-----------------------------------------------

If you want to tweak the configuration of the compiler, you can switch to the
option variant with:


    opam update
    opam switch create <switch_name> ocaml-variants.5.2.0~alpha1+options <option_list>

where `option_list` is a space separated list of `ocaml-option-*` packages. For
instance, for a flambda and no-flat-float-array switch:

    opam switch create 5.2.0~alpha1+flambda+nffa ocaml-variants.5.2.0~alpha1+options ocaml-option-flambda ocaml-option-no-flat-float-array

The command line above is slightly more complicated for opam version anterior to
2.1:

    opam update
    opam switch create <switch_name> --packages=ocaml-variants.5.2.0~alpha1+options,<option_list> --repositories=default,beta=git+https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-beta-repository.git

In both cases, all available options can be listed with `opam search ocaml-option`.