Dear OCaml users,

Nearly two months after the first alpha release, the r= elease of OCaml 5.2.0 is drawing near.

We have thus released a first= beta version of OCaml 5.2.0 to help you update your softwares and librarie= s ahead of the release (see below for the installation instructions).
Compared to the alpha release, this beta contains a majority of runtime s= ystem fixes, and a handful of other fixes across various subsystems.
Overall, the opam ecosystem looks in a good shape for the first beta relea= se.
Most core development tools support OCaml 5.2.0 or have compatibilit= y patches under review (for `odoc` and `ocamlformat`), and you can follow t= he last remaining wrinkles on the
opam readiness for 5.2.0 meta-issue (h= ttps://github.com/ocaml/opam-repository/issues/25182).

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

Currently, the release is planned for the end of = April or the beginning of May.

If you are interested in full list of= features and bug fixes of the new OCaml version, the
updated change log= for OCaml 5.2.0 is available on GitHub (https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/blo= b/5.2/Changes).

Happy hacking,
Florian Angeletti for the O= Caml team.

Installation Instructions

----------= --------------------

The base compil= er can be installed as an opam switch with the following commands
on opa= m 2.1:

opam update
opam swi= tch create 5.2.0~beta1

The source code for the alpha is also available at these addresses:
* GitHub: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/archive/5.2.0-beta1.tar.gz
* = OCaml archives at Inria: https://caml.inria.fr/pub/distrib/ocaml-5.2/ocaml-= 5.2.0~beta1.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~beta1+options <option_li= st>

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

    opam switch create 5.2.0~beta1+flambd= a+nffa ocaml-variants.5.2.0~beta1+options ocaml-option-flambda ocaml-option= -no-flat-float-array

All available options can be listed with `o= pam search ocaml-option`.

Changes since the first alpha

---------------------------------------