First alpha release of OCaml 5.2.0

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, | 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`.