Re: time to release 0.22.b1 ?

Dear Günter, all,

>  with a long list a fixes, improvements, and additions since
release 0.21.2 (2024-04-23), how about releasing 0.22?

Sounds good! I want to review the situation around type annotations before releasing, and I might revert some of the changes I have made. There are also a few updates to the packaging metadata we can take the opportunity to make before releasing.

> IMO, we should start with a beta release, to give downstream users an easy
> chance to test without breaking installations with `pip` auto-updates.

Sphinx 8.2. (released last week) is fully compatible with Docutils master (although there are some deprecation warnings). I think we can request that other projects test a release candidate, as with previous releases.

I am happy to help with the release (perhaps publishing a release candidate), I think it might be useful to have more people who can do releases, to share the work and remove pressure on individuals. If this would be helpful, please could I be added to the Docutils PyPI project [1]_? My username on PyPI is ``AA-Turner`` [2]_.

.. [1]: https://pypi.org/project/docutils/
.. [2]: https://pypi.org/user/AA-Turner/

I can probably also co-ordinate with the downstream projects, should this be useful.

Best wishes,
Adam