Towards GAP 4.16.0

[fingolfin]

I'd like to prepare things for the GAP 4.16.0 release during the GAP Days in Porto next week, and then have the full release not so long after.

Stuff to do:

• announce this on the GAP mailing list (today) to giver porters and packagers a warning
• tag an alpha version (maybe also today)
• document the process of making/tagging alpha/beta releases, say in dev/releases/README.md
• update/release certain packages
  • forms
  • recog
  • utils
  • ...
• import some new packages into the distro, if possible
  • ClassicalMaximal??
  • LocalNR
  • ModularGroup
  • Origami
  • ...
• merge some PRs, fix some issues, namely...
  • ...
• create additional beta releases as needed
• work on release notes
• create a stable-4.16 branch (end of next week?)
• have the actual release in mid-may

Anything I forgot? Then please leave a comment below, or just edit the list above directly.

[james-d-mitchell]

I took the liberty to correct the title, unless something very weird is happening with GAP version numbers, that I'm not aware of :~|

[cdwensley]

Utils-0.94 will be released this weekend with the new generalized straight line programs from @ThomasBreuer

[fingolfin]

One of the things to be done is to generate the release notes:

• run cd dev/releases && ./release_notes.py 4.16.0
• this generates two files, unsorted_PRs_4.16.0.md and releasenotes_4.16.0.md
• unsorted_PRs_4.16.0.md ideally would be empty but probably isn't; the listed PRs are probably missing labels
• in fact I am sure it will list dependabot PR like build(deps): bump actions/upload-pages-artifact from 4 to 5 #6336
  • to solve this, we should teach the script to ignore these PRs (based on the two labels they automatically have and/or the "author")
• for other issue, we can manually add labels
• repeat
• once that list is clear, inspect releasenotes_4.16.0.md: some issue title may require tweaking (typo fixes, align them with others, clarify, etc.)