Per this request:
While most of the replies on this thread appear to be for newcomers to Scala itself, my suggestion has to do with managing the expectations of those already familiar with Scala.
There is a huge corpus of existing Scala 2 code especially within Enterprise IT departments. With the release of Scala 3, this huge corpus of code is now more rapidly gaining technical debt. For those of us having to maintain, update, and upgrade said Scala 2 codebases, being able to quickly drop in and evaluate where Scala 3’s current releases are which then facilitates our making decisions to begin sooner (rather than later) to explore the conversion and transition to Scala 3.
As such, it would be very helpful if upon each release candidate, a note was added about that specific release’s anticipated timetable. The questions I can imagine being asked by a said explorer are:
- When was this release dropped?
- If there are no showstoppers, when would the release expect to be generally available?
- If a showstopper is found, does the new release candidate restart the +6 week clock?
- How long after general release should one expect to wait for +90% of third party libraries to become available?
It might work more optimally if within the RCx notes, there was a link to an elaboration of the abstract answers to the 4 questions, and provide only concrete answers for questions 1 and 2.
Again, the purpose is to attract the already existing Scala 2 developers to begin exploring their conversions and transitions to Scala 3 as early as possible. The attraction is increased by anticipating and answering their timing questions as early and as clearly as possible. Until timing is clear, what is resolved in the release candidate implicitly remains a lower priority.