Use the "pre-release" functionnality of GitHub to notify about a new release

[lecoqlibre]

Concerning releases, in GitHub we have the possibility to define "pre-release", to notify users that the release is not ready for production and may be unstable.

This seems quite well scoped for our PATCH procedure as we could publish some kind of a preview of the real release. It could be better to have this than explaining in the announcement what the future release will look like, right? Also I guess it would ease the process of publishing the real release.

Any comments @RaggedStaff ?

[RaggedStaff]

🤔 Are you proposing we publish the pre-release a set time before a full release as a notification that the full release is coming?

It's not quite what I'd associate with a pre-release candidate (for me that's more for beta testing) but it seems like we could use the functionality to fit our purposes.
Could we automate the move from pre-release to full release, perhaps with GitHub actions?

[lecoqlibre]

Yes like you said, a beta release sends a message like "this need to be tested", so it could be what we are looking for. Checking the "pre-release" option will not change the latest release so there should be no impact on production systems.

Otherwise we could target a commit in the description of the announcement so people could look at the changelog file and see what needs attention. Maybe we could start with this option and see if we get limitations.