Hi all, We are pleased to announce the issue of the first release candidate for 3.8.0. Please test widely so that we may correct any bugs before the final release. Pre-built wheels are available for most major platforms, and can be installed using `pip install matplotlib==3.8.0rc1`. Other packages may also be available already; please check with your preferred source. This release introduces provisional support for type hints of most public APIs. Please test typing support with downstream projects. The 3.8.0 release candidate represents the work of 140 authors over 500 pull requests, and we thank them for their contributions. For further details, please see the release notes: https://matplotlib.org/3.8.0/users/next_api_changes.html and the milestone on GitHub: https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/milestone/77 Note, the release notes have not yet been curated, and may be incomplete. For packagers, this release contains some changes to dependencies: * python>=3.9 is now required. * kiwisolver>=1.3.1 is now required. * Pillow>= 8.0 is now required. * Support for Qt<5.12 has been dropped. * NumPy 1.21 is now required. * Tk>=8.5 is now required if Tk is provided. This release tag is signed by my GPG key. The fingerprint is: EB83 2218 7FD4 5119 2E43 0A72 79B3 FEC4 56F1 2599 and it is also used to sign this message. Note that PyPI no longer supports GPG signing of uploaded files, so the sdist is no longer signed. -- Kyle Sunden Matplotlib RSE