Hi all,

We are please to announce the first¹ release candidate of the 3.9.0 meso² release.

Pre-built wheels are available for most major platforms, and can be installed using `pip install matplotlib==3.9.0rc2`. Other packages may also be available already; please check with your preferred source.

This release is the work of 170 authors over 393 Pull Requests, fixing 86 Issues. A preliminary set of release notes may be found at

https://matplotlib.org/3.9.0/users/release_notes.html#version-3-9

and the milestone on GitHub:

https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/milestone/78?closed=1

¹ Note, due to technical issues this release candidate is 3.9.0rc2.

² Starting with this release, we have moved to the Effective Versioning scheme: https://jacobtomlinson.dev/effver/

Elliott