Getting ready for release v3.0.0-beta.2

Author: FrancescAlted

ANNOUNCE.rst

@@ -1,10 +1,12 @@
-Announcing Python-Blosc2 3.0.0-beta.1
+Announcing Python-Blosc2 3.0.0-beta.2
 =====================================
 
-The Blosc development team is pleased to announce the first beta release of
-Python-Blosc2 3.0.0.  We have been working hard to provide a new evaluation
-engine (based on numexpr) for NDArray instances, and we would like to get
-feedback from the community before the final release.
+The Blosc development team is pleased to announce the second beta release of
+Python-Blosc2 3.0.0.  Here, we have fine tuned the performance of the new
+evaluation engine, and extended it to operate with other instances than NDArray,
+like the `C2Array` class and the new one `Proxy` (access to remote data with caching).
+Documentation has been improved and we have added more examples and tutorials.
+As always, we would like to get feedback from the community before the final release.
 
 Now, you can evaluate expressions like `a + sin(b) + 1` where `a` and `b`
 are NDArray instances.  This is a powerful feature that allows for

RELEASE_NOTES.md

@@ -2,7 +2,24 @@
 
 ## Changes from 3.0.0-beta.1 to 3.0.0-beta.2
 
-XXX version-specific blurb XXX
+* Revamped documentation.  Now, the documentation is more complete and has a better structure. See [here](https://www.blosc.org/python-blosc2/index.html).  Thanks to Oumaima Ech Chdig (@omaech), our newcomer to the Blosc team.  Also, thanks to NumFOCUS for the support in this task.
+
+* New `Proxy` class to access other arrays, while providing caching. This is useful for example when you have a big array, and you want to access a small part of it, but you want to cache the accessed data for later use.  See [its doc](https://www.blosc.org/python-blosc2/reference/proxy.html).
+
+* Lazy expressions can accept proxies as operands. 
+
+* Read-ahead support for reading super-chunks from disk.  This allows for overlapping reads and computations, which can be a big performance boost for some workloads.
+
+* New BLOSC_LOW_MEM envar for keeping memory under a minimum while evaluating expressions.  This makes it possible to evaluate expressions on very large arrays, even if the memory is limited (at the expense of performance).
+
+* Fine tune block sizes for the internal compute engine.
+
+* Better CPU cache size guessing for linux and macOS.
+
+* Build tooling has been modernized and now uses `pyproject.toml` and `scikit-build-core` for managing dependencies and building the package.  Thanks to @LecrisUT for the excellent guidance in this area.
+
+* Many code cleanup and syntax improvements in code.  Thanks to @DimitriPapadopoulos.
+
 
 ## Changes from 2.6.2 to 3.0.0-beta.1
 

RELEASING.rst

@@ -11,18 +11,18 @@ Preliminaries
 * Make sure that the c-blosc2 submodule is updated to the latest version (or a specific
   version that will be documented in the ``RELEASE_NOTES.md``)::
 
-    cd blosc2/c-blosc2
+    cd c-blosc2
     git pull
     git checkout <desired tag>
     cd ../..
-    git commit -m "Update C-Blosc2 sources to <desired tag>" blosc2/c-blosc2
+    git commit -m "Update C-Blosc2 sources to <desired tag>" c-blosc2
     git push
 
 * Make sure that the current main branch is passing the tests in continuous integration.
 
 * Build the package and make sure that::
 
-    PYTHONPATH=. python -c "import blosc2; blosc2.print_versions()"
+    python -c "import blosc2; blosc2.print_versions()"
 
   is printing the correct versions.