The following is meant to be constructive, it is not to blame anybody, but to improve the release process for future releases:
For any software it is important that releases are
- either only made once there are no known regressions
- or if there are known regressions but a new release should/must nevertheless be made, the known regressions are listed in the release announcement together with a workaround and additional info (for example to stay for now with an older version or why a new release was nevertheless done)
Take the case of PackageCompiler. Since Julia 1.11 one cannot use more than one thread. This reduces the compilation speed a lot (for me by about 40%). The problem was already reported and verified in October. But since it was not mentioned in release notes, I run into that. Now I know, but it caused me hours to find out and thus of course also unnecessary frustration. Now I see that Julia 1.11.5 was released and despite this ongoing discussion where the regression was mentioned several times, it is not mentioned in the release notes and a new release was done at all.
Again, things are now as they are, but for Julia 1.11.6, 1.12.x it would be very good, if the release maintainers would adopt their checklist regarding known issues and regressions.
I know that some argument that PackageCompiler is not really part of Julia, but think about average users. They cannot know the internals of the Julia project structure. People like me chose Julia to use all features Julia advertises. And PackageCompiler is in many talks mentioned as one the key features for interoperability with other software.