Prepare for the tech preview release

[stasm]

At the September 19 meeting, we discussed a number of action items to complete in preparation for the release of the MessageFormat 2.0 tech preview.

Communicate about the release

• [ ] Draft a press release: Press Release Draft - MF 2.0 (currently empty)

Prepare for feedback

• [ ] Update the README to guide feedback-givers
• [ ] Create an issue template for feedback
• [ ] Create a guideline about issues vs. discussions
• [ ] Create a list of follow-up questions to ask after someone reaches out to us with feedback.
• [ ] Start tagging issues with blocker-candidate?

Clean-up the repo & meetings

• [x] Merge develop into main
• [x] Update urls in the ICU implementation (1, 2)
• [ ] Cleanup branches (some delete, some rename, tbd)
• [x] Change the Extended meeting to 1-hour-long weekly touchpoints.

[echeran]

The item above "Update urls in the ICU implementation" has already been cleaned up at the same time the implementation was merged. It was handled in the followup PR https://github.com/unicode-org/icu/pull/2192 .

[stasm]

Re. the clean-up of the branches in the repo: @romulocintra, there are 3 inactive branches related to your PRs: #193, #203, #205. Can we remove these branches (and maybe close the PRs)? Github should keep the data as part of the PRs.

[romulocintra]

Re. the clean-up of the branches in the repo: @romulocintra, there are 3 inactive branches related to your PRs: #193, #203, #205. Can we remove these branches (and maybe close the PRs)? Github should keep the data as part of the PRs.

Deleted

[romulocintra]

@stasm should this one be closed as well https://github.com/unicode-org/message-format-wg/pull/266

[glen-84]

Please consider https://github.com/unicode-org/message-format-wg/discussions/321. While it starts off as a suggestion for an FAQ section, I think that the proposed syntax at the end is much cleaner.

In my opinion, the current syntax is inverted, placing more focus on the control flow than the actual translatable text.

I also don't believe that every message should be wrapped in braces – whitespace control seems like an implementation detail for the storage in use, and I'm always curious to hear about use cases for significant leading or trailing whitespace (if there are any).

[stasm]

The tech preview implementation of the MessageFormat 2 syntax, together with a formatting API, was released in October 2022 as part of ICU 72: com.ibm.icu.message2. See the ICU User Guide for examples and a quickstart guide.