Hi everyone,

biblatex v3.17 and Biber v2.17 are currently being made ready for release

The releases include a number of smaller changes, the most interesting
additions for end users are probably the Romanian
(https://github.com/plk/biblatex/issues/1083) and Marathi
(https://github.com/plk/biblatex/pull/1060) localisations. Another
localisation-related feature is the introduction of bibstring sets
(https://github.com/plk/biblatex/pull/1028,
https://github.com/plk/biblatex/issues/899,
https://github.com/plk/biblatex/issues/555) which allow additional
formatting to apply to certain sets of strings in a certain language
(this can be used to italicise Latin terms in French, for example).

Possibly critical changes include
* changes to @xdata list inheritance
<https://github.com/plk/biber/issues/387>
* removal of list support for the first mandatory argument of
\DeclareDelimFormat <https://github.com/plk/biblatex/pull/1161>
* changes to the code written to auxiliary files
<https://github.com/plk/biblatex/issues/1116>
* generalisation of season to yeardivision
<https://github.com/plk/biblatex/issues/1127>

As always Changes of a technical nature can be found in CHANGES.md
<https://github.com/plk/biblatex/blob/master/doc/latex/biblatex/CHANGES.md>,
higher-level changes in the changelog section at the end of the PDF
documentation The complete set of changes from 3.16 can be found at
<https://github.com/plk/biblatex/compare/v3.16...v3.17?diff=split&w=1>.
A list of style-related changes that may be easier to digest is at
<https://github.com/plk/biblatex/wiki/Changes-to-the-standard-styles>
(lower-level code changes that may also affect [style] output are not
listed there).

The tentative release versions are already available on SourceForge
(<https://sourceforge.net/projects/biblatex/files/biblatex-3.17/> and
<https://sourceforge.net/projects/biblatex-biber/files/biblatex-biber/current/>),
but only the CTAN release should be seen as the official version.

Testing would be appreciated. Urgent bugs can (hopefully) be fixed
before the release.

Any bugs or complaints with the new version of biblatex can be
registered at <https://github.com/plk/biblatex/issues>.