We gave up on betas a few years back, jumping to rcs. But this is good too!

I opted for a beta since some issues are not solved, and as you mentioned we still may add some features. But the main reason, is that I didn't want my first release to be an RC. This is partly beta because I'm still learning the steps and didn't want to accidentally release something which people may rely on while there's a chance that they shouldn't ;)

I can remove the beta tag and replace it with an rc1 if you prefer.

yeah someone might ask "what's the difference between an rc and a beta". So I'm +0.5 for rc

This now passes the CI and has 0.22rc1 as the version tag.

If I understand correctly, this PR needs to be merged so that the wheels are uploaded to wheels.scipy.org, so that I can continue with the release?

Do we want to add Python 3.8 wheels as well for the rc #34? As far as I understood tests were passing locally, so it's mostly about adding the corresponding CI entries in this repo I think.

Do we need it for the RC? I rather get the RC out, then add the few things which we need to add for the release.

The next one can be an RC2 or a release. I'm not sure if the preconditioning needs to be in an RC first, but I'm happy to do an RC2 with that and some other fixes we have in the backlog before the release if that's what you think is appropriate.

Let's merge this and get it onto wheels.scipy.

But we've also made a few changes since this was tagged, so it would be good practice to then make another RC afterwards