We also decided to start early with alpha releases, to enable you to test your extensions, applications and websites with them. The first alpha version will be released on tuesday next week. A lot of code cleanups and refactoring happend already in order to have an easier and better testable codebase. This means that quite some previously deprecated API has been removed. Therefore we recommend to already test your extensions with it. Of course also new features made it into that alpha version, most notably the long awaited File Abstraction Layer (FAL). We think FAL works great already, but there might be some minor issues here and there. We would love to get your feedback especailly on this but also on other features and changes, be it from a user's or a programmer's perspective.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://typo3.org/article/typo3-60-release-timeline/