What is the problem this feature will solve?

Numpy 2.0 is a sufficiently breaking change that it feels like trying to support it in a bugfix release in 6.0 is not really sensible any more: some things are just going to break and that is unexpected for a bugfix release.

But it would be very good to have an official astropy release that does work with numpy 2.0. Hence, @taldcroft and I wondered whether it might make sense to aim for a somewhat earlier than usual 6.1. It is not completely clear how much earlier, but the beta version of numpy 2.0 has been released and the expectation is that the final version will be about a month from now. Does this make sense?

My own feeling is that 6.1 in itself is looking like a rather minor release, with not too much that is new (which is not illogical, since bigger things have to wait for 7.0 anyway). So, from that respect, perhaps it is not so crazy to do feature-freeze in about a week?

Alternative

As noted by @pllim below, we can just add a big fat warning in 6.0.1 that the numpy 2.0 changes are sufficiently large that we cannot guarantee that astropy will run the same way with numpy 2.0 as it did with 1.x in all cases.

The obvious advantage is that in that case we can just stick to our own schedule.

The disadvantage is that people may not read very carefully and those just trying to use the latest versions of everything may get hurt.