Releasing 4.0-alpha2

By writing "one final merge at the end" I do not mean that the changes should be reviewed in one batch: the whole point for my recent restructuring of this branch is to make it possible to review the changes in independent steps. So that does not change much in terms of reviewing, apart from the review of the resolution of merge conflicts.

As I wrote above I'll look into rebasing the entire branch on top of a recent version of master.