The announcement is here: Blender 2.78 RC2. Earlier this month I wrote Blender 2.78 Release Candidate is now available. It gives you a bit on what is in this release. We are nearing release of the final 2.78 version.
AvaStar is now on alpha release 2.0-23 for Blender 2.77… If you are confused by the version numbering, so am I. The last version I downloaded was 2.0 Alpha-10. Asking in the AvaStar-Blender group I’m told Matrice said drop the alpha… and that Gaia does the numbering… and that they are just generally inconsistent… I took that as nobody knew.
What they were sure of is: AvaStar 2,0 is still in Alpha. I’m not sure that is so. What I do think is the case is 2.0-23 is not the final release but a beta or RC version. We may find out Thursday at the Bento UG meeting.