Tuesday, June 30, 2020

Python 3.8.4rc1 is now ready for testing

Python 3.8.4rc1 is the release candidate of the fourth maintenance release of Python 3.8. Go get it here:
https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-384rc1/

Assuming no critical problems are found prior to 2020-07-13, the scheduled release date for 3.8.4, no code changes are planned between this release candidate and the final release.
That being said, please keep in mind that this is a pre-release and as such its main purpose is testing.
Maintenance releases for the 3.8 series will continue at regular bi-monthly intervals, with 3.8.5 planned for mid-September 2020.

What’s new?

The Python 3.8 series is the newest feature release of the Python language, and it contains many new features and optimizations. See the “What’s New in Python 3.8” document for more information about features included in the 3.8 series.

This is the first bugfix release that is considerably smaller than the previous three. There’s 20% less changes at 130 commits than the average of previous three releases. Detailed information about all changes made in version 3.8.4 specifically can be found in its change log.

We hope you enjoy Python 3.8!

Thanks to all of the many volunteers who help make Python Development and these releases possible! Please consider supporting our efforts by volunteering yourself or through organization contributions to the Python Software Foundation.


Your friendly release team,
Ned Deily @nad
Steve Dower @steve.dower
Łukasz Langa @ambv

Sunday, June 28, 2020

Python 3.7.8 and 3.6.11 now available - last 3.7.x bugfix release

Python 3.7.8, the next bugfix release of Python 3.7, is now available. You can find the release files, a link to the changelog, and more information here:
    https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-378/
   
Note that Python 3.8 is now the latest feature release series of Python 3. After two years of quarterly 3.7.x bugfix releases and with the successful release and adoption of Python 3.8 over the last year, 3.7.8 is expected to be the last bugfix release in the 3.7 series. You should consider upgrading to 3.8 as soon as practical. Get the latest release of 3.8.x here.

Following our release support policy, after 3.7.8 we plan to provide security fixes for 3.7 as needed until mid-year 2023, five years after its initial release. More details are available in PEP 537, the Python 3.7 Release Schedule.

In addition to 3.7.8, the lastest security fix rollup for Python 3.6, 3.6.11, is also now available.  You can download its source release here:
    https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3611/

Thanks to all of the many volunteers who help make Python Development and these releases possible!  Please consider supporting our efforts by volunteering yourself or through organization contributions to the Python Software Foundation.

Wednesday, June 17, 2020

Python 3.7.8rc1 and 3.6.11rc1 now available for testing

Python 3.7.8rc1 and 3.6.11rc1 are now available. 3.7.8rc1 is the release preview of the next bugfix release of Python 3.7;  3.6.11rc1 is the release preview of the next security-fix release of Python 3.6. Assuming no critical problems are found prior to 2020-06-27, no code changes are planned between these release candidates and the final releases. These release candidates are intended to give you the opportunity to test the new security and bug fixes in 3.7.8 and security fixes in 3.6.11. While we strive to not introduce any incompatibilities in new bugfix and security releases, we encourage you to test your projects and report issues found to bugs.python.org as soon as possible. Please keep in mind that these are preview releases and, thus, their use is not recommended for production environments.

You can find the release files, a link to their changelogs, and more information here:

Sunday, June 14, 2020

Python 3.9.0b3 is now available for testing


On behalf of the entire Python development community, and the currently serving Python release team in particular, I’m pleased to announce the release of Python 3.9.0b3. Get it here:

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-390b3/


Wait, Beta 3? What happened to Beta 2?

Beta 2? Speak of him no more. We disappeared him. He was a bad release. Truly awful. I get shivers just thinking about it. Never mention that name again in this house.
I mean, long story short, in Beta 2 you couldn’t do urllib.request.urlopen("https://www.python.org").read() because it wouldn’t find root certificates due to a bug. Since this was a problem only apparent on an installed Python, it wasn’t identified by unit tests and was only found by Ned while he was testing his Mac installer. By the time we learned of the severity of the bug I already tagged and published the release on python.org. That’s why we couldn’t just re-do the release under the same version.
Sorry for the trouble. We’re tweaking our release process to catch this problem sooner in future releases. Now, back to regular programming…

This is a beta preview of Python 3.9

Python 3.9 is still in development. This release, 3.9.0b3, is the third of five planned beta release previews.
Beta release previews are intended to give the wider community the opportunity to test new features and bug fixes and to prepare their projects to support the new feature release.

Call to action

We strongly encourage maintainers of third-party Python projects to test with 3.9 during the beta phase and report issues found to the Python bug tracker as soon as possible. While the release is planned to be feature complete entering the beta phase, it is possible that features may be modified or, in rare cases, deleted up until the start of the release candidate phase (2020-08-10). Our goal is have no ABI changes after beta 5 and as few code changes as possible after 3.9.0rc1, the first release candidate. To achieve that, it will be extremely important to get as much exposure for 3.9 as possible during the beta phase.
Please keep in mind that this is a preview release and its use is not recommended for production environments.

Major new features of the 3.9 series, compared to 3.8

Some of the new major new features and changes in Python 3.9 are:
  • PEP 584, Union Operators in dict
  • PEP 585, Type Hinting Generics In Standard Collections
  • PEP 593, Flexible function and variable annotations
  • PEP 602, Python adopts a stable annual release cadence
  • PEP 615, Support for the IANA Time Zone Database in the Standard Library
  • PEP 616, String methods to remove prefixes and suffixes
  • PEP 617, New PEG parser for CPython
  • BPO 38379, garbage collection does not block on resurrected objects;
  • BPO 38692, os.pidfd_open added that allows process management without races and signals;
  • BPO 39926, Unicode support updated to version 13.0.0;
  • BPO 1635741, when Python is initialized multiple times in the same process, it does not leak memory anymore;
  • A number of Python builtins (range, tuple, set, frozenset, list, dict) are now sped up using PEP 590 vectorcall;
  • A number of Python modules (_abc, audioop, _bz2, _codecs, _contextvars, _crypt, _functools, _json, _locale, operator, resource, time, _weakref) now use multiphase initialization as defined by PEP 489;
  • A number of standard library modules (audioop, ast, grp, _hashlib, pwd, _posixsubprocess, random, select, struct, termios, zlib) are now using the stable ABI defined by PEP 384.
  • (Hey, fellow core developer, if a feature you find important is missing from this list, let Łukasz know.)
The next pre-release, the fourth beta release of Python 3.9, will be 3.9.0b4. It is currently scheduled for 2020-06-29.

More resources

Your friendly release team,
   Ned Deily @nad
   Steve Dower @steve.dower
   Łukasz Langa @ambv