[Python-Dev] pre-announce: Python 2.4a1 is about a month away

[Jeremy Hylton]

On Mon, 2004-05-31 at 11:39, Anthony Baxter wrote:
>      This is a pre-announcement that the first alpha of Python 2.4
>      is about a month away. The purpose of this notice is to give
>      people a heads up - if you have a bug that you want to see
>      fixed for 2.4, start looking at it now.

I just wanted to note for the record that the ast-branch did not get
merged by the beginning of May and won't be included in Python 2.4.  (At
PyCon, we agreed to finish it by then or hold off.)

The ast-branch is actually in quite good shape, but I didn't have time
to finish it before starting my new job.  It handles every major source
construct correctly; there are a few corner cases (in exec for example)
that are off and there are a number of error handling / memory
management issues to sort out.

It's far enough along that development is fairly comfortable on the
branch.  setup.py compiles and executes correctly as do almost all of
the regression tests.

I think the most likely next step is to merge the head to the branch so
that it keeps up with the evolution of the language.  Merging changes
from the head will identify changes that the compiler is expected to
handle.  I don't know when that will happen -- perhaps early fall if
it's left to me.

Jeremy