It's been nearly 20 months since the last major release of Python (2.4), and 5 months since the first alpha release of this cycle, so I'm absolutely thrilled to be able to say: On behalf of the Python development team and the Python community, I'm happy to announce the FINAL release of Python 2.5. This is a *production* release of Python 2.5. Yes, that's right, it's finally here. Python 2.5 is probably the most significant new release of Python since 2.2, way back in the dark ages of 2001. There's been a wide variety of changes and additions, both user-visible and underneath the hood. In addition, we've switched to SVN for development and now use Buildbot to do continuous testing of the Python codebase. Much more information (as well as source distributions and Windows and Universal Mac OSX installers) are available from the 2.5 website: http://www.python.org/2.5/ The new features in Python 2.5 are described in Andrew Kuchling's What's New In Python 2.5. It's available from the 2.5 web page. Amongst the new features of Python 2.5 are conditional expressions, the with statement, the merge of try/except and try/finally into try/except/finally, enhancements to generators to produce coroutine functionality, and a brand new AST-based compiler implementation underneath the hood. There's a variety of smaller new features as well. New to the standard library are hashlib, ElementTree, sqlite3, wsgiref, uuid and ctypes. As well, a new higher-performance profiling module (cProfile) was added. Extra-special thanks on behalf of the entire Python community should go out to Neal Norwitz, who's done absolutely sterling work in shepherding Python 2.5 through to it's final release. Enjoy this new release, (and Woo-HOO! It's done!) Anthony Anthony Baxter anthony@python.org Python Release Manager (on behalf of the entire python-dev team)