I am happy to announce the second **release candidate** for NetworkX 2.6! This release has a larger than normal number of changes in preparation for the upcoming 3.0 release. The current plan is to release 2.6 soon, 2.7 near the end of summer, and 3.0 near the end of the year. The focus of the 3.0 release is on addressing years of technical debt and making it easier to contribute. The 2.6 release deprecates over 30 functions. It also makes major changes to our default dependencies. We no longer depend on the "decorator" library. More importantly, NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, and Pandas are now default requirements. While we've made these core libraries of the scientific Python ecosystem default dependencies, much of NetworkX still works without these libraries and we expect that to continue. Be assured that we test NetworkX with and without the dependencies, so if you do **not** use functions that depend on external libraries you can install NetworkX using pip with the `--no-deps` flag. This release supports Python 3.7-3.9 and contains many new features. It is the result of almost a year of work with over 300 pull requests by over 80 contributors. If you have code that imports NetworkX, please take some time to check that you are able to update your code to work with the new release. The draft 2.6 release announcement is here: https://networkx.org/documentation/latest/release/release_dev.html Please try out the pre-release and let us know about any problems you find. Since this is a pre-release, pip won't automatically install it. So $ pip install networkx will still install networkx-2.5.1. But $ pip install --pre networkx will install networkx-2.6rc2. If you already have NetworkX installed then you need to do $ pip install --pre --upgrade networkx For more information, please visit our website - http://networkx.org and our gallery of examples - https://networkx.org/documentation/latest/auto_examples/index.html Best regards, Jarrod