On behalf of the Python development community and the Python 3.6 release team, I would like to announce the availability of Python 3.6.1rc1. 3.6.1rc1 is the first release candidate for Python 3.6.1, the first maintenance release of Python 3.6. 3.6.0 was released on 2017-12-22 to great interest and now, three months later, we are providing the first set of bugfixes and documentation updates for it. While 3.6.1rc1 is a preview release and, thus, not intended for production environments, we encourage you to explore it and provide feedback via the Python bug tracker (https://bugs.python.org). Although it should be transparent to users of Python, 3.6.1 is the first release after some major changes to our development process so we ask users who build Python from source to be on the lookout for any unexpected differences. 3.6.1 is planned for final release on 2017-03-20 with the next maintenance release expected to follow in about 3 months. Please see "What’s New In Python 3.6" for more information: https://docs.python.org/3.6/whatsnew/3.6.html You can find Python 3.6.1rc1 here: https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-361rc1/ More information about the 3.6 release schedule can be found here: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0494/ -- Ned Deily nad@python.org -- []