As you've probably seen already, 3.7.4rc2 is now available. We were on target to get 3.7.4 final out last Friday as scheduled but, fortunately for quality, a few last-minute issues, primarily with TLS 1.3 support, were identified shortly before we were about to produce the release. Because the OpenSSL project is helping to push TLS 1.3 with OpenSSL 1.1.1 and is planning to end support of 1.1.0 in a few months which we had been supplying in our Windows and macOS binary installers, an important objective of 3.7.4 is to migrate to 1.1.1. It's no secret that the transition to TLS 1.3 in the industry has not been totally without problems so it's not surprising to find a few in our support of it. Thanks to Christian Heimes for following by on the issues as he wrote about earlier.
We decided that, because there are non-trivial changes since rc1, we really needed to do a second release candidate. But because we are so late with 3.7.4 and because of the press of other committments like EuroPython, we are tryting to stick to a *very* brief exposure period. Assuming nothing shows up by next Monday, we will plan to release then. Any exposure and testing you can arrange for rc2 would be greatly appreciated, particularly testing of TLS 1.3 and secure networking in general. As always, please mark any issues you think may impact the release as a "release blocker" in bugs.python.org. Also, keep merging fixes to the 3.7 branch as warranted; they will end up in 3.7.5, the next maintenance release, unless they are judged to be release blockers in which case we will cherry-pick them into 3.7.4 (although it would be *really* great to not have any of those!).
As always, thanks for all you do to help make Python available to the world!
P.S. Now that we are over this hump, expect to see 3.8.0b2 real soon now.
-- Ned Deily nad@python.org -- []