Short and sweet: thanks to a *lot* of work by a lot of people, we appear to be about ready to finally tag and manufacture the 3.7.0 release candidate!
At the moment, we have no "release blocker" or "deferred blocker" issues open for 3.7 - a first! We also now have 21 out of 22 3.7 "production" buildbots consistently green or occasionally pink (meaning successful test retry) - also quite an accomplishment. (Only the 3.7 AIX PPC64 buildbot remains red but, since we really only support AIX on a "best effort" basis, we are not going to further delay 3.7.0 for it.) We have also had to make some tough decisions and defer some features to 3.8 and a few more complex bug resolutions to 2.7.1 or later. And releasing the "bonus beta", 3.7.0b5, resulted in some good feedback and squashing a few more issues.
As you may recall, the most recently updated schedule calls for both 3.7.0rc1 and 3.6.6rc1 to be produced today, 2018-06-11, with the finals coming about two weeks later on 2018-06-27. I plan to start on 3.6.6rc1 in about 12 hours (around 22:00 UTC) with 3.7.0rc1 to follow soon thereafter. Feel free to use the remaining time to merge any last-minute documentation updates or minor bug fixes - but please do not break anything! When in doubt, ask. (I will be off-line for the next 8 hours or so.)
After 3.7.0rc1 cutoff, new 3.7 merges will appear in 3.7.1, which should appear sometime next month (by the end of 2018-07). Likewise, new 3.6 merges will next appear in 3.6.7rc1, by the end of 2018-09. Please continue to exercise diligence when deciding whether a change is appropriate for 3.7; as a rule of thumb, treat the 3.7 branch as if it were already released and in maintenance mode. Please also pay attention to CI test failures and buildbot test failures and see if you can help resolve them. As always, if you think you may have found a critical problem at any time in either release candidate, please open (or reuse) an issue on bugs.python.org and mark it as "release blocker" priority.
3.7.0: here we come, thanks to you!
--Ned
-- Ned Deily nad@python.org -- []