Python 3.3 is fast approaching its end-of-life date, 2017-09-29. Per our release policy, that date is five years after the initial release of 3.3, 3.3.0 final on 2012-09-29. Note that 3.3 has been in security-fix only mode since the 2014-03-08 release of 3.3.5. It has been a while since we produced a 3.3.x security-fix release and, due to his commitments elsewhere, Georg has agreed for me to lead 3.3 to its well-deserved retirement.
To that end, I would like to schedule its next, and hopefully final, security-fix release to coincide with the already announced 3.4.7 security-fix release. In particular, we'll plan to tag and release 3.3.7rc1 on Monday 2017-07-24 (UTC) and tag and release 3.3.7 final on Monday 2017-08-07. In the coming days, I'll be reviewing the outstanding 3.3 security issues and merging appropriate 3.3 PRs. Some of them have been sitting as patches for a long time so, if you have any such security issues that you think belong in 3.3, it would be very helpful if you would review such patches and turn them into 3.3 PRs.
As a reminder, here are the guidelines from the devguide as to what is appropriate for a security-fix only branch:
"The only changes made to a security branch are those fixing issues exploitable by attackers such as crashes, privilege escalation and, optionally, other issues such as denial of service attacks. Any other changes are not considered a security risk and thus not backported to a security branch. You should also consider fixing hard-failing tests in open security branches since it is important to be able to run the tests successfully before releasing."
Note that documentation changes, other than any that might be related to a security fix, are also out of scope.
Assuming no new security issues arise prior to the EOL date, 3.3.7 will likely be the final release of 3.3. And you really shouldn't be using 3.3 at all at this point; while downstream distributors are, of course, free to provide support of 3.3 to their customers, in a little over two months when EOL is reached python-dev will no longer accept any issues or make any changes available for 3.3. If you are still using 3.3, you really owe it to your applications, to your users, and to yourself to upgrade to a more recent release of Python 3, preferably 3.6! Many, many fixes, new features, and substantial performance improvements await you.
https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0398/ https://devguide.python.org/devcycle/#security-branches
-- Ned Deily nad@python.org -- []