Happy mid-winter (northern hemisphere) or -summer (southern)!

The time has come to finish feature development for Python 3.7. As previously announced, this coming Monday marks the end of the alpha phase of the release cycle and the beginning of the beta phase. Up through the alpha phase, there has been unrestricted feature development phase; that ends as of beta 1. All feature code for 3.7.0 must be checked in by the b1 cutoff on end-of-day Monday (unless you have contacted me and we have agreed on an extension).

As was done during the 3.6 release cycle, we will create the 3.7 branch at b1 time. During the beta phase, the emphasis is on fixes for new features, fixes for all categories of bugs and regressions, and documentation fixes/updates. I will send out specific information for core committers next week after the creation of the b1 tag and the 3.7 branch.

Beta releases are intended to give the wider community the opportunity to test new features and bug fixes and to prepare their projects to support the new feature release. We strongly encourage maintainers of third-party Python projects to test with 3.7 during the beta phase and report issues found to bugs.python.org as soon as possible. While the release will be feature complete entering the beta phase, it is possible that features may be modified or, in rare cases, deleted up until the start of the release candidate phase. Our goal is have no changes after rc1. To achieve that, it will be extremely important to get as much exposure for 3.7 as possible during the beta phase.

Also, during the 3.6.0 release cycle, the question of ABI stability during the final (e.g. beta and release candidate) phases of the release came up. Last-minute changes put a burden on our and our downstream users testing efforts and adds risk to the release.
Therefore, as was proposed then, we will strive to have no ABI changes after beta 3. More details forthcoming.

To recap:

2018-01-29 ~23:59 Anywhere on Earth (UTC-12:00): code snapshot for 3.7.0 beta 1 (feature code freeze, no new features)

2019-01-30: 3.7 branch opens for 3.7.0 feature development continues on master branch, now for 3.8.0

2018-01-30 to 2018-05-21: 3.7.0 beta phase (bug, regression, and doc fixes, no new features)

2018-03-26: 3.7.0 beta 3 (3.7.0 ABI freeze)

2018-05-21: 3.7.0 release candidate 1 (3.7.0 code freeze)

2018-06-15: 3.7.0 release (3.7.0rc1 plus, if necessary, any dire emergency fixes)

~2019-12 tentative (3.7.0 release + 18 months): 3.8.0 release (details TBD)

Thank you all for your great efforts so far on 3.7; it should be another great release!

--Ned

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0537/

-- Ned Deily nad@python.org -- []