Thanks for all of your efforts in getting us to the beta phase of 3.6.0! A large number of important features and a huge amount of code were committed just prior to the b1 feature freeze 3 weekends ago. Not surprisingly, there were a number of bugs found and loose ends identified and, as a result, we've negotiated some extensions to get things in before b2. Under the current schedule there were only 3 weeks between b1 and b2 and then 4 weeks between b2 and b3; that was mainly because we pushed b1 back a week due to the development sprint. I would *really* like for us to get those remaining pieces which were granted extensions into b2 as planned. The longer they are delayed, the more risk it puts on the final steps of the release and it's really important to have a stable base for our testing efforts and those of our downstream users, like third-party developers and distributors. So I think it makes sense to move b2 back a week, giving us all an extra week to get things in for b2. Without changing the date for b3, we will now have 4 weeks between b1 and b2 and 3 weeks between b2 and b3. That gives us about 10 days from now until b2.

It would be great if you can update the issue tracker for any exempted items you have. I will try to followup with you, as needed, over the next few days on their status. Please contact me if you have any questions about the 3.6.0 schedule or about whether a change is appropriate for the beta phase.

To recap, the remaining milestones for 3.6.0:

2016-10-10, 1200 UTC: 3.6.0 beta 2 (was 10-03, remaining exempted features, bug and doc fixes)

2016-10-31: 3.6.0 beta 3 (bug and doc fixes)

2016-11-21: 3.6.0 beta 4 (important bug fixes and doc fixes)

2016-12-05 3.6.0 release candidate 1 (3.6.0 code freeze, critical bug fixes, doc fixes)

2016-12-16 3.6.0 release (3.6.0rc1 plus any necessary emergency fixes)

Thank you all again for your great efforts so far on 3.6!

--Ned

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0494/

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