Hi everyone,

This is the last friendly reminder from the release management team that Python 3.10 feature freeze is a week away (Monday, 3 May 2021).

Some important things to have in mind:

• We have some release blockers that must be resolved before the release is done:

https://bugs.python.org/issue43908 https://bugs.python.org/issue43933 https://bugs.python.org/issue43916

If you want to help making sure that the release is on time, help us resolving those blockers. You can also search the issues in https://bugs.python.org/issue?@template=search&status=1 with the "release-blocker" priority.

• Please, don't wait until the last moment (Sunday) to merge PRs into master. This is because if many changes accumulate into a time window and problems are detected, is much more difficult to locate the problematic changes among the rest. If there are any problems with your commits, you also would have the risk of having your changes reverted to unblock the release without any time window to merge them again before feature freeze.

Please, also be aware of the following:

• No new features or improvements should be merged after the feature freeze. From the devguide (https://devguide.python.org/devcycle/#beta) :

After a first beta release is published, no new features are accepted. Only bug fixes and improvements to documentation and tests can now be committed. This is when core developers should concentrate on the task of fixing regressions and other new issues filed by users who have downloaded the alpha and beta releases. Being in beta can be viewed much like being in RC but without the extra overhead of needing commit reviews.

• If your change involves some platform-specific behaviour or has a non-trivial amount of C code, make sure you run the buildbots in your Pull Request by using the "test-with-buildbots" label ( https://discuss.python.org/t/now-you-can-test-a-pr-with-the-buildbots-before... ). Alternatively you could check the buildbots post-merge in the buildbot server: https://buildbot.python.org/all/#/builders?tags=%2B3.x&tags=%2Bstable This is very important because if problems are detected at the time of the release, the release management team may have to revert the changes and therefore those will not be included in Python 3.10.

• The master branch will be renamed to main (check our previous communication about how this will be done and how you should proceed https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/thread/QWW7KGBW5... )

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact me as soon as possible.

Regards from sunny London, Pablo Galindo Salgado