There's a bunch of ongoing work fixing Tcl/Tk problems. macOS Monterey got released with a new incompatible Tcl/Tk version, some fixes were required for tkinter compatibility. Details in https://bugs.python.org/issue44828. This is now a fixed issue (thanks, Ned!) but we're going through some more ttk fixes discovered in failing buildbots, which were sadly unrelated to the Tcl/Tk version bump. In particular, there's a ttk refleak that was discovered by the Windows 8.1 refleak buildbot which turned out to be a widespread issue (other refleak buildbots were simply skipping GUI tests). Example failure: https://buildbot.python.org/all/#/builders/6/builds/168

I'm fixing the macOS ttk test failures and the refleak now to unblock the 3.9.8 release. I should be done with this tomorrow. We'll go ahead with the release then. Pablo decided to wait for me with 3.11a2 since the problems are fixing are also happening in `main` (and 3.10).

We'll keep you posted, cheers!

Łukasz Langa

CPython Developer in Residence

Python Software Foundation