On behalf of the Python development team and the Python community, I'm happy to announce the third BETA release of Python 2.5. This is an *beta* release of Python 2.5. As such, it is not suitable for a production environment. It is being released to solicit feedback and hopefully discover bugs, as well as allowing you to determine how changes in 2.5 might impact you. If you find things broken or incorrect, please log a bug on Sourceforge. In particular, note that changes to improve Python's support of 64 bit systems might require authors of C extensions to change their code. More information (as well as source distributions and Windows and Universal Mac OSX installers) are available from the 2.5 website: http://www.python.org/2.5/ There's been over 50 fixes since the second beta. This large number of changes meant we felt more comfortable cutting a third beta release, rather than charging ahead to the release candidate. As of this release, Python 2.5 is now in *feature freeze*. Unless absolutely necessary, no functionality changes will be made between now and the final release of Python 2.5. The plan is that this will be the final beta release (no, really, this time for sure (probably)). We should now move to one or more release candidates, leading to a 2.5 final release early August. PEP 356 includes the schedule and will be updated as the schedule evolves. At this point, any testing you can do would be greatly, greatly appreciated. The new features in Python 2.5 are described in Andrew Kuchling's What's New In Python 2.5. It's available from the 2.5 web page. Amongst the language features added include conditional expressions, the with statement, the merge of try/except and try/finally into try/except/finally, enhancements to generators to produce a coroutine kind of functionality, and a brand new AST-based compiler implementation. New modules added include hashlib, ElementTree, sqlite3, wsgiref and ctypes. In addition, a new profiling module "cProfile" was added. Enjoy this new release, Anthony Anthony Baxter anthony@python.org Python Release Manager (on behalf of the entire python-dev team)