I'm happy to announce the successful release of Python 2.3a1 tonight, on Dec 31 (in *some* timezones :-). Go pick it up from its home page: http://www.python.org/2.3/ This is an alpha release: if you have Python code that's important (to you), please test it thoroughly with this release, but don't use the release for production runs. Please report any problems to the SourceForge bug tracker: http://sourceforge.net/bugs/?group_id=5470 What's new? The language isn't changing much this time. Instead, we have lots of new or improved standard library modules: bsddb, bz2, datetime, heapq, logging, optparse, ossaudiodev, random (Mersenne Twister algorithm), sets, socket (added timeouts), textwrap, and zipimport. That's right, you can now import modules from zip files. More elaborate news is on the website: http://www.python.org/2.3/highlights.html (brief) http://www.python.org/doc/2.3a1/whatsnew/ (extensive) http://www.python.org/2.3/NEWS.html (exhausting) --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)