I had previously announced tomorrow as the date for the release candidate of our first 3.6 maintenance release. But, with the switchover to the new GitHub-based development process, there are a number of changes needed behind the scenes to our release production process and I think the release team (read "Ned") needs a few more days to get ready to produce the release. So, reluctantly, I'm delaying the cutoff and production of 3.6.1rc1 for 4 days, that is, until Friday 2017-03-03 UTC. As a plus, it gives us all a few more days to tackle the release-blocker, deferred-blocker, and critical issues still open against 3.6 and also to keep working though the new development process. For now, I'm not changing the date for 3.6.1 final (2017-03-13) until we see how rc1 goes. My apologies for the delay! --Ned Begin forwarded message:

From: Ned Deily <nad@python.org> Subject: IMPORTANT: Python 3.6.1 Maintenance Release Release Candidate in 7 days (2017-02-27) Date: February 20, 2017 at 15:12:47 EST To: python-committers <python-committers@python.org> Cc: Python Dev <python-dev@python.org>

It seems like last year already since the release of 3.6.0. I guess that's because it was last year, 2016-12-22 to be exact! Now we're approaching the end of the first quarter and, according to PEP 494, it's time to start producing the first maintenance release for the 3.6 series. The schedule calls for the release candidate to be produced on Monday 2017-02-27 UTC. As was the case with the 3.6.0 release cycle, the plan is for the release candidate to be the same as the final release, that is, no additional changes go in after the release candidate except for any showstopper critical problems that might be discovered with rc1. So please plan to get any security fixes, bug fixes, and documentation changes you think should be in 3.6.1 merged in before 2017-02-27. I will send out another reminder a couple of days before. The 3.6.1 final is planned for two weeks following rc1, that is, on 2017-03-13. I expect the next 3.6 maintenance release (3.6.2) will follow about 3 months later, so most likely in 2017-06 after PyCon US.

3.6.1 will be the first release using our new GitHub-based development process (thanks, Brett and team!). If you are planning to push something for 3.6.1 and haven't yet tried out the new workflow or are not yet familiar with GitHub pull requests, you should probably give yourself some extra time. As always, the Developer's Guide is the primary reference for the development workflow; not surprisingly, with such a major change, there are likely still some parts of the guide that could use further changes and clarifications. You can help by reviewing the devguide's open issues and pull requests in its repository and adding to them as you work through issues. If you have comments on or improvement suggestions for the new workflow, the place to discuss them is on the core-workflow mailing list.

Thanks again for all of your efforts in bringing 3.6.0 into the world and for helping now to make it even better!

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0494/ http://cpython-devguide.readthedocs.io https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/core-workflow

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