Python 2.3a1 released

[Guido van Rossum]

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/)