RELEASED Python 2.5 (release candidate 2)

[Anthony Baxter]

On behalf of the Python development team and the Python
community, I'm happy to announce the second RELEASE
CANDIDATE of Python 2.5.

After the first release candidate a number of new bugfixes
have been applied to the Python 2.5 code. In the interests
of making 2.5 the best release possible, we've decided to
put out a second (and hopefully last) release candidate. We
plan for a 2.5 final in a week's time.

This is not yet the final release - it is not suitable for
production use. It is being released to solicit feedback
and hopefully expose bugs, as well as allowing you to
determine how changes in 2.5 might impact you. As a release
candidate, this is one of your last chances to test the new
code in 2.5 before the final release. *Please* try this
release out and let us know about any problems you find.

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/

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 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, uuid and ctypes. In addition, a new profiling
module "cProfile" was added.

Enjoy this new release,
Anthony

Anthony Baxter
anthony at python.org
Python Release Manager
(on behalf of the entire python-dev team)