[RELEASED] Python 2.7 release candidate 2

[Benjamin Peterson]

On behalf of the Python development team, I'm tickled pink to announce the
second release candidate of Python 2.7.

Python 2.7 is scheduled (by Guido and Python-dev) to be the last major version
in the 2.x series. However, 2.7 will have an extended period of bugfix
maintenance.

2.7 includes many features that were first released in Python 3.1. The faster io
module, the new nested with statement syntax, improved float repr, set literals,
dictionary views, and the memoryview object have been backported from 3.1. Other
features include an ordered dictionary implementation, unittests improvements, a
new sysconfig module, auto-numbering of fields in the str/unicode format method,
and support for ttk Tile in Tkinter.  For a more extensive list of changes in
2.7, see http://doc.python.org/dev/whatsnew/2.7.html or Misc/NEWS in the Python
distribution.

To download Python 2.7 visit:

     http://www.python.org/download/releases/2.7/

While this is a preview release and is thus not suitable for production use, we
strongly encourage Python application and library developers to test the release
with their code and report any bugs they encounter to:

     http://bugs.python.org/

This helps ensure that those upgrading to Python 2.7 will encounter as few bumps
as possible.

2.7 documentation can be found at:

     http://docs.python.org/2.7/


Enjoy!

--
Benjamin Peterson
Release Manager
benjamin at python.org
(on behalf of the entire python-dev team and 2.7's contributors)