[Python-Dev] RELEASED Python 2.5 (alpha 2)

[Anthony Baxter]

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

This is an *alpha* release of Python 2.5. As such, it is not
suitable for a production environment. It is being released to
solicit feedback and hopefully discover bugs, as well as allowing
you to determine how changes in 2.5 might impact you. If you find
things broken or incorrect, please log a bug on Sourceforge.

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 installers) are available from the 2.5 website:

    http://www.python.org/2.5/

Since the first alpha, a host of bug fixes and smaller new features
have been added. See the release notes (available from the 2.5
webpage) for more.

The plan from here is for either one more alpha release, or (more
likely) moving to the beta releases, then moving to a 2.5 final
release around August.  PEP 356 includes the schedule and will be
updated as the schedule evolves.

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 and ctypes.
In addition, a new profiling module cProfile was added. In addition,
in the second alpha we have the new 'mailbox' module (a product of
last years Google Summer of Code).

Enjoy this new release,
Anthony

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