[Python-Dev] RELEASED Python 2.5 (beta 3)

[Anthony Baxter]

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

This is an *beta* 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 and Universal Mac OSX installers) are
available from the 2.5 website:

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

There's been over 50 fixes since the second beta. This
large number of changes meant we felt more comfortable
cutting a third beta release, rather than charging ahead to
the release candidate.

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 plan is that this will be the final beta release (no,
really, this time for sure (probably)). We should now move
to one or more release candidates, leading to a 2.5 final
release early August. PEP 356 includes the schedule and will
be updated as the schedule evolves. At this point, any
testing you can do would be greatly, greatly appreciated.

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 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)
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