Introduction

This PEP describes the Python 1.6 release schedule. The CVSrevision history of this file contains the definitive historicalrecord.

This release will be produced by BeOpen PythonLabs staff for theCorporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI).

Schedule

• August 1: 1.6 beta 1 release (planned).
• August 3: 1.6 beta 1 release (actual).
• August 15: 1.6 final release (planned).
• September 5: 1.6 final release (actual).

Features

A number of features are required for Python 1.6 in order tofulfill the various promises that have been made. The followingare required to be fully operational, documented, and forwardcompatible with the plans for Python 2.0:

• Unicode support: The Unicode object defined for Python 2.0 must be provided,including all methods and codec support.
• SRE: Fredrik Lundh’s new regular expression engine will be usedto provide support for both 8-bit strings and Unicode strings. It must passthe regression test used for the pcre-based version of the re module.
• The curses module was in the middle of a transformation to a package, so thefinal form was adopted.

Mechanism

The release will be created as a branch from the development treerooted at CNRI’s close of business on 16 May 2000. Patchesrequired from more recent checkins will be merged in by moving thebranch tag on individual files whenever possible in order toreduce mailing list clutter and avoid divergent and incompatibleimplementations.

The branch tag is “cnri-16-start”.

Patches and features will be merged to the extent required to passregression tests in effect on 16 May 2000.

The beta release is tagged “r16b1” in the CVS repository, and thefinal Python 1.6 release is tagged “release16” in the repository.

Copyright

This document has been placed in the public domain.