Abstract

This document describes the development and release schedule forPython 2.5. The schedule primarily concerns itself with PEP-sizeditems. Small features may be added up to and including the firstbeta release. Bugs may be fixed until the final release.

There will be at least two alpha releases, two beta releases, andone release candidate. The release date is planned for12 September 2006.

Release Manager

• Anthony Baxter has volunteered to be Release Manager.
• Martin von Loewis is building the Windows installers,
• Ronald Oussoren is building the Mac installers,
• Fred Drake the doc packages and
• Sean Reifschneider the RPMs.

Release Schedule

• alpha 1: April 5, 2006 [completed]
• alpha 2: April 27, 2006 [completed]
• beta 1: June 20, 2006 [completed]
• beta 2: July 11, 2006 [completed]
• beta 3: August 3, 2006 [completed]
• rc 1: August 17, 2006 [completed]
• rc 2: September 12, 2006 [completed]
• final: September 19, 2006 [completed]

Completed features for 2.5

• PEP 308: Conditional Expressions
• PEP 309: Partial Function Application
• PEP 314: Metadata for Python Software Packages v1.1
• PEP 328: Absolute/Relative Imports
• PEP 338: Executing Modules as Scripts
• PEP 341: Unified try-except/try-finally to try-except-finally
• PEP 342: Coroutines via Enhanced Generators
• PEP 343: The “with” Statement (still need updates in Doc/ref and for thecontextlib module)
• PEP 352: Required Superclass for Exceptions
• PEP 353: Usingssize_t as the index type
• PEP 357: Allowing Any Object to be Used for Slicing
• ASCII became the default coding
• AST-based compiler
• Access to C AST from Python through new_ast module
• any()/all() builtin truth functions

New standard library modules:

• cProfile – suitable for profiling long running applicationswith minimal overhead
• ctypes – optional component of the windows installer
• ElementTree andcElementTree – by Fredrik Lundh
• hashlib – adds support for SHA-224, -256, -384, and -512(replaces oldmd5 andsha modules)
• msilib – for creating MSI files andbdist_msi in distutils.
• pysqlite
• uuid
• wsgiref

Other notable features:

• Added support for reading shadow passwords[1]
• Added support for the Unicode 4.1 UCD
• AddedPEP 302zipfile/__loader__ support to the following modules:warnings,linecache,inspect,traceback,site, anddoctest
• Addedpybench Python benchmark suite – by Marc-Andre Lemburg
• Add write support for mailboxes from the code in sandbox/mailbox.(Owner: A.M. Kuchling. It would still be good if another personwould take a look at the new code.)
• Support for building “fat” Mac binaries (Intel and PPC)
• Add new icons for Windows with the new Python logo?
• New utilities infunctools to help write wrapper functions thatsupport naive introspection (e.g. havingf.__name__ returnthe original function name).
• Upgradepyexpat to use expat 2.0.
• Python core now compiles cleanly with g++

Possible features for 2.5

Each feature below should implemented prior to beta1 orwill require BDFL approval for inclusion in 2.5.

• Modules under consideration for inclusion:
• Add new icons for MacOS and Unix with the new Python logo?(Owner: ???)MacOS:http://hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/python/prettified-py-icons.png
• Check the various bits of code inDemo/ all still work, update orremove the ones that don’t.(Owner: Anthony)
• All modules inModules/ should be updated to be ssize_t clean.(Owner: Neal)

Deferred until 2.6

• bdist_deb in distutils package[2]
• bdist_egg in distutils package
• pure pythonpgen module(Owner: Guido)
• Remove thefpectl module?
• Make everything inModules/ build cleanly with g++

Open issues

• Bugs that need resolving before release, ie, they block release:

  None

• Bugs deferred until 2.5.1 (or later):
  • https://bugs.python.org/issue1544279 -Socket module is not thread-safe
  • https://bugs.python.org/issue1541420 - tools and demo missing from windows
  • https://bugs.python.org/issue1542451 - crash with continue in nested try/finally
  • https://bugs.python.org/issue1475523 - gettext.py bug (owner: Martin v. Loewis)
  • https://bugs.python.org/issue1467929 - %-formatting and dicts
  • https://bugs.python.org/issue1446043 -unicode() does not raiseLookupError
• ThePEP 302 changes to (at least)pkgutil,runpy andpydoc mustbe documented.
• test_zipfile64 takes too long and too much disk space formost of the buildbots. How should this be handled?It is currently disabled.
• should C modules listed in “Undocumented modules” be removed too?“timing” (listed as obsolete), “cl” (listed as possibly not up-to-date),and “sv” (listed as obsolete hardware specific).

References

Copyright

This document has been placed in the public domain.