Abstract

This document describes the development and release schedule for Python 2.5. The schedule primarily concerns itself with PEP-sized items. Small features may be added up to and including the first beta release. Bugs may be fixed until the final release.

There will be at least two alpha releases, two beta releases, and one release candidate. The release date is planned for 12 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 the contextlib module)
• PEP 352: Required Superclass for Exceptions
• PEP 353: Using ssize_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 applications with minimal overhead
• ctypes – optional component of the windows installer
• ElementTree and cElementTree – by Fredrik Lundh
• hashlib – adds support for SHA-224, -256, -384, and -512 (replaces old md5 and sha modules)
• msilib – for creating MSI files and bdist_msi in distutils.
• pysqlite
• uuid
• wsgiref

Other notable features:

• Added support for reading shadow passwords [1]
• Added support for the Unicode 4.1 UCD
• Added PEP 302 zipfile/__loader__ support to the following modules: warnings, linecache, inspect, traceback, site, and doctest
• Added pybench 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 person would 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 in functools to help write wrapper functions that support naive introspection (e.g. having f.__name__ return the original function name).
• Upgrade pyexpat 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 or will 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 in Demo/ all still work, update or remove the ones that don’t. (Owner: Anthony)
• All modules in Modules/ 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 python pgen module (Owner: Guido)
• Remove the fpectl module?
• Make everything in Modules/ 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 raise LookupError
• The PEP 302 changes to (at least) pkgutil, runpy and pydoc must be documented.
• test_zipfile64 takes too long and too much disk space for most 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

[1]

Shadow Password Support Module https://bugs.python.org/issue579435

[2]

Joe Smith, bdist_* to stdlib? https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2006-February/060926.html

Copyright

This document has been placed in the public domain.