RELEASED Python 2.5 (beta 1)

[Anthony Baxter]

On behalf of the Python development team and the Python community, I'm 
happy to announce the first 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. 

I'd like to really encourage you to try out this version and check 
that your code still works - if not, and you think it's a bug, please 
log a bug. Hopefully this will make it easier for you to upgrade once 
the final release of Python 2.5 is done.

Please note that changes to improve Python's support for 64 bit 
systems might require authors of C extensions to change their code. 
See the website for more, including a link to a posting discussing 
this issue in particular.

More information on the release (as well as source distributions and 
Windows and Mac OSX installers) are available from the 2.5 website:

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

Since the alpha releases, a slew of bug fixes and smaller new
features have been added. See the release notes (available from the
2.5 webpage) for more. The first beta also includes the results of the 
Iceland NeedForSpeed sprint, resulting in some significant speedups.

As of this release, Python 2.5 is now in *feature freeze*. No new
features are planned - only bugfixes for the code already in the 
codebase.

The plan from here is for one more beta release followed by one or 
more release candidates as needed, leading to a 2.5 final release 
early 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, wsgiref and
ctypes. We also have a new profiling module "cProfile".

Enjoy this new release (another step on the path to Python 2.5 final)
Anthony

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