Python 2.5 Schedule

[nnorwitz at gmail.com]

For more details about the plan for Python 2.5, see:

    http://www.python.org/doc/peps/pep-0356/

The highlights are that we are hoping to put out the first alpha Real
Soon Now, hopefully in a week or two.  If there's something you really
think just must be in 2.5 and can't wait until 2.6, now is the time to
speak up.  (Actually, it was time to speak up months ago.)  Send a
message to python-dev.  If you have a patch or bug report outstanding
that you would like to see fixed for 2.5, add a comment to it.  Patches
and bugs will continue to be worked on until final release.

We are trying to be mostly feature complete by the first alpha.  This
is especially true for large C modifications.  There are still a few
more Python-based modules that are likely to make it into the standard
library before alpha 2.

I'm still hoping we can get a final 2.5 out by August.  Worst case, we
should have release by September.  A lot more testing
(http://www.python.org/dev/buildbot/all/) has gone into this version
than in the past, I expect this to be the most stable python yet.  Even
if we did happen to rip out the guts and and replace all the internals
with a new AST compiler, support for 64-bit objects (PEP 353), not to
mention support for try-except-finally (PEP 341), a new with statement
(PEP 343), and a whole lot more. :-)  See the PEP for what's to come.

It would be great to start testing now, particularly C extension
modules.
For those too lazy to hit the link, here are some more details copied
from the PEP:

Release Schedule

    alpha 1: April 1, 2006 [planned]
    alpha 2: April 29, 2006 [planned]
    alpha 3: May 27, 2006 [planned]
    beta 1:  June 24, 2006 [planned]
    beta 2:  July 15, 2006 [planned]
    rc 1:    August 5, 2006 [planned]
    final:   August 19, 2006 [planned]

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 341: Unified try-except/try-finally to try-except-finally
    PEP 342: Coroutines via Enhanced Generators
    PEP 343: The "with" Statement
    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 is the default coding

    - AST-based compiler
      - Access to C AST from Python through new _ast module

    - Add support for reading shadow passwords
(http://python.org/sf/579435)

    - any()/all() builtin truth functions

    - new hashlib module add support for SHA-224, -256, -384, and -512
      (replaces old md5 and sha modules)

    - new cProfile module suitable for profiling long running
applications
      with minimal overhead

    - Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree and cElementTree

Cheers,
n