On behalf of the Python development team and the Python community, I'm happy to announce the second RELEASE CANDIDATE of Python 2.5.
After the first release candidate a number of new bugfixes have been applied to the Python 2.5 code. In the interests of making 2.5 the best release possible, we've decided to put out a second (and hopefully last) release candidate. We plan for a 2.5 final in a week's time. This is not yet the final release - it is not suitable for production use. It is being released to solicit feedback and hopefully expose bugs, as well as allowing you to determine how changes in 2.5 might impact you. As a release candidate, this is one of your last chances to test the new code in 2.5 before the final release. *Please* try this release out and let us know about any problems you find. In particular, note that changes to improve Python's support of 64 bit systems might require authors of C extensions to change their code. More information (as well as source distributions and Windows and Universal Mac OSX installers) are available from the 2.5 website: http://www.python.org/2.5/ As of this release, Python 2.5 is now in *feature freeze*. Unless absolutely necessary, no functionality changes will be made between now and the final release of Python 2.5. 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, uuid and ctypes. In addition, a new profiling module "cProfile" was added. Enjoy this new release, Anthony Anthony Baxter [EMAIL PROTECTED] Python Release Manager (on behalf of the entire python-dev team) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list