Saturday, February 14, 2009

Python 3.0.1 released

The first bugfix release, 3.0.1, of the new Python 3.x series has been released! Many embarrassing bugs have been fixed. Among other things:


  • The wsgiref package has been fixed for 3.x.

  • A few hideous bugs in the new IO implementation have been squashed. In addition, a few cases have been optimized. (Note that IO in 3.x is still quite a bit slower than 2.x; more on that later.)

  • Unbuffered standard streams (the "-u" flag) have been restored.



This is actually a bit more than an average point release. Somehow, the builtin cmp() and __cmp__ slipped into the final release and has been removed in 3.0.1.

Our next goal is 3.1. We plan to compress our rather huge release cycle to make 3.1 between 1/2 and 1 year after 3.0. The focus of 3.1 will be stabilizing the feature set and change in 3.x. This is includes the rewrite of IO in C for speed and Brett's rewrite of import in Python.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sounds like 3.1 is still the Python the core developers expected the 3.0 release to be. That and hopefully by 3.1 the core debs will finally once again release a Mac binary installer in DMG format once again on the python.org website. Both of those but primarily the latter is what will keep me from installing (not to be confused with moving all my programs over to) Python 3.x

Congrats to the core dev team nevertheless for pushing 3.0 towards what they originally intended to release. The hard work is appreciated even by us who can't install it yet :-p

Tzury Bar Yochay said...

dear Benjamin,
How can I contact with you?
I would love to dive into the python development and want some senior member to assist me at the begining.

best regards,
Tzury

Benjamin Peterson said...

@PN I think 3.0 was reasonably stable for being the huge step that it was. 3.1 will certainly be a improvement, but that was foreseen almost from the beginning.

Also, Someone is supposed to be building the Mac installers as we speak.

@Tzury You can email me at <my first name here>@python.org