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

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 installers) are available from the
2.5 website:

    http://www.python.org/2.5/

A Universal Mac OSX Installer will be available shortly - in
the meantime, Mac users can build from the source tarballs.

Since the first beta, a large number of bug fixes have been
made to Python 2.5 - see the release notes (available from
the 2.5 webpage) for the full details.

There has been one very small new feature added - the
sys._current_frames() function was added. This is extremely
useful for tracking down deadlocks and related problems -
a similar technique is already used in the popular
DeadlockDebugger extension for Zope. It is not possible to
do this sort of debugging from outside the Python core safely
and robustly, which is why we've snuck this in after the
feature freeze.

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 plan is for this to be the final beta release. We should
now move to one or more release candidates, leading to
a 2.5 final release early August. PEP 356 includes the
schedule and will be updated as the schedule evolves. At
this point, any testing you can do would be greatly, greatly
appreciated.

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. In addition, a new profiling module
"cProfile" was added.

Enjoy this new release,
Anthony

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

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