Python 3.2 Beta 2 released

The Python development team has released the second beta for Python 3.2, the latest generation of the Python language. Two release candidates are expected to arrive in January and the final version of Python 3.2 is scheduled to be released on the 5th of February, 2011.

As is normal at this stage of development, the developers have been focussing on correcting bugs found in the previous releases. The latest preview version includes updates to the Windows libraries and fixes for IDLE, which now works on Carbon and Cocoa versions of the Tk framework. Other changes include more resilient testing, HTTP support fixes and changes to subprocess.Popen.

As with all development releases, use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter.

More details about the development release, including a summary of planned features, can be found on the What's New In Python 3.2 page and in the change log. Python 3.2 Beta 2 is available to download as a source tar archive or a Windows x86 or Windows x86-64 installer from the project's site. The developers note that Mac OS X installer images "will be provided shortly".

Python 3.2 Beta 2 is licensed, as are all recent Python releases, under the permissive and GPL-compatible Python licence. The latest stable releases of Python are version 2.7.1 and 3.1.3 from the 13th of November – from now on, the 2.7.x branch will only receive bug fixes.

(crve)