Introduction

This PEP describes the Python 1.6 release schedule. The CVS revision history of this file contains the definitive historical record.

This release will be produced by BeOpen PythonLabs staff for the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI).

Schedule

• August 1: 1.6 beta 1 release (planned).
• August 3: 1.6 beta 1 release (actual).
• August 15: 1.6 final release (planned).
• September 5: 1.6 final release (actual).

Features

A number of features are required for Python 1.6 in order to fulfill the various promises that have been made. The following are required to be fully operational, documented, and forward compatible with the plans for Python 2.0:

• Unicode support: The Unicode object defined for Python 2.0 must be provided, including all methods and codec support.
• SRE: Fredrik Lundh’s new regular expression engine will be used to provide support for both 8-bit strings and Unicode strings. It must pass the regression test used for the pcre-based version of the re module.
• The curses module was in the middle of a transformation to a package, so the final form was adopted.

Mechanism

The release will be created as a branch from the development tree rooted at CNRI’s close of business on 16 May 2000. Patches required from more recent checkins will be merged in by moving the branch tag on individual files whenever possible in order to reduce mailing list clutter and avoid divergent and incompatible implementations.

The branch tag is “cnri-16-start”.

Patches and features will be merged to the extent required to pass regression tests in effect on 16 May 2000.

The beta release is tagged “r16b1” in the CVS repository, and the final Python 1.6 release is tagged “release16” in the repository.

Copyright

This document has been placed in the public domain.