Python versions 3.10.8, 3.9.15, 3.8.15, 3.7.15 now available

Déjà vu? Right, a month after the expedited releases we are doing the dance again. This coincides with the regular scheduled time for 3.10.8 but since we accrued a few fixes in 3.7 - 3.9 as well, we’re again releasing all four editions at the same time. We’re not promising to continue at this pace 

Security content this time

• CVE-2022-40674: bundled libexpat was upgraded from 2.4.7 to 2.4.9 which fixes a heap use-after-free vulnerability in function doContent
• gh-97616: a fix for a possible buffer overflow in list *= int
• gh-97612: a fix for possible shell injection in the example script get-remote-certificate.py(this issue originally had a CVE assigned to it, which its author withdrew)
• gh-96577: a fix for a potential buffer overrun in msilib

Python 3.10.8

Get it here: https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3108/

As a bugfix release coming a mere month after an out-of-schedule security release, 3.10.8 is somewhat smaller compared to 3.9.8 released at the same stage of the release cycle a year ago. There’s 151 commits vs 204 in 3.9. It’s still a larger release than 3.10.7 at 113 commits. One way or the other, it’s worth checking out the change log.

And now for something completely different

Granular convection is a phenomenon where granular material subjected to shaking or vibration will exhibit circulation patterns similar to types of fluid convection.

It is sometimes described as the Brazil nut effect when the largest particles end up on the surface of a granular material containing a mixture of variously sized objects; this derives from the example of a typical container of mixed nuts, where the largest will be Brazil nuts.

The phenomenon is also known as the muesli effect since it is seen in packets of breakfast cereal containing particles of different sizes but similar densities, such as muesli mix.

Under experimental conditions, granular convection of variously sized particles has been observed forming convection cells similar to fluid motion.

We hope you enjoy the new releases!

Thanks to all of the many volunteers who help make Python Development and these releases possible! Please consider supporting our efforts by volunteering yourself or through organization contributions to the Python Software Foundation.

Your friendly release team,

Ned Deily @nad
Steve Dower @steve.dower
Pablo Galindo Salgado @pablogsal
Łukasz Langa @ambv

Python 3.11.0rc2 is now available

This is the second release candidate of Python 3.11

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3110rc2/

This release, 3.11.0rc2, is the last preview before the final release of Python 3.11.0 on 2022-10-24.

Entering the release candidate phase, only reviewed code changes which are clear bug fixes are allowed between this release candidate and the final release. The second candidate and the last planned release preview is currently planned for Monday, 2022-09-05 while the official release is planned for Monday, 2022-10-24.

There will be no ABI changes from this point forward in the 3.11 series and the goal is that there will be as few code changes as possible.

Modification of the final release

Due to the fact that we needed to delay the last release candidate by a week and because of personal scheduling problems I am delaying the final release to 2022-10-24 (three weeks from the original date).

Call to action

The 3.11 branch is now accepting changes for 3.11.1. To maximize stability, the final release will be cut from the v3.11.0rc2 tag. If you
need the release manager (me) to cherry-pick any critical fixes, mark issues as release blockers, and/or add me as a reviewer on a critical
backport PR on GitHub. To see which changes are currently cherry-picked for inclusion in 3.11.0, look at the short-lived branch-v3.11.0
https://github.com/python/cpython/tree/branch-v3.11.0 on GitHub.

Core developers: all eyes on the docs now

* Are all your changes properly documented?

* Did you notice other changes you know of to have insufficient documentation?

Community members

We strongly encourage maintainers of third-party Python projects to prepare their projects for 3.11 compatibilities during this phase. As always, report any issues to the Python bug tracker.

Please keep in mind that this is a preview release and its use is **not** recommended for production environments.

Major new features of the 3.11 series, compared to 3.10

Among the new major new features and changes so far:

• PEP 657 – Include Fine-Grained Error Locations in Tracebacks
• PEP 654 – Exception Groups and except*
• PEP 673 – Self Type
• PEP 646 – Variadic Generics
• PEP 680 – tomllib: Support for Parsing TOML in the Standard Library
• PEP 675 – Arbitrary Literal String Type
• PEP 655 – Marking individual TypedDict items as required or potentially-missing
• bpo-46752 – Introduce task groups to asyncio
• PEP 681 – Data Class Transforms
• bpo-433030– Atomic grouping ((?>…)) and possessive quantifiers (*+, ++, ?+, {m,n}+) are now supported in regular expressions.
• The Faster Cpython Project is already yielding some exciting results. Python 3.11 is up to 10-60% faster than Python 3.10. On average, we measured a 1.22x speedup on the standard benchmark suite. See Faster CPython for details.
(Hey, fellow core developer, if a feature you find important is missing from this list, let Pablo know.)

The next release will be the final release of Python 3.11.0, which is currently scheduled for Monday, 2022-10-24.

More resources

• Online Documentation

• PEP 664, 3.11 Release Schedule
• Report bugs at https://bugs.python.org.

• Help fund Python and its community.

And now for something completely different

In general relativity, a white hole is a theoretical region of spacetime and singularity that cannot be entered from the outside, although energy-matter, light and information can escape from it. In this sense, it is the reverse of a black hole, which can be entered only from the outside and from which energy-matter, light and information cannot escape. White holes appear in the theory of eternal black holes. In addition to a black hole region in the future, such a solution of the Einstein field equations has a white hole region in its past. This region does not exist for black holes that have formed through gravitational collapse, however, nor are there any observed physical processes through which a white hole could be formed. Supermassive black holes are theoretically predicted to be at the centre of every galaxy and that possibly, a galaxy cannot form without one. Stephen Hawking and others have proposed that these supermassive black holes spawn a supermassive white hole.

We hope you enjoy the new releases!

Thanks to all of the many volunteers who help make Python Development and these releases possible! Please consider supporting our efforts by volunteering yourself or through organization contributions to the Python Software Foundation.

https://www.python.org/psf/

Your friendly release team,
Ned Deily @nad 
Steve Dower @steve.dower 
Pablo Galindo Salgado @pablogsal

Python releases 3.10.7, 3.9.14, 3.8.14, and 3.7.14 are now available

We have some security content, and plenty of regular bug fixes for 3.10. Let’s dive right in.

CVE-2020-10735

Converting between int and str in bases other than 2 (binary), 4, 8 (octal), 16 (hexadecimal), or 32 such as base 10 (decimal) now raises a ValueError if the number of digits in string form is above a limit to avoid potential denial of service attacks due to the algorithmic complexity.

Security releases for 3.9.14, 3.8.14, and 3.7.14 are made available simultaneously to address this issue, along with some less urgent security content.

Upgrading your installations is highly recommended.

Python 3.10.7

Get it here:

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3107/

This bugfix version of Python was released out-of-schedule to address the CVE, and as such contains a smaller number of changes compared to 3.10.6 (200 commits), or in fact 3.9.7 (187 commits) at the same stage of the release cycle a year ago. But there’s still over a 100 commits in this latest Python version so it’s worth checking out the change log.

And now for something completely different

In quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle (also known as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle) is any of a variety of mathematical inequalities asserting a fundamental limit to the accuracy with which the values for certain pairs of physical quantities of a particle, such as position and momentum or the time and the energy can be predicted from initial conditions.

Such variable pairs are known as complementary variables or canonically conjugate variables; and, depending on interpretation, the uncertainty principle limits to what extent such conjugate properties maintain their approximate meaning, as the mathematical framework of quantum physics does not support the notion of simultaneously well-defined conjugate properties expressed by a single value.

The uncertainty principle implies that it is in general not possible to predict the value of a quantity with arbitrary certainty, even if all initial conditions are specified.

We hope you enjoy the new releases!

Thanks to all of the many volunteers who help make Python Development and these releases possible! Please consider supporting our efforts by volunteering yourself or through organization contributions to the Python Software Foundation.

https://www.python.org/psf/

Your friendly release team,

Ned Deily @nad
Steve Dower @steve.dower
Pablo Galindo Salgado @pablogsal
Łukasz Langa @ambv

Python 3.11.0rc1 is now available

This is the first release candidate of Python 3.11

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3110rc1/

This release, **3.11.0rc1**, is the penultimate release preview.  Entering the release candidate phase, only reviewed code changes which are clear bug fixes are allowed between this release candidate and the final release. The second candidate and the last planned release preview is currently planned for Monday, 2022-09-05 while the official release is planned for Monday, 2022-10-03.

There will be no ABI changes from this point forward in the 3.11 series and the goal is that there will be as few code changes as possible.

Call to action

Core developers: all eyes on the docs now

* Are all your changes properly documented?

* Did you notice other changes you know of to have insufficient documentation?

Community members

We strongly encourage maintainers of third-party Python projects to prepare their projects for 3.11 compatibilities during this phase. As always, report any issues to the Python bug tracker.

Please keep in mind that this is a preview release and its use is **not** recommended for production environments.

Major new features of the 3.11 series, compared to 3.10

Among the new major new features and changes so far:

• PEP 657 – Include Fine-Grained Error Locations in Tracebacks
• PEP 654 – Exception Groups and except*
• PEP 673 – Self Type
• PEP 646 – Variadic Generics
• PEP 680 – tomllib: Support for Parsing TOML in the Standard Library
• PEP 675 – Arbitrary Literal String Type
• PEP 655 – Marking individual TypedDict items as required or potentially-missing
• bpo-46752 – Introduce task groups to asyncio
• PEP 681 – Data Class Transforms
• bpo-433030– Atomic grouping ((?>…)) and possessive quantifiers (*+, ++, ?+, {m,n}+) are now supported in regular expressions.
• The Faster Cpython Project is already yielding some exciting results. Python 3.11 is up to 10-60% faster than Python 3.10. On average, we measured a 1.22x speedup on the standard benchmark suite. See Faster CPython for details.
(Hey, fellow core developer, if a feature you find important is missing from this list, let Pablo know.)

The next pre-release of Python 3.11 will be 3.11.0rc2, currently scheduled for  Monday, 2022-09-05.

More resources

• Online Documentation

• PEP 664, 3.11 Release Schedule
• Report bugs at https://bugs.python.org.

• Help fund Python and its community.

And now for something completely different

A quark star is a hypothetical type of compact, exotic star, where extremely high core temperature and pressure have forced nuclear particles to form quark matter, a continuous state of matter consisting of free quarks. 

Some massive stars collapse to form neutron stars at the end of their life cycle, as has been both observed and explained theoretically. Under the extreme temperatures and pressures inside neutron stars, the neutrons are normally kept apart by degeneracy pressure, stabilizing the star and hindering further gravitational collapse. However, it is hypothesized that under even more extreme temperature and pressure, the degeneracy pressure of the neutrons is overcome, and the neutrons are forced to merge and dissolve into their constituent quarks, creating an ultra-dense phase of quark matter based on densely packed quarks. In this state, a new equilibrium is supposed to emerge, as a new degeneracy pressure between the quarks, as well as repulsive electromagnetic forces, will occur and hinder total gravitational collapse.

If these ideas are correct, quark stars might occur, and be observable, somewhere in the universe. Theoretically, such a scenario is seen as scientifically plausible, but it has been impossible to prove both observationally and experimentally because the very extreme conditions needed for stabilizing quark matter cannot be created in any laboratory nor observed directly in nature. The stability of quark matter, and hence the existence of quark stars, is for these reasons among the unsolved problems in physics.

We hope you enjoy the new releases!

Thanks to all of the many volunteers who help make Python Development and these releases possible! Please consider supporting our efforts by volunteering yourself or through organization contributions to the Python Software Foundation.

https://www.python.org/psf/

Your friendly release team,
Ned Deily @nad 
Steve Dower @steve.dower 
Pablo Galindo Salgado @pablogsal

Python 3.10.6 is available

Here you have a nice package of 200 commits of bugfixes and documentation improvements freshly made for Python 3.10. Go and download it when is still hot:

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3106/

This is the sixth maintenance release of Python 3.10

Python 3.10.6 is the newest major release of the Python programming language, and it contains many new features and optimizations.

Major new features of the 3.10 series, compared to 3.9

Among the new major new features and changes so far:

• PEP 623 – Deprecate and prepare for the removal of the wstr member in PyUnicodeObject.

• PEP 604 – Allow writing union types as X | Y

• PEP 612 – Parameter Specification Variables

• PEP 626 – Precise line numbers for debugging and other tools.

• PEP 618 – Add Optional Length-Checking To zip.

• bpo-12782: Parenthesized context managers are now officially allowed.

• PEP 632 – Deprecate distutils module.

• PEP 613 – Explicit Type Aliases

• PEP 634 – Structural Pattern Matching: Specification

• PEP 635 – Structural Pattern Matching: Motivation and Rationale

• PEP 636 – Structural Pattern Matching: Tutorial

• PEP 644 – Require OpenSSL 1.1.1 or newer

• PEP 624 – Remove Py_UNICODE encoder APIs

• PEP 597 – Add optional EncodingWarning

More resources

• Online Documentation

• PEP 619, 3.10 Release Schedule

• Report bugs at https://bugs.python.org.

• Help fund Python and its community.

bpo-38605: from __future__ import annotations (PEP 563) used to be on this list in previous pre-releases but it has been postponed to Python 3.11 due to some compatibility concerns. You can read the Steering Council communication about it here to learn more.

And now for something completely different

A pentaquark is a human-made subatomic particle, consisting of four quarks and one antiquark bound together; they are not known to occur naturally or exist outside of experiments to create them. As quarks have a baryon number of (+1/3), and antiquarks of (−1/3), the pentaquark would have a total baryon number of 1 and thus would be a baryon. Further, because it has five quarks instead of the usual three found in regular baryons (a.k.a. ‘triquarks’), it is classified as an exotic baryon. The name pentaquark was coined by Claude Gignoux et al. (1987) and Harry J. Lipkin in 1987; however, the possibility of five-quark particles was identified as early as 1964 when Murray Gell-Mann first postulated the existence of quarks. Although predicted for decades, pentaquarks proved surprisingly tricky to discover and some physicists were beginning to suspect that an unknown law of nature prevented their production.

We hope you enjoy the new releases!

Thanks to all of the many volunteers who help make Python Development and these releases possible! Please consider supporting our efforts by volunteering yourself or through organization contributions to the Python Software Foundation.

https://www.python.org/psf/

Your friendly release team,
Ned Deily @nad 
Steve Dower @steve.dower 
Pablo Galindo Salgado @pablogsal

Python 3.11.0b5 is now available

Here we are. The universe. The vastness of spacetime. At the edge. The last frontier. The last beta*(conditions apply) for Python 3.11.

We have defied the powerful gods of release blockers and we have won by using the required amount of ruse and subterfuge.

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3110b5/

This is a beta preview of Python 3.11

Python 3.11 is still in development. 3.11.0b5 is the last of five planned beta release previews. Beta release previews are intended to give the wider community the opportunity to test new features and bug fixes and to prepare their projects to support the new feature release.

We strongly encourage maintainers of third-party Python projects to test with 3.11 during the beta phase and report issues found to the Python bug tracker as soon as possible. While the release is planned to be feature complete entering the beta phase, it is possible that features may be modified or, in rare cases, deleted up until the start of the release candidate phase (Monday, 2021-08-02). Our goal is have no ABI changes after beta 5 and as few code changes as possible after 3.11.0rc1, the first release candidate. To achieve that, it will be extremely important to get as much exposure for 3.11 as possible during the beta phase.

Please keep in mind that this is a preview release and its use is not recommended for production environments.

Major new features of the 3.11 series, compared to 3.10

Among the new major new features and changes so far:

• PEP 657 – Include Fine-Grained Error Locations in Tracebacks
• PEP 654 – Exception Groups and except*
• PEP 673 – Self Type
• PEP 646 – Variadic Generics
• PEP 680 – tomllib: Support for Parsing TOML in the Standard Library
• PEP 675 – Arbitrary Literal String Type
• PEP 655 – Marking individual TypedDict items as required or potentially-missing
• bpo-46752 – Introduce task groups to asyncio
• PEP 681 – Data Class Transforms
• bpo-433030– Atomic grouping ((?>…)) and possessive quantifiers (*+, ++, ?+, {m,n}+) are now supported in regular expressions.
• The Faster Cpython Project is already yielding some exciting results. Python 3.11 is up to 10-60% faster than Python 3.10. On average, we measured a 1.22x speedup on the standard benchmark suite. See Faster CPython for details.
(Hey, fellow core developer, if a feature you find important is missing from this list, let Pablo know.)

The next pre-release of Python 3.11 will be 3.11.0rc1, currently scheduled for Monday, 2022-08-01.

More resources

• Online Documentation

• PEP 664, 3.11 Release Schedule
• Report bugs at https://bugs.python.org.

• Help fund Python and its community.

And now for something completely different

Schwarzschild wormholes, also known as Einstein–Rosen bridges (named after Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen), are connections between areas of space that can be modelled as vacuum solutions to the Einstein field equations, and that are now understood to be intrinsic parts of the maximally extended version of the Schwarzschild metric describing an eternal black hole with no charge and no rotation. Here, "maximally extended" refers to the idea that spacetime should not have any "edges": it should be possible to continue this path arbitrarily far into the particle's future or past for any possible trajectory of a free-falling particle (following a geodesic in the spacetime).

The Einstein–Rosen bridge was discovered by Ludwig Flamm in 1916, a few months after Schwarzschild published his solution, and was rediscovered by Albert Einstein and his colleague Nathan Rosen, who published their result in 1935. However, in 1962, John Archibald Wheeler and Robert W. Fuller published a paper showing that this type of wormhole is unstable if it connects two parts of the same universe and that it will pinch off too quickly for light (or any particle moving slower than light) that falls in from one exterior region to make it to the other exterior region.

Although Schwarzschild wormholes are not traversable in both directions, their existence inspired Kip Thorne to imagine traversable wormholes created by holding the "throat" of a Schwarzschild wormhole open with exotic matter (material that has negative mass/energy).

We hope you enjoy the new releases!

Thanks to all of the many volunteers who help make Python Development and these releases possible! Please consider supporting our efforts by volunteering yourself or through organization contributions to the Python Software Foundation.

https://www.python.org/psf/

Your friendly release team,
Ned Deily @nad 
Steve Dower @steve.dower 
Pablo Galindo Salgado @pablogsal

Python 3.11.0b4 is now available

I cannot believe I am writing this, but Python 3.11.b4 is available!

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3110b4/

This is a beta preview of Python 3.11

Python 3.11 is still in development. 3.11.0b4 is the fourth of four planned beta release previews. Beta release previews are intended to give the wider community the opportunity to test new features and bug fixes and to prepare their projects to support the new feature release.

We strongly encourage maintainers of third-party Python projects to test with 3.11 during the beta phase and report issues found to the Python bug tracker as soon as possible. While the release is planned to be feature complete entering the beta phase, it is possible that features may be modified or, in rare cases, deleted up until the start of the release candidate phase (Monday, 2021-08-02). Our goal is have no ABI changes after beta 4 and as few code changes as possible after 3.11.0rc1, the first release candidate. To achieve that, it will be extremely important to get as much exposure for 3.11 as possible during the beta phase.

Please keep in mind that this is a preview release and its use is not recommended for production environments.

Major new features of the 3.11 series, compared to 3.10

Among the new major new features and changes so far:

• PEP 657 – Include Fine-Grained Error Locations in Tracebacks
• PEP 654 – Exception Groups and except*
• PEP 673 – Self Type
• PEP 646 – Variadic Generics
• PEP 680 – tomllib: Support for Parsing TOML in the Standard Library
• PEP 675 – Arbitrary Literal String Type
• PEP 655 – Marking individual TypedDict items as required or potentially-missing
• bpo-46752 – Introduce task groups to asyncio
• PEP 681 – Data Class Transforms
• bpo-433030– Atomic grouping ((?>…)) and possessive quantifiers (*+, ++, ?+, {m,n}+) are now supported in regular expressions.
• The Faster Cpython Project is already yielding some exciting results. Python 3.11 is up to 10-60% faster than Python 3.10. On average, we measured a 1.22x speedup on the standard benchmark suite. See Faster CPython for details.
(Hey, fellow core developer, if a feature you find important is missing from this list, let Pablo know.)

The next pre-release of Python 3.11 will be 3.11.0b5, currently scheduled for Monday, 2022-07-25.

More resources

• Online Documentation

• PEP 664, 3.11 Release Schedule
• Report bugs at https://bugs.python.org.

• Help fund Python and its community.

And now for something completely different

The Planck temperature is 1.416784×10**32 K. At this temperature, the wavelength of light emitted by thermal radiation reaches the Planck length. There are no known physical models able to describe temperatures greater than the Planck temperature and a quantum theory of gravity would be required to model the extreme energies attained. Hypothetically, a system in thermal equilibrium at the Planck temperature might contain Planck-scale black holes, constantly being formed from thermal radiation and decaying via Hawking evaporation; adding energy to such a system might decrease its temperature by creating larger black holes, whose Hawking temperature is lower.

Rumours say the Planck temperature can be reached in some of the hottest parts of Spain in summer.

We hope you enjoy the new releases!

Thanks to all of the many volunteers who help make Python Development and these releases possible! Please consider supporting our efforts by volunteering yourself or through organization contributions to the Python Software Foundation.

https://www.python.org/psf/

Your friendly release team,
Ned Deily @nad 
Steve Dower @steve.dower 
Pablo Galindo Salgado @pablogsal