RELEASED Python 2.4.3, release candidate 1

[Anthony Baxter]

On behalf of the Python development team and the Python
community, I'm happy to announce the release of Python 2.4.3
(release candidate 1).

Python 2.4.3 is a bug-fix release. See the release notes at
the website (also available as Misc/NEWS in the source
distribution) for details of the more than 50 bugs squished
in this release, including a number found by the Coverity
Scan project.

Assuming no major problems crop up, a final release of
Python 2.4.3 will follow in about a week's time.

For more information on Python 2.4.3, including download
links for various platforms, release notes, and known issues,
please see:

http://www.python.org/2.4.3/

Highlights of this new release include:

- Bug fixes. According to the release notes, at least 50
have been fixed since 2.4.2.

Highlights of the previous major Python release (2.4) are
available from the Python 2.4 page, at

http://www.python.org/2.4/highlights.html

On a personal note, according to my records this is the 25th
release of Python I've made as release manager.

So enjoy this silver anniversary release,
Anthony

Anthony Baxter
(e-mail address removed)
Python Release Manager
(on behalf of the entire python-dev team)

 

[Paddy]

I followed the links to the coverity page that shows their table of
errors found, and subsequently fixed in tools used for the LAMP stack.
They say that they informed the maintainers of the software about the
precise errors found and the number of errors has been tracked since
then.

It seems there page has been updated with the results of the latest
Python release o i thought I'd put a marketing spin on the data to show
which projects have been fixing their bugs.
I added the column showing % bugs fixed and sorted on that column to
highlight just what you Python maintainers have achieved:

Project Current Original Percent Lines of Defects /
defects defects fixed code KLOC
AMANDA 0 108 100.00% 88879 0
Python 0 96 100.00% 269609 0
Samba 0 216 100.00% 313893 0
XMMS 0 6 100.00% 117099 0
ethereal 11 143 92.31% 1131213 0.01
icecast 2 12 83.33% 37251 0.05
SQLite 6 31 80.65% 54257 0.11
PHP 47 204 76.96% 426559 0.11
wxWidgets 30 73 58.90% 310917 0.1
Net-SNMP 61 148 58.78% 173203 0.35
Gaim 51 113 54.87% 325646 0.16
Firefox 50 108 53.70% 305453 0.16
OpenSSL 35 66 46.97% 200813 0.17
xine 196 347 43.52% 578738 0.34
MPlayer 192 284 32.39% 489636 0.39
gcc 103 140 26.43% 696310 0.15
NetBSD 2529 3230 21.70% 5078094 0.5
Perl 70 89 21.35% 483331 0.15
Linux-2.6 847 1062 20.24% 3171895 0.27
apache-http 26 32 18.75% 127974 0.2
X.org 1448 1681 13.86% 2353980 0.62
Squid 48 53 9.43% 175345 0.27
Gnome 849 896 5.25% 1311031 0.65
tcl 67 69 2.90% 120865 0.55
OpenLDAP 154 158 2.53% 258144 0.6
snort 47 48 2.08% 94111 0.5
FreeBSD 632 635 0.47% 1582166 0.4
PostgreSQL 294 295 0.34% 816869 0.36
Inetutils 29 29 0.00% 72681 0.4
OpenVPN 7 7 0.00% 69905 0.1
ProFTPD 26 26 0.00% 90027 0.29
Firebird 194 163 -19.02% 271192 0.72

The original data is from http://scan.coverity.com/ on the day of this
posting.

- Paddy

 

[Fredrik Lundh]

I followed the links to the coverity page that shows their table of
errors found, and subsequently fixed in tools used for the LAMP stack.
They say that they informed the maintainers of the software about the
precise errors found and the number of errors has been tracked since
then.

It seems there page has been updated with the results of the latest
Python release

Python 0 96 100.00% 269609 0

coverity checks the development trunk (i.e. the current 2.5 pre-alpha),
so 2.4.3 isn't quite as good as this looks. however, I don't think coverity
found any truly serious bug in the code base, so 2.4.3 should be almost
as good as the upcoming 2.5 release.

(and there was never 96 real errors in the code base, of course; coverity
is a remarkable tool, but there's plenty of room for mistakes when used on
a code base this large)

</F>