Science and Technology (old posts, page 236)

Python 3.14.0 beta 4 is here!

It’s the final 3.14 beta!

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3140b4/

This is a beta preview of Python 3.14

Python 3.14 is still in development. This release, 3.14.0b4, is the last of four planned beta releases.

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 3.14 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 (Tuesday 2025-07-22). Our goal is to have no ABI changes after beta 4 and as few code changes as possible after the first release candidate. To achieve that, it will be extremely important to get as much exposure for 3.14 as possible during the beta phase.

This includes creating pre-release wheels for 3.14, as it helps other projects to do their own testing. However, we recommend that your regular production releases wait until 3.14.0rc1, to avoid the risk of ABI breaks.

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

Major new features of the 3.14 series, compared to 3.13

Some of the major new features and changes in Python 3.14 are:

New features

Note that PEPs 734 and 779 are exceptionally new in beta 3!

(Hey, fellow core developer, if a feature you find important is missing from this list, let Hugo know.)

For more details on the changes to Python 3.14, see What’s new in Python 3.14. The next pre-release of Python 3.14 will be the first release candidate, 3.14.0rc1, scheduled for 2025-07-22.

Build changes

  • PEP 761: Python 3.14 and onwards no longer provides PGP signatures for release artifacts. Instead, Sigstore is recommended for verifiers.
  • Official macOS and Windows release binaries include an experimental JIT compiler.

Incompatible changes, removals and new deprecations

Python install manager

The installer we offer for Windows is being replaced by our new install manager, which can be installed from the Windows Store or from its download page. See our documentation for more information. The JSON file available for download below contains the list of all the installable packages available as part of this release, including file URLs and hashes, but is not required to install the latest release. The traditional installer will remain available throughout the 3.14 and 3.15 releases.

More resources

And now for something completely different

All this talk of π and yet some say π is wrong. Tau Day (June 28th, 6/28 in the US) celebrates τ as the “true circle constant”, as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its radius, C/r = 6.283185… The Tau Manifesto declares π “a confusing and unnatural choice for the circle constant”, in part because “ occurs with astonishing frequency throughout mathematics”.

If you wish to embrace τ the good news is PEP 628 added math.tau to Python 3.6 in 2016:

When working with radians, it is trivial to convert any given fraction of a circle to a value in radians in terms of tau. A quarter circle is tau/4, a half circle is tau/2, seven 25ths is 7*tau/25, etc. In contrast with the equivalent expressions in terms of pi (pi/2, pi, 14*pi/25), the unnecessary and needlessly confusing multiplication by two is gone.

Enjoy the new release

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 organisation contributions to the Python Software Foundation.

Regards from a cloudy Helsinki, looking forward to Prague and EuroPython next week,

Your release team,
Hugo van Kemenade
Ned Deily
Steve Dower
Łukasz Langa

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[$] Toward the unification of kselftests and KUnit

The kernel project, for many years, lacked a formal testing setup; it was often joked that testing was the project's main reason for keeping users around. While many types of kernel testing can only be done in the presence of specific hardware, there are other parts of the kernel that could be more widely tested. Over time, though, the kernel has gained two separate testing frameworks and a growing body of automated tests to go with them. These two frameworks — kselftests and KUnit — take different approaches to the testing problem; now this patch series from Thomas Weißschuh aims to bring them together.

Security updates for Tuesday

Security updates have been issued by Debian (djvulibre and slurm-wlm), Red Hat (apache-commons-vfs, container-tools:rhel8, kernel, kernel-rt, podman, python3, rsync, socat, and sudo), SUSE (apache2, helm-mirror, incus, kernel, openssl-3, python-Django, and systemd), and Ubuntu (dcmtk, File::Find::Rule, ghostscript, jquery, and libssh).