Release Date: March 11, 2008

Python 2.4 is now in security-fix-only mode. No new features are being added, and bugs are not fixed anymore unless they affect the stability and security of the interpreter, or of Python applications. This release includes just a small number of fixes, primarily preventing crashes of the interpreter in certain boundary cases.

Python 2.5 is the latest release of Python. This release of the older 2.4 code is to provide bug fixes for people who are still using Python 2.4. This is the last planned release in the Python 2.4 series - future maintenance releases of Python will be in the 2.5 series, starting of course with 2.5.1.

We have decided not to include binaries for Windows or OS X in this release, nor to update any online documentation, as the overhead for doing so would have greatly outweighed the amount of changes that we release. If you need the security fixes included in this release, please build your own binaries from the sources, or (better) upgrade to a more recent Python release for which we still do provide binaries and documentation updates.

See the detailed release notes for more details.

Since the release candidate, we received various reports that the this release may fail to build on current operating systems, in particular on OS X. We have made no attempt to fix these problems, as the release is targeted for systems that were current at the time Python 2.4 was originally released. For more recent systems, you might have to come up with work-arounds. For OS X in particular, try invoking:

./configure MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.5

For more information on the new features of Python 2.4 see the 2.4 highlights or consult Andrew Kuchling's What's New In Python for a more detailed view.

Please see the separate bugs page for known issues and the bug reporting procedure.

See also the license

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