Python Insider: Python 3.12.5 released

I’m pleased to announce the release of Python 3.12.5:

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3125/

Python 3.12 is the newest major release of the Python programming
language, and it contains many new features and optimizations. 3.12.5 is
the latest maintenance release, containing more than 250 bugfixes,
build improvements and documentation changes since 3.12.4.

This version of Python 3.12 also comes with pip 24.2 by default. However,
due to an incompatibility with older macOS versions, macOS 10.9 through
10.12 will downgrade their version of pip to 24.1.2 during the
installation process (in the Install Certificates step). See the installer ReadMe and the pip issue on the matter
for more information. Versions of macOS older than 10.13 haven’t been
supported by Apple since 2019, and maintaining support for them is
becoming increasingly difficult. While this release of 3.12 still
supports them, it is likely that we will be forced to drop support for macOS 10.12 and older in a future 3.12 release. (Python 3.13 has already dropped support for them.)

Type annotations

Deprecations

• The deprecated wstr and wstr_length members of the C implementation of unicode objects were removed, per PEP 623.
• In the unittest module, a number of long deprecated methods and classes were removed. (They had been deprecated since Python 3.1 or 3.2).
• The deprecated smtpd and distutils modules have been removed (see PEP 594 and PEP 632. The setuptools package continues to provide the distutils module.
• A number of other old, broken and deprecated functions, classes and methods have been removed.
• Invalid backslash escape sequences in strings now warn with SyntaxWarning instead of DeprecationWarning, making them more visible. (They will become syntax errors in the future.)
• The internal representation of integers has changed in preparation
  for performance enhancements. (This should not affect most users as it
  is an internal detail, but it may cause problems for Cython-generated
  code.)

For more details on the changes to Python 3.12, see What’s new in Python 3.12.

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 release team,
Thomas Wouters
Łukasz Langa
Ned Deily
Steve Dower