While there are many reasons to welcome the end of 2021, I would like to give a shout-out to Python 3.6 which officially reached end-of-life on 2021-12-23, 6.5 years after its development began and exactly five years after its initial release.
Building on the success of previous Python 3 releases, 3.6 added many new features and improvements too numerous to list: over 10000 commits by some 160 contributors, including one of the most popular features in recent Python releases, f-strings (thanks, EVS!). I think it is fair to say that, with Python 3.6, the long transition from Python 2 was finally settled. As release manager for 3.6, I would like to personally thank all those contributors, and mostly volunteers: you made my job an easy one with your overwhelmingly positive attitude and support. I would also like to thank the authors and maintainers of the many third-party packages that were updated to support 3.6 as well as the downstream distributors of Python whose rapid uptake and release of 3.6 in their distributions was crucial to its success.
I would also like to thank those who helped get the 3.6 releases out the door, in particular, Steve Dower for manufacturing the Windows packages, Julien Palard for managing our on-line documentation build process, Elvis Pranskevichus and Yury Selivanov for taking on the thankless task of assembling and editing the 3.6 "What's New" document, my fellow release managers for their encouragement and support from the start to finish of 3.6's life, the Steering Councils, the PSF Infrastructure Team, those individuals and organizations who contribute resources (money, people, time, facilities, services) to the PSF, making Python development possible. And, I suppose I should thank that git who produces the macOS packages.
Thanks again to you all for making 3.6 so successful!
--Ned
P.S. As a reminder, with 3.6 having reached end-of-life, we no longer accept bug reports of any type against 3.6 and the 3.6 source code is now frozen. There is no longer a 3.6 branch in the GitHub cpython repository; the final state of the branch is captured in the repo as tag "3.6" and, as always, the source code for any release can be checked out using its tag; for example, the source for the final release of 3.6 can be obtained with "git checkout v3.6.15". Pro tip: if you haven't already, you may want to update your repo clones with "git fetch --tags upstream" (if you use the recommended naming convention) to get the latest tags and branches.
--
Ned Deily
nad(a)python.org -- []