Did anybody say cursed releases? Well, it turns out that 3.10.3 and 3.9.11 both shipped a regression which caused those versions not to build on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. While this 11-year-old version is now out of maintenance support, it’s still used in production workloads. Some of those rely on Python 3.9 and/or 3.10. In particular, our own manylinux2010 image used to build widely compatible Linux wheels is based on CentOS 6. (Don’t worry, we do have newer manylinux* variants, see PEP 599 and PEP 600 for details.)
Due to the out-of-schedule release, the respective versions released today contain a very limited set of changes. Python 3.9.12 only contains 12 other bug fixes on top of 3.9.11. Python 3.10.4 only contains 10 other bug fixes on top of 3.10.3.
Get 3.10.4 here: Python Release Python 3.10.4 | Python.org
Get 3.9.12 here: Python Release Python 3.9.12 | Python.org
Hopefully, the third time’s a charm and we’ll return no sooner than May with the regularly scheduled bug fix releases of 3.9 and 3.10.
We hope you enjoy the new releases
Your friendly release team,
Łukasz Langa @ambv
Pablo Galindo Salgado @pablogsal
Ned Deily @nad
Steve Dower @steve.dower