Python 2.4.6

We are pleased to announce Python 2.4.6 (final), a bugfix release of Python 2.4, on Dec 19, 2008.

Important: 2.4.6 is a source-only release. If you need a binary release of 2.4, use 2.4.4. If you need the fixes that are included in this release, use 2.6.1 or later.

This release includes just a small number of fixes, primarily preventing crashes of the interpreter in certain boundary cases. This is the last planned release in the Python 2.4 series.

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.

For the previous release (2.4.5), 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

Download the release

gzip-compressed source code: python-2.4.6.tgz

bzip2-compressed source code: python-2.4.6.tar.bz2, the source archive.

The bzip2-compressed version is considerably smaller, so get that one if your system has the appropriate tools to deal with it.

Unpack the archive with tar -zxvf Python-2.4.6.tgz (or bzcat Python-2.4.6.tar.bz2 | tar -xf -). Change to the Python-2.4.6 directory and run the "./configure", "make", "make install" commands to compile and install Python. The source archive is also suitable for Windows users who feel the need to build their own version.

What's New?

• See the highlights of the Python 2.4 release.
• Andrew Kuchling's What's New in Python 2.4 describes the most visible changes since Python 2.3 in more detail.
• A detailed list of the changes in 2.4.6 can be found in the release notes, or the Misc/NEWS file in the source distribution.
• For the full list of changes, you can poke around in Subversion.

Documentation

The documentation has also been updated:

• Browse HTML on-line
• Download using HTTP.
• Documentation is available in Windows Help (.chm) format - python24.chm.

Files, MD5 checksums, signatures and sizes

7564b2b142b1b8345cd5358b7aaaa482 Python-2.4.6.tgz (9550168 bytes, signature)

76083277f6c7e4d78992f36d7ad9018d Python-2.4.6.tar.bz2 (8154677 bytes, signature)

The signatures above were generated with GnuPG using release manager Martin v. Löwis's public key which has a key id of 7D9DC8D2.