Python 3.13

[EwoutH]

Python 3.13 is well into the Beta phase and will be released in a few months. This means it's going to be heavily tested the next few months. It would be great if AppVeyor could add Python 3.13 to it's images, preferable ASAP (at least before the end of beta-phase).

• Ubuntu images
• Windows images
• macOS

Important milestones

• End of beta-phase, first release candidate: Tuesday 2024-07-30
• Stable Python 3.13.0 release: Tuesday 2024-10-01

[EwoutH]

@OwenMcDonnell the release candidate is next week, can you share any updates on the plan for 3.13?

I think we really want to avoid the disaster that 3.12 was (#3879).

[OwenMcDonnell]

Thanks for your disaster assessment @EwoutH!
New Ubuntu images with 3.13 are being created presently, after which new windows images will get some attention.

[OwenMcDonnell]

Python 3.13.0b3 is now available on all ubuntu images.
Put the following in your appveyor.yml to activate it.

stack:
  - python 3.13

[EwoutH]

Awesome! This is a great first step, thanks!

3.13.0b3 is still a beta release however, to build ABI stable wheels 3.13.0rc1 is needed. Could you share anything about rolling out that version?

[OwenMcDonnell]

@EwoutH were you aware of our BYOC solution? If you need build images with up to the minute python releases then this might be a better option for you going forward.

[EwoutH]

Yes, thanks.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting the target market of AppVeyor. Do you include Python developers, libraries and projects (both closed and open-source) in your target audience?

[OwenMcDonnell]

Regardless of target audience, we don't have the resources to release new images for both Windows and Linux whenever a new version of the pre-installed software/libraries we support is released.
We will try to release an image with the 3.13 release candidate as soon as possible.

[EwoutH]

Thanks, for the context, it’s appreciated!

I think GitHub Actions has automated this process, and updates their dependencies about once a week. Alternatively, they have actions that can be added (like setup-python) which can do stuff with relatively few lines of code.

For some context, the Python release candidate is the first build which is ABI stable, so that’s an important one, but also only once a year.

I think AppVeyor “only” needs about four Python updates a year:

• The first beta build to start testing (early May)
• The first rc build to start building wheels (early August)
• The first stable build for regular usage (early October)
• One or two point releases which fix the most pressing issues (January and/or March)

If that would be feasible it would make AppVeyor a great option for developing Python apps.

We need some alternatives to GHA. The Python ecosystem is becoming very dependent on it.

[OwenMcDonnell]

Python 3.13 release candidate is now live on all Ubuntu images.

[OwenMcDonnell]

Python 3.13 release candidate is now live on Visual Studio 2019 and Visual Studio 20222 images.
Apologies for the delay, but we ran into some serious road blocks in creating these latest images.

[cclauss]

Is there a remaining todo on this one?

• https://www.appveyor.com/docs/windows-images-software/#python still says release candidate 1.