Python3

From time to time there are new releases of Python3 which fix known security vulnerabilities.

If you ever are running such an old system that you need to upgrade the version of Python3 to a new minor version, you will need to find suitable versions of all the packages which installed modules in site-python and recompile them.

However, if there is a new release of the same minor version (e.g. 3.12 to 3.12.1) you can just upgrade that and the existing modules should continue to work. Although current 3.10 is in 'bugfix' status, several of the previous series are still receiving security fixes (back to 3.8 in August 2023), see ​https://www.python.org/downloads/source/

WARNING: On two LFS-12.0 machines where I have tried to update to Python-3.11.9 the builds stalled in different ways. Putting the output in a log to avoid cluttering the screen, nothing show apart from a few lines at the start about missing dependencies (_tkinter, nis). On one machine I interrupted the build with Ctrl-C and found it had run all the 483 initial tests, with some errors, and had then spent 1hr 28. On the other, 453 tests were ok then some messages about the interrupt. For a non-pythonista the reason for the stall was not clear, but the log ended

2 re-run tests:
    test_embed test_threading

2 tests failed:
    test_embed test_threading

453 tests OK.

Test suite interrupted by signal SIGINT.

Total duration: 2 hour 26 sec
Total tests: run=40,186 failures=4 skipped=1,225
Total test files: run=480/483 failed=2 skipped=23 resource_denied=3 rerun=2
Result: FAILURE, INTERRUPTED then FAILURE, INTERRUPTED

Clearly, it would have kept on hanging if I had not killed it.

This is supposed to include a vulnerability which was fixed in 3.10.14 in March.