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/

Although previous updates seemed to complete without problems, some people have been seeing hangs in the tests for a long time, and that hit me (ken) on two machines with 3.11.9 where 3.11.8 was OK. LFS now has an added 'timeout' parameter (check the LFS development books) which works well.