News You Can Bruise for 2010 November 21

Ta-da. This is not a release to fix bugs or add new features. There are almost no changes to the code, which is why it took me so long to do this—it seemed silly. This is a release to stop people from getting confused.

Previously, there were a couple versions of Beautiful Soup you might conceivably use. They were 3.0.8.1 and 3.1.0. Version 3.0.8.1 was the stable release, and version 3.1.0 was the development branch. Except 3.1.0 wasn't actually the "development" branch, since a) no development is happening right now, and b) 3.1.0 in particular turned out to be a huge mistake. But for almost two years now, 3.1.0 has been hanging around with a higher version number than 3.0.x, looking like the latest version. And people have been using it, and having problems.

I'm not working on BS right now, but the least I can do is stop actively misleading people, so I added a tiny new feature suggested by Aaron and leapfrogged the 3.1 series with the UNAMBIGUOUSLY THE VERSION YOU SHOULD USE version 3.2.0. I've also set up a new build system which uploads the new releases to Crummy, to PyPI, and to Launchpad. So if my hosting provider randomly shuts down my instance, as happened last night, your craving for the tarball can still be fulfilled.