Release 0.8.0 of igraph’s Python interface follows the recent release of version 0.8.0 of the C core with many bug fixes that have accumulated over the last five years, and an improved build process that does not require the C core of igraph to be downloaded at the time when python-igraph is installed; the tarball of python-igraph already bundles the appropriate version of the C core in it.

Including the C core directly in the source tarball also allows us to decouple python-igraph’s version number from the version number of the C core in the future. This means that we no longer have to wait for a release of the C core in order to fix some bugs in the Python interface.

Precompiled Python wheels

Starting from this release, we will also aim to provide pre-compiled Python wheels for most platforms. The current release includes Python wheels for Python 2.7, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7 and 3.8 on Windows, macOS and Linux, so most users will not have to compile anything when installing python-igraph from pip. Currently the only limitation is that the Windows wheels do not support GraphML import; this will be fixed in the next patch release (0.8.1).

End of support for Python 2.7

python-igraph 0.8.x will also be the last version that supports Python 2.7. Since Python 2 has reached its end of life, we will drop support for Python 2 before python-igraph 0.9 so we can simplify some parts of the codebase where we needed to introduce additional code to support both Python versions.

As for Python 3, we are committing ourselves to supporting at least the last three minor releases of Python 3.

Although we are not supporting PyPy officially, python-igraph will also be tested with PyPy regularly in a CI environment, and we will strive to fix any issues that arise with PyPy. If you use python-igraph with PyPy and you are willing to become an official maintainer responsible for PyPy compatibility, please let us know in the community forum.

New community forum

Concurrently with the release of igraph 0.8, we have launched a new community forum, which replaces the mailing list as the main support channel. The community forum is also meant for users of python-igraph, so If you are a current python-igraph user or just interested in the project, please join!

We would like to thank everyone who reported issues, contributed features or fixes, or edited the documentation. igraph is an open-source project run by volunteers. As always, your contributions are very welcome!