This package will install Python $FULL_VERSION for macOS $MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET for the following architecture(s): $ARCHITECTURES.

Certificate verification and OpenSSL

This package includes its own private copy of OpenSSL 1.1.0.   The trust certificates in system and user keychains managed by the Keychain Access application and the security command line utility are not used as defaults by the Python ssl module.  A sample command script is included in /Applications/Python 3.8 to install a curated bundle of default root certificates from the third-party certifi package (https://pypi.org/project/certifi/).  If you choose to use certifi, you should consider subscribing to the project's email update service to be notified when the certificate bundle is updated.

The bundled pip included with this installer has its own default certificate store for verifying download connections.

Using IDLE or other Tk applications 

This package includes its own private version of Tcl/Tk 8.6. It does not use any system-supplied or third-party supplied versions of Tcl/Tk.

Other changes

For other changes in this release, see the What's new section in the Documentation Set for this release and its Release Notes link at https://www.python.org/downloads/.

Python 3 and Python 2 Co-existence

Python.org Python $VERSION and 2.7.x versions can both be installed on your system and will not conflict. Command names for Python 3 contain a 3 in them, python3 (or python$VERSION), idle3 (or idle$VERSION), pip3 (or pip$VERSION), etc.  Python 2.7 command names contain a 2 or no digit: python2 (or python2.7 or python), idle2 (or idle2.7 or idle), etc.