Would love to know this myself.

I'm in process of moving my company's main web app to python 3, and standardized on 3.5 to match Debian 9.

But python 3.6 has so many cpu & memory improvements (not to mention things like f'' strings), seriously considering installing custom copy of 3.6... though not sure if I want the burden of maintaining my own copy of everything that will affect.

Then again... "Debian stable" being rock solid stable is why I stick with it for production; if their caution in this is the price I pay, it's worth it.

Basically, yes. While for a lot of software, you can use backports to get a more recent version, this doesn't apply to software being part of the toolchain (gcc, python, ...) because it would affect the rest of the archive. o

You are left with third-party repositories until we come with another solution, like Ubuntu PPA.

> Does this mean we're stuck with Python 3.5 for the lifetime of Debian 9

As always, with debian, you’re stuck with older softwares for the lifetime of their latest release.

For example, I can’t use any C++17 feature for the next 2-3 years in my projects, just because I want to support debian…