Psycopg 2.7 beta 2 released

Hello,

we have released psycopg2 version 2.7 beta 2. This version comes two
years after the previous major release so it is packed with new
features and improvements; among the main points:

- support for replication protocol
- helpers to build dynamically SQL statements and manipulate connection strings
- speedups in multiple execution and Unicode decoding
- better transactions characteristics support

A more complete list of changes is available at
http://initd.org/psycopg/docs/news.html#what-s-new-in-psycopg-2-7

On top of the changes in the code we have addressed the deployment
problems found by many inexperienced users, especially on Windows and
OSX: psycopg is now distributed as a self-contained wheel package on
PyPI so that, starting from the stable 2.7 release, it will be
possible to use:

pip install psycopg2

without requiring the presence of C compiler, headers, pg_config, libpq.

Because of all these changes, we ask you kindly to test this psycopg
beta release, both its installation and its usage, before we release
the stable version, which should happen next week if we don't find any
problem. The binary packages of the beta release are on the PyPI
testing site: you can install it using:

pip install -U pip # make sure to have an up-to-date pip
pip install -i https://testpypi.python.org/pypi psycopg2==2.7b2

Thank you very much everyone, and I wish to thank especially Oleksandr
Shulgin and Craig Ringer for the development of the replication
protocol support (the development of which brought along several other
features and improvement) and Jason Erickson for the invaluable help
with the Windows packages.

Happy testing!

-- Daniele