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7 What's New in Python 2.5 beta 1?
8 =================================
10 *Release date: XX-JUN-2006*
15 - Fix the socket tests so they can be run concurrently.
17 - Removed 5 integers from C frame objects (PyFrameObject).
18 f_nlocals, f_ncells, f_nfreevars, f_stack_size, f_restricted.
20 - Bug #532646: object.__call__() will continue looking for the __call__
21 attribute on objects until one without one is found. This leads to recursion
22 when you take a class and set its __call__ attribute to an instance of the
23 class. Originally fixed for classic classes, but this fix is for new-style.
24 Removes the infinite_rec_3 crasher.
26 - The string and unicode methods startswith() and endswith() now accept
27 a tuple of prefixes/suffixes to look for. Implements RFE #1491485.
29 - Buffer objects, at the C level, never used the char buffer
30 implementation even when the char buffer for the wrapped object was
31 explicitly requested (originally returned the read or write buffer).
32 Now a TypeError is raised if the char buffer is not present but is
35 - Patch #1346214: Statements like "if 0: suite" are now again optimized
36 away like they were in Python 2.4.
38 - Builtin exceptions are now full-blown new-style classes instead of
39 instances pretending to be classes, which speeds up exception handling
40 by about 80% in comparison to 2.5a2.
42 - Patch #1494554: Update unicodedata.numeric and unicode.isnumeric to
45 - Patch #921466: sys.path_importer_cache is now used to cache valid and
46 invalid file paths for the built-in import machinery which leads to
47 fewer open calls on startup.
49 - Patch #1442927: ``long(str, base)`` is now up to 6x faster for non-power-
50 of-2 bases. The largest speedup is for inputs with about 1000 decimal
51 digits. Conversion from non-power-of-2 bases remains quadratic-time in
52 the number of input digits (it was and remains linear-time for bases
55 - Bug #1334662: ``int(string, base)`` could deliver a wrong answer
56 when ``base`` was not 2, 4, 8, 10, 16 or 32, and ``string`` represented
57 an integer close to ``sys.maxint``. This was repaired by patch
58 #1335972, which also gives a nice speedup.
60 - Patch #1337051: reduced size of frame objects.
62 - PyErr_NewException now accepts a tuple of base classes as its
65 - Patch #876206: function call speedup by retaining allocated frame
68 - Bug #1462152: file() now checks more thoroughly for invalid mode
69 strings and removes a possible "U" before passing the mode to the
72 - Patch #1488312, Fix memory alignment problem on SPARC in unicode
74 - Bug #1487966: Fix SystemError with conditional expression in assignment
76 - WindowsError now has two error code attributes: errno, which carries
77 the error values from errno.h, and winerror, which carries the error
78 values from winerror.h. Previous versions put the winerror.h values
79 (from GetLastError()) into the errno attribute.
81 - Patch #1475845: Raise IndentationError for unexpected indent.
83 - Patch #1479181: split open() and file() from being aliases for each other.
85 - Patch #1497053 & bug #1275608: Exceptions occurring in ``__eq__()``
86 methods were always silently ignored by dictionaries when comparing keys.
87 They are now passed through (except when using the C API function
88 ``PyDict_GetItem()``, whose semantics did not change).
90 - Bug #1456209: In some obscure cases it was possible for a class with a
91 custom ``__eq__()`` method to confuse dict internals when class instances
92 were used as a dict's keys and the ``__eq__()`` method mutated the dict.
93 No, you don't have any code that did this ;-)
98 - Change binascii.hexlify to accept a read-only buffer instead of only a char
99 buffer and actually follow its documentation.
101 - Fixed a potentially invalid memory access of CJKCodecs' shift-jis decoder.
103 - Patch #1478788 (modified version): The functional extension module has
104 been renamed to _functools and a functools Python wrapper module added.
105 This provides a home for additional function related utilities that are
106 not specifically about functional programming. See PEP 309.
108 - Patch #1493701: performance enhancements for struct module.
110 - Patch #1490224: time.altzone is now set correctly on Cygwin.
112 - Patch #1435422: zlib's compress and decompress objects now have a
115 - On Win32, os.listdir now supports arbitrarily-long Unicode path names
116 (up to the system limit of 32K characters).
118 - Use Win32 API to implement os.{access,chdir,chmod,mkdir,remove,rename,rmdir,utime}.
119 As a result, these functions now raise WindowsError instead of OSError.
121 - ``time.clock()`` on Win64 should use the high-performance Windows
122 ``QueryPerformanceCounter()`` now (as was already the case on 32-bit
125 - Calling Tk_Init twice is refused if the first call failed as that
128 - bsddb: added the DB_ARCH_REMOVE flag and fixed db.DBEnv.log_archive() to
129 accept it without potentially using an uninitialized pointer.
131 - bsddb: added support for the DBEnv.log_stat() and DBEnv.lsn_reset() methods
132 assuming BerkeleyDB >= 4.0 and 4.4 respectively. [pybsddb project SF
133 patch numbers 1494885 and 1494902]
135 - bsddb: added an interface for the BerkeleyDB >= 4.3 DBSequence class.
136 [pybsddb project SF patch number 1466734]
138 - bsddb: fix DBCursor.pget() bug with keyword argument names when no data
139 parameter is supplied. [SF pybsddb bug #1477863]
141 - bsddb: the __len__ method of a DB object has been fixed to return correct
142 results. It could previously incorrectly return 0 in some cases.
143 Fixes SF bug 1493322 (pybsddb bug 1184012).
145 - bsddb: the bsddb.dbtables Modify method now raises the proper error and
146 aborts the db transaction safely when a modifier callback fails.
147 Fixes SF python patch/bug #1408584.
153 - Bug #1498146: fix optparse to handle Unicode strings in option help,
154 description, and epilog.
156 - Bug #1366250: minor optparse documentation error.
158 - Bug #1361643: fix textwrap.dedent() so it handles tabs appropriately;
161 - The wsgiref package has been added to the standard library.
163 - The functions update_wrapper() and wraps() have been added to the functools
164 module. These make it easier to copy relevant metadata from the original
165 function when writing wrapper functions.
167 - The optional ``isprivate`` argument to ``doctest.testmod()``, and the
168 ``doctest.is_private()`` function, both deprecated in 2.4, were removed.
170 - Patch #1359618: Speed up charmap encoder by using a trie structure
173 - The functions in the ``pprint`` module now sort dictionaries by key
174 before computing the display. Before 2.5, ``pprint`` sorted a dictionary
175 if and only if its display required more than one line, although that
176 wasn't documented. The new behavior increases predictability; e.g.,
177 using ``pprint.pprint(a_dict)`` in a doctest is now reliable.
179 - Patch #1497027: try HTTP digest auth before basic auth in urllib2
180 (thanks for J. J. Lee).
182 - Patch #1496206: improve urllib2 handling of passwords with respect to
183 default HTTP and HTTPS ports.
185 - Patch #1080727: add "encoding" parameter to doctest.DocFileSuite.
187 - Patch #1281707: speed up gzip.readline.
189 - Patch #1180296: Two new functions were added to the locale module:
190 format_string() to get the effect of "format % items" but locale-aware,
191 and currency() to format a monetary number with currency sign.
193 - Patch #1486962: Several bugs in the turtle Tk demo module were fixed
194 and several features added, such as speed and geometry control.
196 - Patch #1488881: add support for external file objects in bz2 compressed
199 - Patch #721464: pdb.Pdb instances can now be given explicit stdin and
200 stdout arguments, making it possible to redirect input and output
201 for remote debugging.
203 - Patch #1484695: Update the tarfile module to version 0.8. This fixes
204 a couple of issues, notably handling of long file names using the
205 GNU LONGNAME extension.
207 - Patch #1478292. ``doctest.register_optionflag(name)`` shouldn't create a
208 new flag when ``name`` is already the name of an option flag.
210 - Bug #1385040: don't allow "def foo(a=1, b): pass" in the compiler
213 - Patch #1472854: make the rlcompleter.Completer class usable on non-
216 - Patch #1470846: fix urllib2 ProxyBasicAuthHandler.
218 - Bug #1472827: correctly escape newlines and tabs in attribute values in
219 the saxutils.XMLGenerator class.
225 - Bug #1502728: Correctly link against librt library on HP-UX.
227 - OpenBSD 3.9 is supported now.
229 - Patch #1492356: Port to Windows CE.
231 - Bug/Patch #1481770: Use .so extension for shared libraries on HP-UX for ia64.
233 - Patch #1471883: Add --enable-universalsdk.
249 What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 2?
250 =================================
252 *Release date: 27-APR-2006*
257 - Bug #1465834: 'bdist_wininst preinstall script support' was fixed
258 by converting these apis from macros into exported functions again:
260 PyParser_SimpleParseFile PyParser_SimpleParseString PyRun_AnyFile
261 PyRun_AnyFileEx PyRun_AnyFileFlags PyRun_File PyRun_FileEx
262 PyRun_FileFlags PyRun_InteractiveLoop PyRun_InteractiveOne
263 PyRun_SimpleFile PyRun_SimpleFileEx PyRun_SimpleString
264 PyRun_String Py_CompileString
266 - Under COUNT_ALLOCS, types are not necessarily immortal anymore.
268 - All uses of PyStructSequence_InitType have been changed to initialize
269 the type objects only once, even if the interpreter is initialized
272 - Bug #1454485, array.array('u') could crash the interpreter. This was
273 due to PyArgs_ParseTuple(args, 'u#', ...) trying to convert buffers (strings)
274 to unicode when it didn't make sense. 'u#' now requires a unicode string.
276 - Py_UNICODE is unsigned. It was always documented as unsigned, but
277 due to a bug had a signed value in previous versions.
279 - Patch #837242: ``id()`` of any Python object always gives a positive
280 number now, which might be a long integer. ``PyLong_FromVoidPtr`` and
281 ``PyLong_AsVoidPtr`` have been changed accordingly. Note that it has
282 never been correct to implement a ``__hash()__`` method that returns the
283 ``id()`` of an object:
286 return id(self) # WRONG
288 because a hash result must be a (short) Python int but it was always
289 possible for ``id()`` to return a Python long. However, because ``id()``
290 could return negative values before, on a 32-bit box an ``id()`` result
291 was always usable as a hash value before this patch. That's no longer
294 - Python on OS X 10.3 and above now uses dlopen() (via dynload_shlib.c)
295 to load extension modules and now provides the dl module. As a result,
296 sys.setdlopenflags() now works correctly on these systems. (SF patch
299 - Patch #1463867: enhanced garbage collection to allow cleanup of cycles
300 involving generators that have paused outside of any ``try`` or ``with``
301 blocks. (In 2.5a1, a paused generator that was part of a reference
302 cycle could not be garbage collected, regardless of whether it was
303 paused in a ``try`` or ``with`` block.)
308 - Patch #1191065: Fix preprocessor problems on systems where recvfrom
311 - Bug #1467952: os.listdir() now correctly raises an error if readdir()
312 fails with an error condition.
314 - Fixed bsddb.db.DBError derived exceptions so they can be unpickled.
316 - Bug #1117761: bsddb.*open() no longer raises an exception when using
317 the cachesize parameter.
319 - Bug #1149413: bsddb.*open() no longer raises an exception when using
320 a temporary db (file=None) with the 'n' flag to truncate on open.
322 - Bug #1332852: bsddb module minimum BerkeleyDB version raised to 3.3
323 as older versions cause excessive test failures.
325 - Patch #1062014: AF_UNIX sockets under Linux have a special
326 abstract namespace that is now fully supported.
331 - Patch #1475231: ``doctest`` has a new ``SKIP`` option, which causes
332 a doctest to be skipped (the code is not run, and the expected output
333 or exception is ignored).
335 - Fixed contextlib.nested to cope with exceptions being raised and
336 caught inside exit handlers.
338 - Updated optparse module to Optik 1.5.1 (allow numeric constants in
339 hex, octal, or binary; add ``append_const`` action; keep going if
340 gettext cannot be imported; added ``OptionParser.destroy()`` method;
341 added ``epilog`` for better help generation).
343 - Bug #1473760: ``tempfile.TemporaryFile()`` could hang on Windows, when
344 called from a thread spawned as a side effect of importing a module.
346 - The pydoc module now supports documenting packages contained in
349 - The pkgutil module now has several new utility functions, such
350 as ``walk_packages()`` to support working with packages that are either
351 in the filesystem or zip files.
353 - The mailbox module can now modify and delete messages from
354 mailboxes, in addition to simply reading them. Thanks to Gregory
355 K. Johnson for writing the code, and to the 2005 Google Summer of
356 Code for funding his work.
358 - The ``__del__`` method of class ``local`` in module ``_threading_local``
359 returned before accomplishing any of its intended cleanup.
361 - Patch #790710: Add breakpoint command lists in pdb.
363 - Patch #1063914: Add Tkinter.Misc.clipboard_get().
365 - Patch #1191700: Adjust column alignment in bdb breakpoint lists.
367 - SimpleXMLRPCServer relied on the fcntl module, which is unavailable on
368 Windows. Bug #1469163.
370 - The warnings, linecache, inspect, traceback, site, and doctest modules
371 were updated to work correctly with modules imported from zipfiles or
372 via other PEP 302 __loader__ objects.
374 - Patch #1467770: Reduce usage of subprocess._active to processes which
375 the application hasn't waited on.
377 - Patch #1462222: Fix Tix.Grid.
379 - Fix exception when doing glob.glob('anything*/')
381 - The pstats.Stats class accepts an optional stream keyword argument to
382 direct output to an alternate file-like object.
387 - The Makefile now has a reindent target, which runs reindent.py on
390 - Patch #1470875: Building Python with MS Free Compiler
392 - Patch #1161914: Add a python-config script.
394 - Patch #1324762:Remove ccpython.cc; replace --with-cxx with
395 --with-cxx-main. Link with C++ compiler only if --with-cxx-main was
396 specified. (Can be overridden by explicitly setting LINKCC.) Decouple
397 CXX from --with-cxx-main, see description in README.
399 - Patch #1429775: Link extension modules with the shared libpython.
401 - Fixed a libffi build problem on MIPS systems.
403 - ``PyString_FromFormat``, ``PyErr_Format``, and ``PyString_FromFormatV``
404 now accept formats "%u" for unsigned ints, "%lu" for unsigned longs,
405 and "%zu" for unsigned integers of type ``size_t``.
410 - test_contextlib now checks contextlib.nested can cope with exceptions
411 being raised and caught inside exit handlers.
413 - test_cmd_line now checks operation of the -m and -c command switches
415 - The test_contextlib test in 2.5a1 wasn't actually run unless you ran
416 it separately and by hand. It also wasn't cleaning up its changes to
417 the current Decimal context.
419 - regrtest.py now has a -M option to run tests that test the new limits of
420 containers, on 64-bit architectures. Running these tests is only sensible
421 on 64-bit machines with more than two gigabytes of memory. The argument
422 passed is the maximum amount of memory for the tests to use.
427 - Added the Python benchmark suite pybench to the Tools/ directory;
428 contributed by Marc-Andre Lemburg.
433 - Patch #1473132: Improve docs for ``tp_clear`` and ``tp_traverse``.
435 - PEP 343: Added Context Types section to the library reference
436 and attempted to bring other PEP 343 related documentation into
437 line with the implementation and/or python-dev discussions.
439 - Bug #1337990: clarified that ``doctest`` does not support examples
440 requiring both expected output and an exception.
443 What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
444 =================================
446 *Release date: 05-APR-2006*
451 - PEP 338: -m command line switch now delegates to runpy.run_module
452 allowing it to support modules in packages and zipfiles
454 - On Windows, .DLL is not an accepted file name extension for
455 extension modules anymore; extensions are only found if they
458 - Bug #1421664: sys.stderr.encoding is now set to the same value as
461 - __import__ accepts keyword arguments.
463 - Patch #1460496: round() now accepts keyword arguments.
465 - Fixed bug #1459029 - unicode reprs were double-escaped.
467 - Patch #1396919: The system scope threads are reenabled on FreeBSD
468 5.4 and later versions.
470 - Bug #1115379: Compiling a Unicode string with an encoding declaration
471 now gives a SyntaxError.
473 - Previously, Python code had no easy way to access the contents of a
474 cell object. Now, a ``cell_contents`` attribute has been added
475 (closes patch #1170323).
477 - Patch #1123430: Python's small-object allocator now returns an arena to
478 the system ``free()`` when all memory within an arena becomes unused
479 again. Prior to Python 2.5, arenas (256KB chunks of memory) were never
480 freed. Some applications will see a drop in virtual memory size now,
481 especially long-running applications that, from time to time, temporarily
482 use a large number of small objects. Note that when Python returns an
483 arena to the platform C's ``free()``, there's no guarantee that the
484 platform C library will in turn return that memory to the operating system.
485 The effect of the patch is to stop making that impossible, and in tests it
486 appears to be effective at least on Microsoft C and gcc-based systems.
487 Thanks to Evan Jones for hard work and patience.
489 - Patch #1434038: property() now uses the getter's docstring if there is
490 no "doc" argument given. This makes it possible to legitimately use
491 property() as a decorator to produce a read-only property.
493 - PEP 357, patch 1436368: add an __index__ method to int/long and a matching
494 nb_index slot to the PyNumberMethods struct. The slot is consulted instead
495 of requiring an int or long in slicing and a few other contexts, enabling
496 other objects (e.g. Numeric Python's integers) to be used as slice indices.
498 - Fixed various bugs reported by Coverity's Prevent tool.
500 - PEP 352, patch #1104669: Make exceptions new-style objects. Introduced the
501 new exception base class, BaseException, which has a new message attribute.
502 KeyboardInterrupt and SystemExit to directly inherit from BaseException now.
503 Raising a string exception now raises a DeprecationWarning.
505 - Patch #1438387, PEP 328: relative and absolute imports. Imports can now be
506 explicitly relative, using 'from .module import name' to mean 'from the same
507 package as this module is in. Imports without dots still default to the
508 old relative-then-absolute, unless 'from __future__ import
509 absolute_import' is used.
511 - Properly check if 'warnings' raises an exception (usually when a filter set
512 to "error" is triggered) when raising a warning for raising string
515 - CO_GENERATOR_ALLOWED is no longer defined. This behavior is the default.
516 The name was removed from Include/code.h.
518 - PEP 308: conditional expressions were added: (x if cond else y).
521 - The copy module now "copies" function objects (as atomic objects).
522 - dict.__getitem__ now looks for a __missing__ hook before raising
525 - PEP 343: with statement implemented. Needs ``from __future__ import
526 with_statement``. Use of 'with' as a variable will generate a warning.
527 Use of 'as' as a variable will also generate a warning (unless it's
528 part of an import statement).
529 The following objects have __context__ methods:
530 - The built-in file type.
531 - The thread.LockType type.
532 - The following types defined by the threading module:
533 Lock, RLock, Condition, Semaphore, BoundedSemaphore.
534 - The decimal.Context class.
536 - Fix the encodings package codec search function to only search
537 inside its own package. Fixes problem reported in patch #1433198.
539 Note: Codec packages should implement and register their own
540 codec search function. PEP 100 has the details.
542 - PEP 353: Using ``Py_ssize_t`` as the index type.
544 - ``PYMALLOC_DEBUG`` builds now add ``4*sizeof(size_t)`` bytes of debugging
545 info to each allocated block, since the ``Py_ssize_t`` changes (PEP 353)
546 now allow Python to make use of memory blocks exceeding 2**32 bytes for
547 some purposes on 64-bit boxes. A ``PYMALLOC_DEBUG`` build was limited
548 to 4-byte allocations before.
550 - Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
551 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
552 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
554 - Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
555 configure would break checking curses.h.
557 - Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
558 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
560 - Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
562 - Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
564 - Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
566 - Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
567 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
569 - Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
570 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.subversion. Build number
571 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
573 - Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
574 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
575 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
577 - Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
578 now encodes backslash correctly.
580 - Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
582 - Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correctly even with unsigned longs
585 - SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
586 It was possible for dlerror() to return a NULL pointer, so
587 it will now use a default error message in this case.
589 - Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
590 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
591 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
592 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
593 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
595 - Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
597 - Sped up some Unicode operations.
599 - A new AST parser implementation was completed. The abstract
600 syntax tree is available for read-only (non-compile) access
601 to Python code; an _ast module was added.
603 - SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being produced for generator expressions.
604 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
606 - SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
608 - SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
609 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
611 - Fix segfault with invalid coding.
613 - SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
615 - All iterators now have a Boolean value of True. Formerly, some iterators
616 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
619 - On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
620 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
622 - test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
625 - SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
628 - Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
629 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
630 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
632 - Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
633 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
635 - Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
636 (fixes bug #1119418).
638 - Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
640 - SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
641 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
643 - The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
644 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
645 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
647 - SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
649 - SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
650 reference counts in some error exit cases.
652 - SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
653 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
654 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
655 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so there's no
656 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
657 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
658 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
661 - SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
662 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
664 - SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
665 like their int counterparts.
667 - SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
668 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
669 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
670 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
671 for a longer write-up of the problem).
673 - SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
676 - SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
677 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
678 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
680 - bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
683 - patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
684 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
685 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
686 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
687 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
689 Thanks Walter D�rwald.
691 - Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
692 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
693 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
694 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
696 - It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
697 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
698 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
699 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
700 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
702 - Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
703 disabled caused a crash.
705 - Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
706 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
708 - Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
709 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
711 - Added two new builtins, any() and all().
713 - Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
714 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
715 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
716 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
718 - Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
720 - Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
723 - Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
724 ('\') with a specific error message.
726 - Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
728 - Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
729 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
731 - Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
734 - min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
737 - The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
740 - set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
742 - Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
743 in calls to os.read().
745 - The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
746 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
747 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
749 - Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
750 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
751 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
753 - Patch #1413181: changed ``PyThreadState_Delete()`` to forget about the
754 current thread state when the auto-GIL-state machinery knows about
755 it (since the thread state is being deleted, continuing to remember it
756 can't help, but can hurt if another thread happens to get created with
762 - Patch #1380952: fix SSL objects timing out on consecutive read()s
764 - Patch #1309579: wait3 and wait4 were added to the posix module.
766 - Patch #1231053: The audioop module now supports encoding/decoding of alaw.
767 In addition, the existing ulaw code was updated.
769 - RFE #567972: Socket objects' family, type and proto properties are
770 now exposed via new attributes.
772 - Everything under lib-old was removed. This includes the following modules:
773 Para, addpack, cmp, cmpcache, codehack, dircmp, dump, find, fmt, grep,
774 lockfile, newdir, ni, packmail, poly, rand, statcache, tb, tzparse,
775 util, whatsound, whrandom, zmod
777 - The following modules were removed: regsub, reconvert, regex, regex_syntax.
779 - re and sre were swapped, so help(re) provides full help. importing sre
780 is deprecated. The undocumented re.engine variable no longer exists.
782 - Bug #1448490: Fixed a bug that ISO-2022 codecs could not handle
783 SS2 (single-shift 2) escape sequences correctly.
785 - The unicodedata module was updated to the 4.1 version of the Unicode
786 database. The 3.2 version is still available as unicodedata.db_3_2_0
787 for applications that require this specific version (such as IDNA).
789 - The timing module is no longer built by default. It was deprecated
790 in PEP 4 in Python 2.0 or earlier.
792 - Patch 1433928: Added a new type, defaultdict, to the collections module.
793 This uses the new __missing__ hook behavior added to dict (see above).
795 - Bug #854823: socketmodule now builds on Sun platforms even when
796 INET_ADDRSTRLEN is not defined.
798 - Patch #1393157: os.startfile() now has an optional argument to specify
799 a "command verb" to invoke on the file.
801 - Bug #876637, prevent stack corruption when socket descriptor
802 is larger than FD_SETSIZE.
804 - Patch #1407135, bug #1424041: harmonize mmap behavior of anonymous memory.
805 mmap.mmap(-1, size) now returns anonymous memory in both Unix and Windows.
806 mmap.mmap(0, size) should not be used on Windows for anonymous memory.
808 - Patch #1422385: The nis module now supports access to domains other
809 than the system default domain.
811 - Use Win32 API to implement os.stat/fstat. As a result, subsecond timestamps
812 are reported, the limit on path name lengths is removed, and stat reports
813 WindowsError now (instead of OSError).
815 - Add bsddb.db.DBEnv.set_tx_timestamp allowing time based database recovery.
817 - Bug #1413192, fix seg fault in bsddb if a transaction was deleted
820 - Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
822 - Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
824 - Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
825 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
826 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
828 - Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
829 without prior setting of the userptr.
831 - Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
833 - Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
835 - Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
838 - Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
840 - Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
842 - Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
844 - Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
845 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
847 - Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using
848 BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1.
850 - Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4
852 - Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2
854 - Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
855 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
857 - Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
859 - Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
860 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
862 - Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
863 returns in cStringIO.c.
865 - Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
866 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
868 - Fix memory leak in posix.access().
870 - Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
872 - Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
873 the file system encoding.
875 - Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
876 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
878 - Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
880 - Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
881 line without newlines.
883 - Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
886 - Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
887 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
889 - Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
890 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
891 for large or negative values.
893 - Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
894 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
896 - Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
898 - Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
899 if available on the platform.
901 - Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
902 available on the platform.
904 - Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
905 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
907 - collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
909 - operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
910 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
911 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
913 - os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
915 - Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
916 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
918 - Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
921 - Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
923 - Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
924 {remove_history,replace_history}
926 - The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
929 - stat_float_times is now True.
931 - array.array objects are now picklable.
933 - the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
934 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
936 - itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
937 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
938 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
940 - datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
941 create datetime object using a string and format.
943 - Patch #1117961: Replace the MD5 implementation from RSA Data Security Inc
944 with the implementation from http://sourceforge.net/projects/libmd5-rfc/.
949 - PEP 338: new module runpy defines a run_module function to support
950 executing modules which provide access to source code or a code object
951 via the PEP 302 import mechanisms.
953 - The email module's parsedate_tz function now sets the daylight savings
954 flag to -1 (unknown) since it can't tell from the date whether it should
957 - Patch #624325: urlparse.urlparse() and urlparse.urlsplit() results
958 now sport attributes that provide access to the parts of the result.
960 - Patch #1462498: sgmllib now handles entity and character references
963 - Added the sqlite3 package. This is based on pysqlite2.1.3, and provides
964 a DB-API interface in the standard library. You'll need sqlite 3.0.8 or
965 later to build this - if you have an earlier version, the C extension
966 module will not be built.
968 - Bug #1460340: ``random.sample(dict)`` failed in various ways. Dicts
969 aren't officially supported here, and trying to use them will probably
970 raise an exception some day. But dicts have been allowed, and "mostly
971 worked", so support for them won't go away without warning.
973 - Bug #1445068: getpass.getpass() can now be given an explicit stream
974 argument to specify where to write the prompt.
976 - Patch #1462313, bug #1443328: the pickle modules now can handle classes
977 that have __private names in their __slots__.
979 - Bug #1250170: mimetools now handles socket.gethostname() failures gracefully.
981 - patch #1457316: "setup.py upload" now supports --identity to select the
982 key to be used for signing the uploaded code.
984 - Queue.Queue objects now support .task_done() and .join() methods
985 to make it easier to monitor when daemon threads have completed
986 processing all enqueued tasks. Patch #1455676.
988 - popen2.Popen objects now preserve the command in a .cmd attribute.
990 - Added the ctypes ffi package.
992 - email 4.0 package now integrated. This is largely the same as the email 3.0
993 package that was included in Python 2.3, except that PEP 8 module names are
994 now used (e.g. mail.message instead of email.Message). The MIME classes
995 have been moved to a subpackage (e.g. email.mime.text instead of
996 email.MIMEText). The old names are still supported for now. Several
997 deprecated Message methods have been removed and lots of bugs have been
998 fixed. More details can be found in the email package documentation.
1000 - Patches #1436130/#1443155: codecs.lookup() now returns a CodecInfo object
1001 (a subclass of tuple) that provides incremental decoders and encoders
1002 (a way to use stateful codecs without the stream API). Python functions
1003 codecs.getincrementaldecoder() and codecs.getincrementalencoder() as well
1004 as C functions PyCodec_IncrementalEncoder() and PyCodec_IncrementalDecoder()
1007 - Patch #1359365: Calling next() on a closed StringIO.String object raises
1008 a ValueError instead of a StopIteration now (like file and cString.String do).
1009 cStringIO.StringIO.isatty() will raise a ValueError now if close() has been
1010 called before (like file and StringIO.StringIO do).
1012 - A regrtest option -w was added to re-run failed tests in verbose mode.
1014 - Patch #1446372: quit and exit can now be called from the interactive
1015 interpreter to exit.
1017 - The function get_count() has been added to the gc module, and gc.collect()
1018 grew an optional 'generation' argument.
1020 - A library msilib to generate Windows Installer files, and a distutils
1021 command bdist_msi have been added.
1023 - PEP 343: new module contextlib.py defines decorator @contextmanager
1024 and helpful context managers nested() and closing().
1026 - The compiler package now supports future imports after the module docstring.
1028 - Bug #1413790: zipfile now sanitizes absolute archive names that are
1029 not allowed by the specs.
1031 - Patch #1215184: FileInput now can be given an opening hook which can
1032 be used to control how files are opened.
1034 - Patch #1212287: fileinput.input() now has a mode parameter for
1035 specifying the file mode input files should be opened with.
1037 - Patch #1215184: fileinput now has a fileno() function for getting the
1038 current file number.
1040 - Patch #1349274: gettext.install() now optionally installs additional
1041 translation functions other than _() in the builtin namespace.
1043 - Patch #1337756: fileinput now accepts Unicode filenames.
1045 - Patch #1373643: The chunk module can now read chunks larger than
1048 - Patch #1417555: SimpleHTTPServer now returns Last-Modified headers.
1050 - Bug #1430298: It is now possible to send a mail with an empty
1051 return address using smtplib.
1053 - Bug #1432260: The names of lambda functions are now properly displayed
1056 - Patch #1412872: zipfile now sets the creator system to 3 (Unix)
1057 unless the system is Win32.
1059 - Patch #1349118: urllib now supports user:pass@ style proxy
1060 specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols
1061 are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections.
1063 - Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications.
1065 - Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.
1067 - Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
1069 - Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
1072 - Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
1073 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
1075 - Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
1077 - Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
1079 - Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
1080 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
1081 LoadError subclasses IOError.
1083 - Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
1084 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
1085 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
1086 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
1087 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
1089 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
1090 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
1091 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
1092 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
1093 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
1095 - Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
1096 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
1097 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
1099 - Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
1101 - Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
1103 - Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
1104 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
1107 - Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
1108 is an error in the format string.
1110 - Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
1112 - Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
1115 - Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
1118 - Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
1119 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
1121 - Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
1122 to get the correct encoding.
1124 - Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
1127 - Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
1129 - Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
1131 - Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
1133 - Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
1136 - Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
1138 - Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
1139 separator and do not output trailing semicolon.
1141 - Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
1142 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
1143 match the Content-Length header.
1145 - Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
1147 - Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
1148 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
1149 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
1151 - Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
1153 - Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
1155 - Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
1156 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
1158 - Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
1159 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
1162 - Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
1163 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
1165 - Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
1166 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
1168 - textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
1169 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
1171 - urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
1172 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
1174 - Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
1175 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
1177 - Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module;
1178 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
1180 - Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
1182 - Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
1185 - Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
1187 - The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
1190 - The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
1191 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python source code. In addition,
1192 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
1193 terminates by raising StopIteration.
1195 - Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
1197 - Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
1198 component of the path.
1200 - Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
1201 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
1202 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
1205 - distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
1208 - distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
1211 - decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
1212 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
1213 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
1216 - Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
1217 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
1219 - Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
1220 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
1222 - Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
1224 - Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
1227 - Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
1228 symbolic links on Windows.
1230 - Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
1231 profile.py if available.
1233 - Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
1235 - Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
1238 - Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
1240 - Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
1242 - Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
1244 - Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
1246 - Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
1248 - Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
1250 - Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
1252 - Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
1254 - Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
1255 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
1256 be exploited in various ways.
1258 - Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
1259 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
1261 - Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
1262 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
1264 - Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
1265 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
1267 - Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
1269 - Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
1271 - os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
1273 - Enhancements to the csv module:
1275 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
1276 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
1278 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
1280 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
1282 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
1283 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
1284 types, rather than any object that can be represented as a numeric.
1285 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
1287 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
1289 + writer doublequote handling improved.
1290 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
1291 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
1292 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
1293 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
1294 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
1295 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
1296 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
1297 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
1298 without first creating a dialect class.
1299 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
1300 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
1301 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
1302 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
1303 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
1305 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
1306 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
1307 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
1309 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
1310 This has been fixed.
1312 - _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
1313 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
1314 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
1315 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
1317 - The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
1319 - StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
1322 - locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
1323 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
1324 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
1325 encoding alias table.
1327 - moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
1329 - the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
1330 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
1332 - optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
1334 - the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
1336 - the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
1338 - the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
1340 - the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
1342 - unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
1343 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
1344 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
1346 - heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
1347 the same meaning as in list.sort().
1349 - Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
1350 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
1351 tokenizer with very long source lines.
1353 - Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
1354 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
1355 ``.decompress()`` calls.
1357 - The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
1358 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
1360 - ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
1361 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
1363 - Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
1366 - Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
1367 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
1368 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
1369 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
1372 - Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
1373 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
1376 - Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
1377 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
1378 encoding instead of a unicode string.
1380 - Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
1381 considering it exactly like a '*'.
1383 - Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
1384 ``encodings.aliases``.
1386 - ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
1388 - Patch #1413711: Certain patterns of differences were making difflib
1389 touch the recursion limit.
1391 - Bug #947906: An object oriented interface has been added to the calendar
1392 module. It's possible to generate HTML calendar now and the module can be
1393 called as a script (e.g. via ``python -mcalendar``). Localized month and
1394 weekday names can be ouput (even if an exotic encoding is used) using
1395 special classes that use unicode.
1400 - Fix test_float, test_long, and test_struct failures on Tru64 with gcc
1401 by using -mieee gcc option.
1403 - Patch #1432345: Make python compile on DragonFly.
1405 - Build support for Win64-AMD64 was added.
1407 - Patch #1428494: Prefer linking against ncursesw over ncurses library.
1409 - Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
1411 - The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
1412 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
1414 - Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
1416 - Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
1417 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
1419 - Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
1420 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
1422 - EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
1423 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
1424 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
1425 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
1427 - SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
1428 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
1429 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
1431 - Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
1433 - spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
1434 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
1436 - setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
1437 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
1438 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
1439 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
1440 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
1441 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
1442 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
1443 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
1445 - Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
1446 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
1447 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
1448 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
1453 - ``PyMem_{Del, DEL}`` and ``PyMem_{Free, FREE}`` no longer map to
1454 ``PyObject_{Free, FREE}``. They map to the system ``free()`` now. If memory
1455 is obtained via the ``PyObject_`` family, it must be released via the
1456 ``PyObject_`` family, and likewise for the ``PyMem_`` family. This has
1457 always been officially true, but when Python's small-object allocator was
1458 introduced, an attempt was made to cater to a few extension modules
1459 discovered at the time that obtained memory via ``PyObject_New`` but
1460 released it via ``PyMem_DEL``. It's years later, and if such code still
1461 exists it will fail now (probably with segfaults, but calling wrong
1462 low-level memory management functions can yield many symptoms).
1464 - Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
1466 - Removed PyRange_New().
1468 - Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
1469 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
1470 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
1477 - In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
1479 - Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
1480 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
1486 - Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.
1488 - Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
1489 values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
1491 - Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
1493 - Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
1495 - Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
1497 - Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
1499 - Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
1501 - Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
1503 - Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
1505 - Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
1507 - Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
1509 - Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
1510 Closes bug #1166582.
1512 - Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
1513 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
1514 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
1523 - FreeBSD 7 support is added.
1529 - Created Misc/Vim/vim_syntax.py to auto-generate a python.vim file in that
1530 directory for syntax highlighting in Vim. Vim directory was added and placed
1531 vimrc to it (was previous up a level).
1533 - Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
1534 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
1535 source files that need an encoding declaration.
1536 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
1538 - Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
1540 - Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
1542 - Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
1543 wiggle over by a pixel.
1547 **(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**