5 (editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
7 What's New in Python 2.7 alpha 1
8 ================================
10 *Release date: XX-XXX-20XX*
15 - Issue #5793: Rationalize isdigit / isalpha / tolower, etc. Includes
16 new Py_ISDIGIT / Py_ISALPHA / Py_TOLOWER, etc. in pctypes.h.
18 - Issue #4971: Fix titlecase for characters that are their own
19 titlecase, but not their own uppercase.
21 - Issue #5835: Deprecate PyOS_ascii_formatd and replace it with
22 _PyOS_double_to_string or PyOS_double_to_string.
24 - Issue #5283: Setting __class__ in __del__ caused a segfault.
26 - Issue #5816: complex(repr(z)) now recovers z exactly, even when
27 z involves nans, infs or negative zeros.
29 - Implement PEP 378, Format Specifier for Thousands Separator, for
30 floats, ints, and longs.
32 - Issue #5515: 'n' formatting for ints, longs, and floats handles
33 leading zero formatting poorly.
35 - Issue #5772: For float.__format__, don't add a trailing ".0" if
36 we're using no type code and we have an exponent.
38 - Issue #3166: Make long -> float (and int -> float) conversions
41 - Issue #5787: object.__getattribute__(some_type, "__bases__") segfaulted on
44 - Issue #1869: fix a couple of minor round() issues. round(5e15+1)
45 was giving 5e15+2; round(-0.0) was losing the sign of the zero.
47 - Issue #5759: float() didn't call __float__ on str subclasses.
49 - Issue #5704: the "-3" command-line option now implies "-t".
51 - Issue #2170: refactored xml.dom.minidom.normalize, increasing both
52 its clarity and its speed.
54 - Issue #2396: the memoryview object was backported from Python 3.1.
56 - Fix a problem in PyErr_NormalizeException that leads to "undetected errors"
57 when hitting the recursion limit under certain circumstances.
59 - Issue #1665206: Remove the last eager import in _warnings.c and make it lazy.
61 - Issue #4865: On MacOSX /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages is added to
62 the end sys.path, for compatibility with the system install of Python.
64 - Issue #4688: Add a heuristic so that tuples and dicts containing only
65 untrackable objects are not tracked by the garbage collector. This can
66 reduce the size of collections and therefore the garbage collection overhead
67 on long-running programs, depending on their particular use of datatypes.
69 - Issue #5512: Rewrite PyLong long division algorithm (x_divrem) to
70 improve its performance. Long divisions and remainder operations
71 are now between 50% and 150% faster.
73 - Issue #4258: Make it possible to use base 2**30 instead of base
74 2**15 for the internal representation of integers, for performance
75 reasons. Base 2**30 is enabled by default on 64-bit machines. Add
76 --enable-big-digits option to configure, which overrides the
77 default. Add sys.long_info structseq to provide information about
80 - Issue #4034: Fix weird attribute error messages of the traceback object. (As a
81 result traceback.__members__ no longer exists.)
83 - Issue #4474: PyUnicode_FromWideChar now converts characters outside
84 the BMP to surrogate pairs, on systems with sizeof(wchar_t) == 4
85 and sizeof(Py_UNICODE) == 2.
87 - Issue #5237: Allow auto-numbered fields in str.format(). For
88 example: '{} {}'.format(1, 2) == '1 2'.
90 - Issue #3652: Make the 'line' argument for warnings.showwarning() a
91 requirement. Means the DeprecationWarning from Python 2.6 can go away.
93 - Issue #5247: Improve error message when unknown format codes are
94 used when using str.format() with str, unicode, long, int, and
97 - Running Python with the -3 option now also warns about classic division
100 - Issue #5260: Long integers now consume less memory: average
101 saving is 2 bytes per long on a 32-bit system and 6 bytes per long
104 - Issue #5186: Reduce hash collisions for objects with no __hash__ method by
105 rotating the object pointer by 4 bits to the right.
107 - Issue #4575: Fix Py_IS_INFINITY macro to work correctly on x87 FPUs:
108 it now forces its argument to double before testing for infinity.
110 - Issue #4978: Passing keyword arguments as unicode strings is now allowed.
112 - Issue #1242657: the __len__() and __length_hint__() calls in several tools
113 were suppressing all exceptions. These include list(), filter(), map(),
114 zip(), and bytearray().
116 - os.ftruncate raises OSErrors instead of IOErrors for consistency with other os
119 - Issue #4991: Passing invalid file descriptors to io.FileIO now raises an
122 - Issue #4807: Port the _winreg module to Windows CE.
124 - Issue #4935: The overflow checking code in the expandtabs() method common
125 to str, bytes and bytearray could be optimized away by the compiler, letting
126 the interpreter segfault instead of raising an error.
128 - Issue #3720: Fix a crash when an iterator modifies its class and removes its
131 - Issue #4893: Use NT threading on CE.
133 - Issue #4915: Port sysmodule to Windows CE.
135 - Issue #4074: Change the criteria for doing a full garbage collection (i.e.
136 collecting the oldest generation) so that allocating lots of objects without
137 destroying them does not show quadratic performance. Based on a proposal by
139 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2008-June/080579.html.
141 - Issue #4850: Change COUNT_ALLOCS variables to Py_ssize_t.
143 - Issue #1180193: When importing a module from a .pyc (or .pyo) file with
144 an existing .py counterpart, override the co_filename attributes of all
145 code objects if the original filename is obsolete (which can happen if the
146 file has been renamed, moved, or if it is accessed through different paths).
147 Patch by Ziga Seilnacht and Jean-Paul Calderone.
149 - Issue #4075: Use OutputDebugStringW in Py_FatalError.
151 - Issue #4797: IOError.filename was not set when _fileio.FileIO failed to open
152 file with `str' filename on Windows.
154 - Issue #3680: Reference cycles created through a dict, set or deque iterator
155 did not get collected.
157 - Issue #4701: PyObject_Hash now implicitly calls PyType_Ready on types
158 where the tp_hash and tp_dict slots are both NULL.
160 - Issue #4764: With io.open, IOError.filename is set when trying to open a
161 directory on POSIX systems.
163 - Issue #4764: IOError.filename is set when trying to open a directory on POSIX
166 - Issue #4759: None is now allowed as the first argument of
167 bytearray.translate(). It was always allowed for bytes.translate().
169 - Added test case to ensure attempts to read from a file opened for writing
172 - Issue #2467: gc.DEBUG_STATS reported invalid elapsed times. Also, always
173 print elapsed times, not only when some objects are uncollectable /
174 unreachable. Original patch by Neil Schemenauer.
176 - Issue #3439: Add a bit_length method to int and long.
178 - Issue #2183: Simplify and optimize bytecode for list comprehensions.
179 Original patch by Neal Norwitz.
181 - Issue #4597: Fixed exception handling when the __exit__ function of a
182 context manager returns a value that cannot be converted to a bool.
184 - Issue #4597: Fixed several opcodes that weren't always propagating
187 - Issue #4445: Replace "sizeof(PyStringObject)" with
188 "offsetof(PyStringObject, ob_sval) + 1" when allocating memory for
189 str instances. On a typical machine this saves 3 bytes of memory
190 (on average) per string allocation.
192 - Issue #3996: On Windows, the PyOS_CheckStack function would cause the
193 interpreter to abort ("Fatal Python error: Could not reset the stack!")
194 instead of throwing a MemoryError.
196 - Issue #3689: The list reversed iterator now supports __length_hint__
197 instead of __len__. Behavior now matches other reversed iterators.
199 - Issue #4367: Python would segfault during compiling when the unicodedata
200 module couldn't be imported and \N escapes were present.
202 - Issue #4233: Changed semantic of ``_fileio.FileIO``'s ``close()``
203 method on file objects with closefd=False. The file descriptor is still
204 kept open but the file object behaves like a closed file. The ``FileIO``
205 object also got a new readonly attribute ``closefd``.
207 - Issue #4348: Some bytearray methods returned that didn't cause any change to
208 the bytearray, returned the same bytearray instead of a copy.
210 - Issue #4317: Fixed a crash in the imageop.rgb2rgb8() function.
212 - Issue #4230: If ``__getattr__`` is a descriptor, it now functions correctly.
214 - Issue #4048: The parser module now correctly validates relative imports.
216 - Issue #4225: ``from __future__ import unicode_literals`` didn't work in an
219 - Issue #4176: Fixed a crash when pickling an object which ``__reduce__``
220 method does not return iterators for the 4th and 5th items.
222 - Issue #4209: Enabling unicode_literals and the print_function in the same
223 __future__ import didn't work.
225 - Using ``nonlocal`` as a variable name will now raise a Py3k SyntaxWarning
226 because it is a reserved word in 3.x.
228 - On windows, os.chdir given unicode was not working if GetCurrentDirectoryW
229 returned a path longer than MAX_PATH. (But It's doubtful this code path is
230 really executed because I cannot move to such directory on win2k)
232 - Issue #4069: When set.remove(element) is used with a set element, the element
233 is temporarily replaced with an equivalent frozenset. But the eventual
234 KeyError would always report the empty frozenset([]) as the missing key. Now
235 it correctly refers to the initial element.
237 - Issue #4509: Various issues surrounding resize of bytearray objects to
238 which there are buffer exports.
240 - Issue #4748: Lambda generators no longer return a value.
242 - Issue #3582: Use native TLS functions on Windows
244 - The re.sub(), re.subn() and re.split() functions now accept a flags parameter.
246 - Issue #3845: In PyRun_SimpleFileExFlags avoid invalid memory access with
249 - Issue #1113244: Py_XINCREF, Py_DECREF, Py_XDECREF: Add `do { ... } while (0)'
250 to avoid compiler warnings.
252 - Issue #5705: os.setuid() would not accept values > 2**31-1 but pwd.getpwnam()
253 returned them on 64bit platforms.
258 - Issue #5853: calling a function of the mimetypes module from several threads
259 at once could hit the recursion limit if the mimetypes database hadn't been
262 - Issue #5854: Updated __all__ to include some missing names and remove some
263 names which should not be exported.
265 - Issue #5810: Fixed Distutils test_build_scripts so it uses
266 sysconfig.get_config_vars.
268 - Issue #4951: Fixed failure in test_httpservers.
270 - Issue #3102: All global symbols that the _ctypes extension defines
271 are now prefixed with 'Py' or '_ctypes'.
273 - Issue #5041: ctypes does now allow pickling wide character.
275 - Issue #5812: For the two-argument form of the Fraction constructor,
276 Fraction(m, n), m and n are permitted to be arbitrary Rational
279 - Issue #5812: Fraction('1e6') is valid: more generally, any string
280 that's valid for float() is now valid for Fraction(), with the
281 exception of strings representing NaNs and infinities.
283 - Issue #5795: Fixed test_distutils failure on Debian ppc.
285 - Issue #5768: Fixed bug in Unicode output logic and test case for same.
287 - Issue #1161031: fix readwrite select flag handling: POLLPRI now
288 results in a handle_expt_event call, not handle_read_event, and POLLERR
289 and POLLNVAL now call handle_close, not handle_expt_event. Also,
290 dispatcher now has an 'ignore_log_types' attribute for suppressing
291 log messages, which is set to 'warning' by default.
293 - Issue #5607: fixed Distutils test_get_platform for Mac OS X fat binaries.
295 - Issue #5741: don't disallow "%%" (which is an escape for "%") when setting
296 a value in SafeConfigParser.
298 - Issue #5732: added a new command in Distutils: check.
300 - Issue #5731: Distutils bdist_wininst no longer worked on non-Windows
301 platforms. Initial patch by Paul Moore.
303 - Issue #2254: Fix CGIHTTPServer information disclosure. Relative paths are
304 now collapsed within the url properly before looking in cgi_directories.
306 - Issue #5095: Added bdist_msi to the list of bdist supported formats.
307 Initial fix by Steven Bethard.
309 - Issue #1491431: Fixed distutils.filelist.glob_to_re for edge cases.
310 Initial fix by Wayne Davison.
312 - Issue #5693: TestSuite.__iter__ can now be consistently overridden in subclasses.
314 - Issue #5694: removed spurious test output in Distutils (test_clean).
316 - Issue #5471: Fix os.path.expanduser() for $HOME set to '/'.
318 - Issue #1326077: fix the formatting of SyntaxErrors by the traceback module.
320 - Issue #1726172: fix IndexError in the case of and empty response in ftplib.
322 - Issue #2625: added missing iteritems() call to the for loop in
323 mailbox.MH.get_message().
325 - Issue #5585: Add the ability to call an initializer to mulitiprocessing.manager
326 so that users can install custom handlers/etc.
328 - Issue #3551: Patch multiprocessing to raise a proper exception if the size of the
329 object when writefile is called causes a ERROR_NO_SYSTEM_RESOURCES. Added docs
330 to note the limitation
332 - unittest.assertNotEqual() now uses the inequality operator (!=) instead
333 of the equality operator.
335 - Issue #5663: better failure messages for unittest asserts. Default assertTrue
336 and assertFalse messages are now useful. TestCase has a longMessage attribute.
337 This defaults to False, but if set to True useful error messages are shown in
338 addition to explicit messages passed to assert methods.
340 - Issue #3110: Add additional protect around SEM_VALUE_MAX for multiprocessing
342 - In Pdb, prevent the reassignment of __builtin__._ by sys.displayhook on
345 - Issue #4572: added SEEK_* symbolic constants to io module.
347 - Issue #1665206 (partially): Move imports in cgitb to the top of the module
348 instead of performing them in functions. Helps prevent import deadlocking in
351 - Issue #5647: MutableSet.__iand__() no longer mutates self during iteration.
353 - Actually make the SimpleXMLRPCServer CGI handler work.
355 - Issue #2522: locale.format now checks its first argument to ensure it has
356 been passed only one pattern, avoiding mysterious errors where it appeared
357 that it was failing to do localization.
359 - Issue #5583: Added optional Extensions in Distutils. Initial patch by Georg
362 - Issue #5619: Multiprocessing children disobey the debug flag and causes
363 popups on windows buildbots. Patch applied to work around this issue.
365 - Issue #5632: Thread.ident was None for the main thread and threads not created
366 with the threading module.
368 - Issue #5400: Added patch for multiprocessing on netbsd compilation/support
370 - Issue #5387: Fixed mmap.move crash by integer overflow.
372 - Issue #5261: Patch multiprocessing's semaphore.c to support context
373 manager use: "with multiprocessing.Lock()" works now.
375 - Issue #5177: Multiprocessing's SocketListener class now uses
376 socket.SO_REUSEADDR on all connections so that the user no longer needs
377 to wait 120 seconds for the socket to expire.
379 - Adjusted _tkinter to compile without warnings when WITH_THREAD is not
380 defined (part of issue #5035).
382 - Issue #5561: Removed the sys.version_info shortcuts from platform's
383 python_version() and python_version_tuple() since they produced different
384 output compared to previous Python versions.
386 - Issue #1034053: unittest now supports skipping tests and expected failures.
388 - The unittest.TestCase.assertRaises() method now returns a context manager when
389 not given a callable so that code to be tested can be written inline using
392 - The unittest.TestCase.assertEqual() now displays the differences in lists,
393 tuples, dicts and sets on failure. Many new handy type and comparison
394 specific assert* methods have been added that fail with error messages
395 actually useful for debugging. Contributed in part by Google. [Issue #2578]
397 - Issue #5068: Fixed the tarfile._BZ2Proxy.read() method that would loop
398 forever on incomplete input. That caused tarfile.open() to hang when used
399 with mode 'r' or 'r:bz2' and a fileobj argument that contained no data or
400 partial bzip2 compressed data.
402 - Issue #5536: urllib.urlretrieve makes sure to close the file it's writing to
403 even if an exception occurs.
405 - Issue #5381: Added object_pairs_hook to the json module. This allows
406 OrderedDicts to be built by the decoder.
408 - Issue #2110: Add support for thousands separator and 'n' type
409 specifier to Decimal.__format__
411 - Fix Decimal.__format__ bug that swapped the meanings of the '<' and
412 '>' alignment characters.
414 - Issue #1222: locale.format() bug when the thousands separator is a space
417 - Issue #5472: Fixed distutils.test_util tear down. Original patch by
420 - collections.deque() objects now have a read-only attribute called maxlen.
422 - Issue #2638: Show a window constructed with tkSimpleDialog.Dialog only after
423 it is has been populated and properly configured in order to prevent
426 - Issue #4792: Prevent a segfault in _tkinter by using the
427 guaranteed to be safe interp argument given to the PythonCmd in place of
428 the Tcl interpreter taken from a PythonCmd_ClientData.
430 - Issue #5193: Guarantee that Tkinter.Text.search returns a string.
432 - Issue #5394: removed > 2.3 syntax from distutils.msvc9compiler.
433 Original patch by Akira Kitada.
435 - Issue #5385: Fixed mmap crash after resize failure on windows.
437 - Issue #5179: Fixed subprocess handle leak on failure on windows.
439 - PEP 372: Added collections.OrderedDict().
441 - The _asdict() for method for namedtuples now returns an OrderedDict().
443 - The configparser module now defaults to using an ordered dictionary.
445 - Issue #4308: httplib.IncompleteRead's repr doesn't include all of the data all
448 - Issue #5401: Fixed a performance problem in mimetypes when ``from mimetypes
449 import guess_extension`` was used.
451 - Issue #1733986: Fixed mmap crash in accessing elements of second map object
452 with same tagname but larger size than first map. (Windows)
454 - Issue #5386: mmap.write_byte didn't check map size, so it could cause buffer
457 - Issue #1533164: Installed but not listed *.pyo was breaking Distutils
460 - Issue #5378: added --quiet option to Distutils bdist_rpm command.
462 - Issue #5052: make Distutils compatible with 2.3 again.
464 - Deprecated methods of symtable.Symbol have been removed: is_keywordarg(),
465 is_vararg(), and is_in_tuple().
467 - Issue #5316: Fixed buildbot failures introduced by multiple inheritance
470 - Issue #5287: Add exception handling around findCaller() call to help out
473 - Issue #5282: Fixed mmap resize on 32bit windows and unix. When offset > 0,
474 The file was resized to wrong size.
476 - Issue #5292: Fixed mmap crash on its boundary access m[len(m)].
478 - Issue #2279: distutils.sdist.add_defaults now add files
479 from the package_data and the data_files metadata.
481 - Issue #5257: refactored all tests in distutils, so they use
482 support.TempdirManager, to avoid writing in the tests directory.
484 - Issue #4524: distutils build_script command failed with --with-suffix=3.
485 Initial patch by Amaury Forgeot d'Arc.
487 - Issue #2461: added tests for distutils.util
489 - Issue #1008086: Fixed socket.inet_aton() to always return 4 bytes even on
490 LP64 platforms (most 64-bit Linux, bsd, unix systems).
492 - Issue #5203: Fixed ctypes segfaults when passing a unicode string to a
493 function without argtypes (only occurs if HAVE_USABLE_WCHAR_T is false).
495 - Issue #3386: distutils.sysconfig.get_python_lib prefix argument was ignored
496 under NT and OS2. Patch by Philip Jenvey.
498 - Issue #5128: Make compileall properly inspect bytecode to determine if needs
499 to be recreated. This avoids a timing hole thanks to the old reliance on the
500 ctime of the files involved.
502 - Issue #5122: Synchronize tk load failure check to prevent a potential
505 - Issue #1818: collections.namedtuple() now supports a keyword argument
506 'rename' which lets invalid fieldnames be automatically converted to
507 positional names in the form, _1, _2, ...
509 - Issue #4890: Handle empty text search pattern in Tkinter.Text.search.
511 - Issue #5170: Fixed Unicode output bug in logging and added test case.
512 This is a regression which did not occur in 2.5.
514 - Issue #4512 (part 2): Promote ``ZipImporter._get_filename()`` to be a
515 public documented method ``ZipImporter.get_filename()``.
517 - Issue #4195: The ``runpy`` module (and the ``-m`` switch) now support
518 the execution of packages by looking for and executing a ``__main__``
519 submodule when a package name is supplied. Initial patch by Andi
522 - Issue #1731706: Call Tcl_ConditionFinalize for Tcl_Conditions that will
523 not be used again (this requires Tcl/Tk 8.3.1), also fix a memory leak in
524 Tkapp_Call when calling from a thread different than the one that created
525 the Tcl interpreter. Patch by Robert Hancock.
527 - Issue #1520877: Now distutils.sysconfig reads $AR from the
528 environment/Makefile. Patch by Douglas Greiman.
530 - Issue #4285: Change sys.version_info to be a named tuple. Patch by
533 - Issue #1276768: The verbose option was not used in the code of
534 distutils.file_util and distutils.dir_util.
536 - Issue #5132: Fixed trouble building extensions under Solaris with
537 --enabled-shared activated. Initial patch by Dave Peterson.
539 - Issue #1581476: Always use the Tcl global namespace when calling into Tcl.
541 - Issue #2047: shutil.move() could believe that its destination path was
542 inside its source path if it began with the same letters (e.g. "src" vs.
545 - Issue #4920: Fixed .next() vs .__next__() issues in the ABCs for
546 Iterator and MutableSet.
548 - Added the ttk module. See issue #2983: Ttk support for Tkinter.
550 - Issue #5021: doctest.testfile() did not create __name__ and
551 collections.namedtuple() relied on __name__ being defined.
553 - Backport importlib from Python 3.1. Only the import_module() function has
554 been backported to help facilitate transitions from 2.7 to 3.1.
556 - Issue #1885: distutils. When running sdist with --formats=tar,gztar
557 the tar file was overriden by the gztar one.
559 - Issue #4863: distutils.mwerkscompiler has been removed.
561 - Added a new itertools functions: combinations_with_replacement()
564 - Issue #5032: added a step argument to itertools.count() and
565 allowed non-integer arguments.
567 - Fix and properly document the multiprocessing module's logging
568 support, expose the internal levels and provide proper usage
571 - Issue #1672332: fix unpickling of subnormal floats, which was
572 producing a ValueError on some platforms.
574 - Issue #3881: Help Tcl to load even when started through the
575 unreadable local symlink to "Program Files" on Vista.
577 - Issue #4710: Extract directories properly in the zipfile module;
578 allow adding directories to a zipfile.
580 - Issue #3807: _multiprocessing build fails when configure is passed
581 --without-threads argument. When this occurs, _multiprocessing will
582 be disabled, and not compiled.
584 - Issue #5008: When a file is opened in append mode with the new IO library,
585 do an explicit seek to the end of file (so that e.g. tell() returns the
586 file size rather than 0). This is consistent with the behaviour of the
587 traditional 2.x file object.
589 - Issue #5013: Fixed a bug in FileHandler which occurred when the delay
592 - Issue #4998: The memory saving effect of __slots__ had been lost on Fractions
593 which inherited from numbers.py which did not have __slots__ defined. The
594 numbers hierarchy now has its own __slots__ declarations.
596 - Issue #3321: _multiprocessing.Connection() doesn't check handle; added checks
597 for *nix machines for negative handles and large int handles. Without this check
598 it is possible to segfault the interpreter.
600 - Issue #4449: AssertionError in mp_benchmarks.py, caused by an underlying issue
603 - Issue #1225107: inspect.isclass() returned True for instances with a custom
606 - Issue #3997: zipfiles generated with more than 65536 files could not be
607 opened with other applications.
609 - Issue #1162154: inspect.getmembers() now skips attributes that raise
610 AttributeError, e.g. a __slots__ attribute which has not been set.
612 - Issue #1696199: Add collections.Counter() for rapid and convenient
615 - Issue #3860: GzipFile and BZ2File now support the context manager protocol.
617 - Issue #4272: Add an optional argument to the GzipFile constructor to override
618 the timestamp in the gzip stream. The default value remains the current time.
619 The information can be used by e.g. gunzip when decompressing. Patch by
622 - Restore Python 2.3 compatibility for decimal.py.
624 - Issue #1702551: distutils sdist was not excluding VCS directories under
625 Windows. Inital solution by Guy Dalberto.
627 - The _tkinter module functions "createfilehandler", "deletefilehandler",
628 "createtimerhandler", "mainloop", "dooneevent" and "quit" have been
629 deprecated for removal in 3.x
631 - Issue #4796: Added Decimal.from_float() and Context.create_decimal_from_float()
632 to the decimal module.
634 - Issue #4812: add missing underscore prefix to some internal-use-only
635 constants in the decimal module. (Dec_0 becomes _Dec_0, etc.)
637 - Issue #4795: inspect.isgeneratorfunction() returns False instead of None when
638 the function is not a generator.
640 - Issue #4702: Throwing a DistutilsPlatformError instead of IOError in case
641 no MSVC compiler is found under Windows. Original patch by Philip Jenvey.
643 - Issue #4646: distutils was choking on empty options arg in the setup
644 function. Original patch by Thomas Heller.
646 - Fractions.from_float() no longer loses precision for integers too big to
649 - Issue #4790: The nsmallest() and nlargest() functions in the heapq module
650 did unnecessary work in the common case where no key function was specified.
652 - Issue #3767: Convert Tk object to string in tkColorChooser.
654 - Issue #3248: Allow placing ScrolledText in a PanedWindow.
656 - Issue #4444: Allow assertRaises() to be used as a context handler, so that
657 the code under test can be written inline if more practical.
659 - Issue #4739: Add pydoc help topics for symbols, so that e.g. help('@')
660 works as expected in the interactive environment.
662 - Issue #4756: zipfile.is_zipfile() now supports file-like objects. Patch by
665 - Issue #4400: .pypirc default generated file was broken in distutils.
667 - Issue #4736: io.BufferedRWPair's closed property now functions properly.
669 - Issue #3954: Fix a potential SystemError in _hotshot.logreader error
672 - Issue #4574: fix a crash in io.IncrementalNewlineDecoder when a carriage
673 return encodes to more than one byte in the source encoding (e.g. UTF-16)
674 and gets split on a chunk boundary.
676 - Issue #4223: inspect.getsource() will now correctly display source code
677 for packages loaded via zipimport (or any other conformant PEP 302
678 loader). Original patch by Alexander Belopolsky.
680 - Issue #4201: pdb can now access and display source code loaded via
681 zipimport (or any other conformant PEP 302 loader). Original patch by
682 Alexander Belopolsky.
684 - Issue #4197: doctests in modules loaded via zipimport (or any other PEP
685 302 conformant loader) will now work correctly in most cases (they
686 are still subject to the constraints that exist for all code running
687 from inside a module loaded via a PEP 302 loader and attempting to
688 perform IO operations based on __file__). Original patch by
689 Alexander Belopolsky.
691 - Issues #4082 and #4512: Add runpy support to zipimport in a manner that
692 allows backporting to maintenance branches. Original patch by
693 Alexander Belopolsky.
695 - Issue #4163: Use unicode-friendly word splitting in the textwrap functions
696 when given an unicode string.
698 - Issue #4616: TarFile.utime(): Restore directory times on Windows.
700 - Issue #4084: Fix max, min, max_mag and min_mag Decimal methods to
701 give correct results in the case where one argument is a quiet NaN
702 and the other is a finite number that requires rounding.
704 - Issue #1030250: Distutils created directories even when run with the
707 - Issue #4483: _dbm module now builds on systems with gdbm & gdbm_compat
710 - Issue #4529: fix the parser module's validation of try-except-finally
713 - Issue #4458: getopt.gnu_getopt() now recognizes a single "-" as an argument,
714 not a malformed option.
716 - Added the subprocess.check_output() convenience function to get output
717 from a subprocess on success or raise an exception on error.
719 - Issue #1055234: cgi.parse_header(): Fixed parsing of header parameters to
720 support unusual filenames (such as those containing semi-colons) in
721 Content-Disposition headers.
723 - Issue #4384: Added logging integration with warnings module using
724 captureWarnings(). This change includes a NullHandler which does nothing;
725 it will be of use to library developers who want to avoid the "No handlers
726 could be found for logger XXX" message which can appear if the library user
727 doesn't configure logging.
729 - Issue #3741: DISTUTILS_USE_SDK set causes msvc9compiler.py to raise an
732 - Issue #4363: The uuid.uuid1() and uuid.uuid4() functions now work even if
733 the ctypes module is not present.
735 - FileIO's mode attribute now always includes ``"b"``.
737 - Issue #4116: Resolve member name conflict in ScrolledCanvas.__init__.
739 - httplib.HTTPConnection.putheader() now accepts an arbitrary number of values
740 for any header, matching what the documentation has claimed for a while.
742 - Issue #3774: Fixed an error when create a Tkinter menu item without command
745 - Fixed a modulefinder crash on certain relative imports.
747 - Issue #4150: Pdb's "up" command now works for generator frames in post-mortem
750 - Issue #4092: Return ArgInfo as promised in the documentation from
751 inspect.getargvalues.
753 - Issue #3935: Properly support list subclasses in bisect's C implementation.
755 - Issue #4014: Don't claim that Python has an Alpha release status, in addition
756 to claiming it is Mature.
758 - Issue #4730: Fixed the cPickle module to handle correctly astral characters
759 when protocol 0 is used.
761 - Issue #1594: MacOS.GetCreatorAndType now always returns a big-endian result,
762 to be consistent with Apple tools.
764 - Issue #900949: plat-mac/videoreader.py no longer relies on a non-existing
767 - Issue #16278952: plat-mac/videoreader.py now correctly imports MediaDescr
769 - Issue #1737832 : plat-mac/EasyDialog.py no longer uses the broken aepack
772 - Issue #1149804: macostools.mkdirs now even works when another process
773 creates one of the needed subdirectories.
775 - Issue #900506: added --no-zipimport flag to the bundlebuilder script
777 - Issue #841800: bundlebuilder now works with 'python -O'
779 - Issue #4861: ctypes.util.find_library(): Robustify. Fix library detection on
780 biarch systems. Try to rely on ldconfig only, without using objdump and gcc.
782 - Issue #5104: The socket module now raises OverflowError when 16-bit port and
783 protocol numbers are supplied outside the allowed 0-65536 range on bind()
786 - Issue #999042: The Python compiler now handles explict global statements
787 correctly (should be assigned using STORE_GLOBAL opcode).
789 - Issue #2703: SimpleXMLRPCDispatcher.__init__: Provide default values for
790 new arguments introduced in 2.5.
792 - Issue #5828 (Invalid behavior of unicode.lower): Fixed bogus logic in
793 makeunicodedata.py and regenerated the Unicode database (This fixes
794 u'\u1d79'.lower() == '\x00').
799 - Ttk demos added in Demo/tkinter/ttk/
801 - Issue #4677: add two list comprehension tests to pybench.
806 - Link the shared python library with $(MODLIBS).
808 - Issue #5134: Silence compiler warnings when compiling sqlite with VC++.
810 - Issue #4494: Fix build with Py_NO_ENABLE_SHARED on Windows.
812 - Issue #4895: Use _strdup on Windows CE.
814 - Issue #4472: "configure --enable-shared" now works on OSX
816 - Issues #4728 and #4060: WORDS_BIGEDIAN is now correct in Universal builds.
818 - Issue #4389: Add icon to the uninstall entry in "add-and-remove-programs".
820 - Issue #4289: Remove Cancel button from AdvancedDlg.
822 - Issue #1656675: Register a drop handler for .py* files on Windows.
824 - Issue #4120: Exclude manifest from extension modules in VS2008.
826 - Issue #4091: Install pythonxy.dll in system32 again.
828 - Issue #4018: Disable "for me" installations on Vista.
830 - Issue #3758: Add ``patchcheck`` build target to .PHONY.
832 - Issue #4204: Fixed module build errors on FreeBSD 4.
837 - Issue #1419652: Change the first argument to PyImport_AppendInittab() to
838 ``const char *`` as the string is stored beyond the call.
840 - Some PyBytes_* aliases have been removed because they don't exist in 3.x.
842 - Issue #5175: PyLong_AsUnsignedLongLong now raises OverflowError
843 for negative arguments. Previously, it raised TypeError.
845 - Issue #4720: The format for PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords can begin with '|'.
847 - Issue #3632: from the gdb debugger, the 'pyo' macro can now be called when
848 the GIL is released, or owned by another thread.
850 - Issue #4122: On Windows, fix a compilation error when using the
851 Py_UNICODE_ISSPACE macro in an extension module.
853 - Issue #4293: Py_AddPendingCall is now thread safe and can be used for
854 asynchronous notifications to python from any thread. Documentation added.
859 - Issue #3745: Fix hashlib to always reject unicode and non buffer-api
860 supporting objects as input no matter how it was compiled (built in
861 implementations or external openssl library).
863 - Issue #4397: Fix occasional test_socket failure on OS X.
865 - Issue #4279: Fix build of parsermodule under Cygwin.
867 - Issue #4051: Prevent conflict of UNICODE macros in cPickle.
869 - Issue #4228: Pack negative values the same way as 2.4 in struct's L format.
871 - Issue #1040026: Fix os.times result on systems where HZ is incorrect.
873 - Issues #3167, #3682: Fix test_math failures for log, log10 on Solaris,
876 - Issue #4365: Add crtassem.h constants to the msvcrt module.
878 - Issue #4396: The parser module now correctly validates the with statement.
880 - Issue #5228: Make functools.partial objects can now be pickled.
885 - Issue #5354: New test support function import_fresh_module() makes
886 it easy to import both normal and optimised versions of modules.
887 test_heapq and test_warnings have been adjusted to use it, tests for
888 other modules with both C and Python implementations in the stdlib
889 can be adjusted to use it over time.
891 - Fix test_warnings to no longer reset the warnings filter.
893 - Fix test_logging to no longer reset the warnings filter.
895 - Issue #5635: Fix running test_sys with tracing enabled.
897 - regrtest no longer treats ImportError as equivalent to SkipTest. Imports
898 that should cause a test to be skipped are now done using import_module
899 from test support, which does the conversion.
901 - Issue #5083: New 'gui' resource for regrtest.
903 - Issue #5837: Certain sequences of calls to set() and unset() for
904 support.EnvironmentVarGuard objects restored the environment variables
905 incorrectly on __exit__.
908 What's New in Python 2.6 final
909 ==============================
911 *Release date: 01-Oct-2008*
916 - Issue #3967: Fixed a crash in the count() and find() methods of string-like
917 objects, when the "start" parameter is a huge value.
919 - Issue #3965: Fixed a crash on Windows when open() is given an invalid
920 filename or mode, and the filename is a unicode string.
922 - Bug #3951: Py_USING_MEMORY_DEBUGGER should not be enabled by default.
927 - Issue #3965: Allow repeated calls to turtle.Screen, by making it a
928 true singleton object.
930 - Issue #3895: It was possible to crash the interpreter when an external timer
931 was used with cProfile that returned an object that could not be converted
934 - Issue #3950: Made turtle respect scale factors.
936 - Issue #3547: Fixed ctypes structures bitfields of varying integer
939 - Issue #3879: A regression in urllib.getproxies_enviroment was fixed.
941 - Issue #3863: Disabled a unit test of fork being called from a thread
942 when running on platforms known to exhibit OS bugs when attempting that.
947 - Bug #3989: Package the 2to3 script (as 2to3.py) in the Windows
950 - Bug #3887: Package x64 version of CRT for AMD64 Windows binaries.
953 What's New in Python 2.6 release candidate 2?
954 =============================================
956 *Release date: 17-Sep-2008*
964 - Security Issue #2: imageop did not validate arguments correctly and could
965 segfault as a result.
967 - Issue #3886: Possible integer overflows in the _hashopenssl module were
973 - Issue #3850: recursion tests in Misc/find_recursion_limit.py can raise
974 AttributeError instead of RuntimeError, depending in which C API call
975 exactly the recursion limit is exceeded. Consequently, both exception types
976 are caught and silenced.
981 - Issue #3617: Include a licensing statement regarding the Microsoft
982 C runtime in the Windows installer.
985 What's New in Python 2.6 release candidate 1?
986 =============================================
988 *Release date: 12-Sep-2008*
993 - Issue #3642: Suppress warning in obmalloc when size_t is larger than uint.
995 - Issue #3743: In a few places, PY_FORMAT_SIZE_T was incorrectly used with
996 PyString_FromFormat or PyErr_Format to display size_t values. The macro
997 PY_FORMAT_SIZE_T is designed to select the correct format for the OS
998 ``printf`` function, whereas PyString_FromFormat has an independent
999 implementation and uses "%zd" on all platforms for size_t values.
1000 This makes a difference on win64, where ``printf`` needs "%Id" to display
1003 - Issue #3634: _weakref.ref(Exception).__init__() gave invalid return value on
1006 - Issue #3777: long() applied to a float object now always return a long
1007 object; previously an int would be returned for small values. the __long__
1008 method is allowed to return either an int or a long, but the behaviour of
1009 float objects should not change to respect backward compatibility.
1011 - Issue #3751: str.rpartition would perform a left-partition when called with
1014 - Issue #3683: Fix compilation when --without-threads is given.
1016 - Issue #3668: Fix a memory leak with the "s*" argument parser in
1017 PyArg_ParseTuple and friends, which occurred when the argument for "s*"
1018 was correctly parsed but parsing of subsequent arguments failed.
1020 - Issue #2534: speed up isinstance() and issubclass() by 50-70%, so as to
1021 match Python 2.5 speed despite the __instancecheck__ / __subclasscheck__
1022 mechanism. In the process, fix a bug where isinstance() and issubclass(),
1023 when given a tuple of classes as second argument, were looking up
1024 __instancecheck__ / __subclasscheck__ on the tuple rather than on each
1027 - Fix crashes on memory allocation failure found with failmalloc.
1029 - Fix memory leaks found with valgrind and update suppressions file.
1031 - Fix compiler warnings in opt mode which would lead to invalid memory reads.
1033 - Fix problem using wrong name in decimal module reported by pychecker.
1035 - Silenced another compiler warning about a used but not defined
1036 function 'stringlib_contains_obj'.
1038 - Added warnings on the use of ``__getslice__``, ``__setslice__``, or
1041 - Issue #3678: Correctly pass LDFLAGS and LDLAST to the linker on shared
1042 library targets in the Makefile.
1044 - Issue #1204: The configure script now tests for additional libraries
1045 that may be required when linking against readline. This fixes issues
1046 with x86_64 builds on some platforms (a few Linux flavors and OpenBSD).
1051 - Aliased PyObject_Bytes to PyObject_Str.
1056 - Issue #3640: Pickling a list or a dict uses less local variables, to reduce
1057 stack usage in the case of deeply nested objects.
1059 - Issue #3629: Fix sre "bytecode" validator for an end case.
1061 - Issue #3811: The Unicode database was updated to 5.1.
1063 - Issue #3781: Further warnings.catch_warnings() cleanup to prevent
1064 silent misbehaviour when a single instance is nested in multiple
1065 with statements, or when the methods are invoked in the wrong order.
1067 - Issue #3809: Fixed spurious 'test.blah' file left behind by test_logging.
1069 - Issue #3781: Clean up the API for warnings.catch_warnings() by having it
1070 return a list or None rather than a custom object.
1072 - Issue #1638033: Cookie.Morsel gained the httponly attribute.
1074 - Issue #3535: zipfile couldn't read some zip files larger than 2GB.
1076 - Issue #3776: Deprecate the bsddb package for removal in 3.0.
1078 - Issue #3762: platform.architecture() fails if python is lanched via
1081 - Issue #3772: Fixed regression problem in StreamHandler.emit().
1083 - Issue 600362: Relocated parse_qs() and parse_qsl(), from the cgi module
1084 to the urlparse one. Added a PendingDeprecationWarning in the old
1085 module, it will be deprecated in the future.
1087 - Issue #2562: Fix distutils PKG-INFO writing logic to allow having
1088 non-ascii characters and Unicode in setup.py meta-data.
1090 - Issue #3726: Allow spaces in separators in logging configuration files.
1092 - Issue #3719: platform.architecture() fails if there are spaces in the
1093 path to the Python binary.
1095 - Issue 3602: Moved test.test_support.catch_warning() to
1096 warnings.catch_warnings() along with some API cleanup. Expanding the tests
1097 for catch_warnings() also led to an improvement in the raising of a
1098 DeprecationWarning related to warnings.warn_explicit().
1100 - The deprecation warnings for the old camelCase threading API were removed.
1102 - logging: fixed lack of use of encoding attribute specified on a stream.
1104 - Silenced a trivial compiler warning in the sqlite module.
1106 - Fixed two format strings in the _collections module.
1108 - Issue #3703: _fileio.FileIO gave unhelpful error message when trying to open a
1111 - Issue #3708: os.urandom no longer goes into an infinite loop when passed a
1112 non-integer floating point number.
1114 - Issue #3110: multiprocessing fails to compiel on solaris 10 due to missing
1120 - Issue #4301: Patch the logging module to add processName support, remove
1121 _check_logger_class from multiprocessing.
1123 - Issue #2975: When compiling several extension modules with Visual Studio 2008
1124 from the same python interpreter, some environment variables would grow
1127 - Issue #3643: Added a few more checks to _testcapi to prevent segfaults by
1128 exploitation of poor argument checking.
1130 - sqlite3: Changed docstring of iterdump() to mark method as "Non-standard".
1132 - Issue #3103: Reduced globals symbols used by sqlite3 module and made sure all
1133 remaining ones have "pysqlite_" prefix.
1135 - Issue #3846: Release the GIL during sqlite3_prepare calls. This improves
1136 concurrent access to the same SQLite database from multiple
1142 - Issue #3781: Add test.test_support.check_warnings() as a convenience
1143 wrapper for warnings.catch_warnings() that makes it easier to check
1144 that expected warning messages are being reported.
1146 - Issue #3796: Some tests functions were not enabled in test_float.
1148 - Issue #3768: Move test_py3kwarn over to the new API for catch_warnings().
1153 - Issue #3833: Use a different upgrade code for Win64 installers.
1155 - Issue #2271: Set SecureCustomProperties so that installation will properly
1156 use the TARGETDIR even for unprivileged users.
1158 - Allow passing the MSI file name to merge.py.
1160 - Issue #3758: Rename the 'check' target to 'patchcheck' so as to not clash
1161 with GNU build target guidelines.
1164 What's New in Python 2.6 beta 3?
1165 ================================
1167 *Release date: 20-Aug-2008*
1172 - Issue #1878: Remove Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_VERSION_TAG from
1173 Py_TPFLAGS_DEFAULT when not building the core. This means 3rd party
1174 extensions do not automatically benefit from the class attribute
1175 cache; they will have to explicitly add Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_VERSION_TAG
1176 to their tp_flags field if they care. This is a backwards
1177 compatibility feature; in 3.0, all types will use the cache by
1180 - Keyword arguments can now follow starred arguments. (``f(a, *args,
1181 keyword=23)`` is now valid syntax.)
1183 - ctypes function pointers that are COM methods have a boolean True
1186 - Issue #3139: Make buffer-interface thread-safe wrt. PyArg_ParseTuple,
1187 by denying s# to parse objects that have a releasebuffer procedure,
1190 - Issue #3537: Fix an assertion failure when an empty but presized dict
1191 object was stored in the freelist.
1193 - Issue #1481296: Make long(float('nan')) and int(float('nan')) raise
1194 ValueError consistently across platforms.
1196 - Issue #3479: On platforms where sizeof(int) is smaller than sizeof(long)
1197 (64bit Unix, for example), unichr() would truncate its argument and return
1198 u'\x00' for unichr(2**32). Now it properly raises an OverflowError.
1200 - Apply security patches from Apple.
1202 - Issue #2542: Now that issubclass() may call arbitrary code, ensure that
1203 PyErr_ExceptionMatches returns 0 when an exception occurs there.
1205 - Issue #1819: function calls with several named parameters are now on
1206 average 35% faster (as measured by pybench).
1208 - Issue #2378: An unexpected UnboundLocalError or NameError could appear when
1209 the python debugger steps into a class statement: the free variables (local
1210 variables defined in an outer scope) would be deleted from the outer scope.
1212 - Issue #2620: Overflow checking when allocating or reallocating memory
1213 was not always being done properly in some python types and extension
1214 modules. PyMem_MALLOC, PyMem_REALLOC, PyMem_NEW and PyMem_RESIZE have
1215 all been updated to perform better checks and places in the code that
1216 would previously leak memory on the error path when such an allocation
1217 failed have been fixed.
1222 - Issue #3612: Added some missing basic types in ctypes.wintypes.
1224 - The methods ``is_in_tuple()``, ``is_vararg()``, and ``is_keywordarg()`` of
1225 symtable.Symbol have been deprecated for removal in 3.0 and the next release.
1227 - Issue #2234: distutils failed for some versions of the cygwin compiler. The
1228 version reported by these tools does not necessarily follow the python
1229 version numbering scheme, so the module is less strict when parsing it.
1231 - Issue #2235: Added Py3k warnings for types which will become unhashable
1232 under the stricter __hash__ inheritance rules in 3.0. Several types
1233 which did not meet the rules for hash invariants and were already
1234 unhashable in 3.0 have now been explicitly flagged as unhashable in
1235 2.6 as well (collections.Mapping, collections.Set, unittest.TestSuite,
1236 xml.dom.minidom.NamedNodeMap, numbers.Number, UserList.UserList)
1238 - Update __all__ for cookielib, csv, os, urllib2, and weakref to include things
1239 imported into the module but exposed as part of the module's API.
1241 - Remove an unneeded import of abc.ABCMeta from 'inspect'.
1243 - Remove unneeded imports of 'sys' and 'warnings' from 'io'.
1245 - Remove unneeded imports of 'warnings' from shelve, filecmp, and dummy_thread.
1247 - Issue #3575: Incremental decoder's decode function now takes bytearray
1248 by using 's*' instead of 't#'.
1250 - Issue #2222: Fixed reference leak when occurred os.rename()
1251 fails unicode conversion on 2nd parameter. (windows only)
1253 - Issue 2464. urllib2 now supports a malformation in the URL received
1256 - Silence the DeprecationWarning raised when importing mimetools in
1257 BaseHTTPServer, cgi (and rfc822), httplib.
1259 - Issue #2776: fixed small issue when handling an URL with double slash
1260 after a 302 response in the case of not going through a proxy.
1262 - Issue #2676: in the email package, content-type parsing was hanging on
1263 pathological input because of quadratic or exponential behaviour of a
1266 - Issue #3476: binary buffered reading through the new "io" library is now
1269 - Silence the DeprecationWarning of rfc822 when it is imported by mimetools
1270 since mimetools itself is deprecated. Because modules are cached, all
1271 subsequent imports of rfc822 will not raise a visible DeprecationWarning.
1273 - Issue #3134: shutil referenced undefined WindowsError symbol.
1275 - Issue #1342811: Fix leak in Tkinter.Menu.delete. Commands associated to
1276 menu entries were not deleted.
1278 - Copied the implementation of reduce() to _functools.reduce() to have a
1279 version that did not raise a DeprecationWarning under -3.
1281 - Issue #3205: When iterating over a BZ2File fails allocating memory, raise
1282 a MemoryError rather than silently stop the iteration.
1284 - Issue #3487: sre "bytecode" validator. Passing invalid "re-bytecode"
1285 to _sre.compile() will now be rejected. This should not affect anybody
1286 since the re.compile() function never generates invalid re-bytecode.
1288 - Issue #3436: Make csv.DictReader's fieldnames attribute a property so that
1289 upon first access it can be automatically initialized from the csv file if
1290 it wasn't initialized during instantiation.
1292 - Issue #2338: Create imp.reload() to help with transitioning to Python 3.0 as
1293 the reload() built-in has been removed.
1295 - Changed code in the following modules/packages to remove warnings raised
1296 while running under the ``-3`` flag: aifc, asynchat, asyncore, bdb, bsddb,
1297 ConfigParser, cookielib, csv, difflib, distutils, DocXMLRPCServer, email,
1298 filecmp, fileinput, inspect, logging, modulefinder, pdb, pickle, profile,
1299 pstats, pydoc, re, rlcompleter, SimpleXMLRPCServer, shelve, socket,
1300 subprocess, sqlite3, tarfile, Tkinter, test.test_support, textwrap,
1301 threading, tokenize, traceback, urlparse, wsgiref, xml, xmlrpclib.
1303 - Issue #3039: Fix tarfile.TarFileCompat.writestr() which always
1304 raised an AttributeError.
1306 - Issue #2523: Fix quadratic behaviour when read()ing a binary file without
1307 asking for a specific length. This problem only affected files opened
1308 using the new "io" module, not the built-in open() function.
1310 - Issue #3449: Update decimal module to use most recent specification
1311 (v. 1.68) and tests (v. 2.58) from IBM.
1313 - Issue 3437: Bug fix in robotparser parsing of Allow: lines.
1315 - Issue 1592: Improve error reporting when operations are attempted
1318 - Deprecate the "ast" parser function aliases.
1320 - Issue #3120: On 64-bit Windows the subprocess module was truncating handles.
1322 - Issue #3303: Fix a crash in locale.strcoll() when calling it with
1325 - Issue #3302: Fix several crashes when calling locale's gettext functions
1326 with None arguments.
1328 - Issue #3389: Allow resolving dotted names for handlers in logging
1329 configuration files.
1331 - Deprecate the sunaudio module for removal in Python 3.0.
1333 - Issue #3394: zipfile.writestr sets external attributes when passed a
1334 file name rather than a ZipInfo instance, so files are extracted with
1335 mode 0600 rather than 000 under Unix.
1337 - Issue #1857: subprocess.Popen.poll gained an additional _deadstate keyword
1338 argument in python 2.5, this broke code that subclassed Popen to include its
1339 own poll method. Fixed my moving _deadstate to an _internal_poll method.
1344 - Generate the PatternGrammar pickle during "make install".
1349 - Issue #2235: the C API function PyObject_HashNotImplemented and its
1350 interaction with the tp_hash slot (added in 2.6b2) are now documented
1352 - Issue #643841: The language reference now provides more detailed
1353 coverage of the lookup process for special methods. The disclaimers
1354 regarding lack of coverage of new-style classes have also been
1355 removed, since the coverage is now fairly reasonable.
1358 What's New in Python 2.6 beta 2?
1359 ================================
1361 *Release date: 17-Jul-2008*
1366 - Issue #3156: Fix inconsistent behavior of the bytearray type: all
1367 its methods now allow for items objects that can be converted to
1368 an integer using operator.index().
1370 - Issue #3360: Fix incorrect parsing of '020000000000.0', which
1371 produced a ValueError instead of giving the correct float.
1373 - Issue #3083: Add alternate (#) formatting for bin, oct, hex output
1374 for str.format(). This adds the prefix 0b, 0o, or 0x, respectively.
1376 - Issue #3008: the float type has a new instance method 'float.hex'
1377 and a new class method 'float.fromhex' to convert floating-point
1378 numbers to and from hexadecimal strings, respectively.
1380 - Issue #2235: __hash__ is once again inherited by default. To allow
1381 collections.Hashable to remain meaningful in the presence of the
1382 default hash implementation (object.__hash__), it is now possible
1383 to explicit block inheritance of hash by setting __hash__=None at
1384 the Python level, or tp_hash=PyObject_HashNotImplemented at the C
1387 - Issue #3221: Issue a RuntimeWarning instead of raising SystemError if
1388 the parent module cannot be found while performing an absolute import.
1389 This means that an incorrectly defined __package__ attribute will
1390 now only prevent relative imports in that module rather than causing
1391 all imports from that module to fail.
1393 - Issue #2517: Allow unicode messages in Exceptions again by correctly
1394 bypassing the instance dictionary when looking up __unicode__ on
1397 - Issue #3242: Fix a crash inside the print statement, if sys.stdout is
1398 set to a custom object whose write() method happens to install
1399 another file in sys.stdout.
1401 - Issue #3088: Corrected a race condition in classes derived from
1402 threading.local: the first member set by a thread could be saved in
1403 another thread's dictionary.
1405 - Issue #3004: Minor change to slice.indices(): the start and stop
1406 arguments are now treated identically, making the behaviour easier
1407 to describe and understand. For example, slice(None, -10,
1408 1).indices(9) now returns (0, 0, 1) instead of (0, -1, 1), and
1409 slice(None, 10, -1).indices(10) returns (9, 9, -1) instead of (9,
1412 - Issue #3219: Calling a function with repeated keyword arguments,
1413 f(a=2, a=23), would not cause a syntax error. This was a regression
1414 from 2.4 caused by the switch to the new compiler.
1416 - Issue #2862: Make int and float freelist management consistent with
1417 other freelists. Changes their CompactFreeList apis into
1418 ClearFreeList apis and calls them via gc.collect().
1423 - Issue #3554: ctypes.string_at and ctypes.wstring_at did call Python
1424 api functions without holding the GIL, which could lead to a fatal
1425 error when they failed.
1427 - Issue #799428: Fix Tkinter.Misc._nametowidget to unwrap Tcl command objects.
1429 - Issue #3395: fix reference in test_multiprocessing to old debugInfo method
1431 - Issue #3312: Fix two crashes in sqlite3.
1433 - Issue #1608818: Fix misbehavior in os.listdir() if readdir() fails.
1435 - Issue #3125: Remove copy_reg in multiprocessing and replace it with
1436 ForkingPickler.register() to resolve conflict with ctypes.
1438 - Issue #3090: Fixed ARCHFLAGS parsing on OS/X
1440 - Issue #3313: Fixed a crash when a failed dlopen() call does not set
1441 a valid dlerror() message.
1443 - Issue #3258: Fixed a crash when a ctypes POINTER type to an
1444 incomplete structure was created.
1446 - Issue #3339: dummy_thread.acquire() should not return None.
1448 - Issue #3285: Fractions from_float() and from_decimal() accept Integral arguments.
1450 - Issue #3301: Bisect module behaved badly when lo was negative.
1452 - Issue #839496: SimpleHTTPServer used to open text files in text mode. This is
1453 both unnecessary (HTTP allows text content to be sent in several forms) and
1454 wrong because the actual transmitted size could differ from the
1455 content-length. The problem had been corrected in the 2.4 branch, but never
1458 - Issue #2663: add filtering capability to shutil.copytree().
1460 - Issue #1622: Correct interpretation of various ZIP header fields.
1462 - Issue #1526: Allow more than 64k files to be added to Zip64 file.
1464 - Issue #1746: Correct handling of zipfile archive comments (previously
1465 archives with comments over 4k were flagged as invalid). Allow writing
1466 Zip files with archives by setting the 'comment' attribute of a ZipFile.
1468 - Issue #449227: The rlcompleter module now adds "(" to callable objects
1471 - Issue #3190: Pydoc now hides the automatic module attribute __package__ (the
1472 handling is now the same as that of other special attributes like __name__).
1474 - Issue #2885 (partial): The urllib.urlopen() function has been deprecated for
1475 removal in Python 3.0 in favor of urllib2.urlopen().
1477 - Issue #2113: Fix error in subprocess.Popen if the select system call is
1478 interrupted by a signal.
1480 - Issue #3309: Fix bz2.BZFile iterator to release its internal lock
1481 properly when raising an exception due to the bz2file being closed.
1482 Prevents a deadlock.
1484 - Issue #3094: httplib.HTTPSConnection Host: headers no longer include the
1485 redundant ":443" port number designation when the connection is using the
1486 default https port (443).
1488 - Issue #874900: after an os.fork() call the threading module state is cleaned
1489 up in the child process to prevent deadlock and report proper thread counts
1490 if the new process uses the threading module.
1495 - test.test_support.catch_warning now keeps track of all warnings it sees
1496 and is now better documented. Explicit unit tests for this context manager
1497 have been added to test_warnings.
1502 - Issue #3215: Build sqlite3 as sqlite3.dll, not sqlite3.pyd.
1508 - Document that robotparser has been renamed to urllib.robotparser in
1511 - Document that urlparse has been renamed to urllib.parse in Python 3.0.
1513 - Document that urllib2 is split across multiple modules and renamed in
1516 - Document that urllib is split across multiple modules and renamed in
1520 What's New in Python 2.6 beta 1?
1521 ================================
1523 *Release date: 18-June-2008*
1528 - Issue #3211: warnings.warn_explicit() did not guard against its 'registry'
1529 argument being anything other than a dict or None. Also fixed a bug in error
1530 handling when 'message' and 'category' were both set to None, triggering a
1533 - Issue #3100: Corrected a crash on deallocation of a subclassed weakref which
1534 holds the last (strong) reference to its referent.
1536 - Add future_builtins.ascii().
1538 - Several set methods now accept multiple arguments: update(), union(),
1539 intersection(), intersection_update(), difference(), and difference_update().
1541 - Issue #2898: Added sys.getsizeof() to retrieve size of objects in bytes.
1543 - New environment variable PYTHONIOENCODING.
1545 - Patch #2488: Add sys.maxsize.
1547 - Issue #2353: file.xreadlines() now emits a Py3k warning.
1549 - Issue #2863: generators now have a ``gen.__name__`` attribute that
1550 equals ``gen.gi_code.co_name``, like ``func.__name___`` that equals
1551 ``func.func_code.co_name``. The repr() of a generator now also
1554 - Issue #2831: enumerate() now has a ``start`` argument.
1556 - Issue #2801: fix bug in the float.is_integer method where a
1557 ValueError was sometimes incorrectly raised.
1559 - Issue #2790: sys.flags was not properly exposing its bytes_warning
1562 - Issue #2196: hasattr() now lets exceptions which do not inherit
1563 Exception (KeyboardInterrupt, and SystemExit) propagate instead of
1566 - Added checks for integer overflows, contributed by Google. Some are
1567 only available if asserts are left in the code, in cases where they
1568 can't be triggered from Python code.
1573 - Issue #1179: [CVE-2007-4965] Integer overflow in imageop module.
1575 - Issue #3116: marshal.dumps() had quadratic behavior for strings > 32Mb.
1577 - Issue #2138: Add factorial() to the math module.
1579 - The heapq module does comparisons using LT instead of LE. This
1580 makes its implementation match that used by list.sort().
1582 - Issue #2819: add full-precision summation function to math module,
1583 based on Hettinger's ASPN Python Cookbook recipe.
1585 - Issue #2592: delegate nb_index and the floor/truediv slots in
1588 - Support os.O_ASYNC and fcntl.FASYNC if the constants exist on the
1591 - Support for Windows 9x has been removed from the winsound module.
1593 - bsddb module updated to version 4.7.3.
1594 http://www.jcea.es/programacion/pybsddb.htm#bsddb3-4.7.3. This
1595 code should be compatible with Python 3.0.
1597 - Issue #2858: Fix potential memory corruption when
1598 bsddb.db.DBEnv.lock_get and other bsddb.db object constructors
1599 raised an exception.
1601 - Issue #2669: bsddb/__init__.py iteration no longer silently fails when
1602 the database has changed size during iteration. It now raises a
1603 RuntimeError in the same manner as a dictionary.
1605 - Issue #2870: cmathmodule.c compile error.
1607 - Added a threading.Thread.ident property.
1612 - logging.config: Removed out-of-date comment in _install_handlers and
1613 used issubclass in place of equality comparison of classes.
1615 - Issue #2722: Now the os.getcwd() supports very long path names.
1617 - Issue #2888: Fixed the behaviour of pprint when working with nested
1618 structures, to match the behaviour of 2.5 and 3.0 (now follows the common
1621 - Issue #1817: cgi now correctly handles the querystring on POST requests
1623 - Issue #3136: fileConfig()'s disabling of old loggers is now conditional via
1624 an optional disable_existing_loggers parameter, but the default value is
1625 such that the old behaviour is preserved. Thanks to Leandro Lucarella for
1628 - Issue #3126: StreamHandler and FileHandler check before calling "flush" and
1629 "close" that the stream object has these, using hasattr (thanks to bobf for
1632 - Issue #2912: platform.uname now tries to determine unknown information even if
1635 - The rfc822 module has been deprecated for removal in 3.0.
1637 - The mimetools module has been deprecated for removal in 3.0.
1639 - The ctypes.byref function now takes an optional second parameter
1640 which allows to specify an offset in bytes for the constructed
1641 pointer-like object.
1643 - Added the ast module.
1645 - Added the multiprocessing module, PEP 371.
1647 - Factored out the indentation cleaning from inspect.getdoc() into
1648 inspect.cleandoc() to ease standalone use.
1650 - Issue #1798: Add ctypes calling convention that allows safe access
1653 - Issue #2404: ctypes objects support the new pep3118 buffer interface.
1655 - Patch #2125: Add GetInteger and GetString methods for
1656 msilib.Record objects.
1658 - Issue #2782: The datetime module's strftime methods now accept
1659 unicode format strings just as time.strftime always has.
1661 - The sgmllib and htmllib modules have been deprecated for removal
1664 - Issue #3011: locale module alias table was updated to the latest
1665 version from the X.org locale.alias file.
1667 - Issue #1797 (partial fix): ctypes NULL function pointers have a
1668 False boolean value now.
1670 - Issue #2985: Allow 64-bit integer responses (``<i8>``) in XMLRPC
1673 - Issue #2877: The UserString.MutableString class has been removed in
1676 - Do not close external file objects passed to tarfile.open(mode='w:bz2')
1677 when the TarFile is closed.
1679 - Issue #2959: For consistency with other file-like objects, gzip's
1680 GzipFile.close() can now be called multiple times without raising
1683 - Issue #1390: Raise ValueError in toxml when an invalid comment would
1684 otherwise be produced.
1686 - Issue #2914: TimedRotatingFileHandler now takes an optional keyword
1687 argument "utc" to use UTC time rather than local time.
1689 - Issue #2929: TimedRotatingFileHandler was using the wrong path when
1690 deleting old log files (filename only instead of full path).
1692 - Issue #1775025: You can now specify zipfile members to open(),
1693 read() or extract() via a ZipInfo instance. This allows handling
1694 duplicate filenames in zipfiles.
1696 - Issue #961805: Fix Text.edit_modified() in Tkinter.
1698 - Issue #1793: Function ctypes.util.find_msvcrt() added that returns
1699 the name of the C runtime library that Python uses.
1700 ctypes.util.find_library(name) now call this function when name is
1703 - The statvfs module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0.
1705 - The sunaudiodev and SUNAUDIODEV modules have been deprecated for
1706 removal in Python 3.0.
1708 - The WAIT module from IRIX has been deprecated for removal in Python
1711 - The torgb module from IRIX has been deprecated for removal in Python
1714 - The SV module from IRIX has been deprecated for removal in Python
1717 - The readcd module from IRIX has been deprecated for removal in
1720 - The panelparser module from IRIX has been deprecated for removal in
1723 - The panel module from IRIX has been deprecated for removal in Python
1726 - The jpeg module from IRIX has been deprecated for removal in Python
1729 - The IOCTL module from IRIX has been deprecated for removal in Python
1732 - The IN module from IRIX has been deprecated for removal in Python
1735 - The imgfile module from IRIX has been deprecated for removal in
1738 - The GLWS module from IRIX has been deprecated for removal in Python
1741 - The GET module from IRIX has been deprecated for removal in Python
1744 - The fm module from IRIX has been deprecated for removal in Python
1747 - The FL, flp, and fl modules from IRIX have been deprecated for
1748 removal in Python 3.0.
1750 - The FILE module on IRIX has been deprecated for removal in Python
1753 - The ERRNO module on IRIX has been deprecated for removal in Python
1756 - The DEVICE, GL, gl, and cgen modules (which indirectly includes
1757 cgensupport) have been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0.
1759 - The CL, CL_old, and cl modules for IRIX have been deprecated for
1760 removal in Python 3.0.
1762 - The cdplayer module for IRIX has been deprecated for removal in
1765 - The cddb module for IRIX has been deprecated for removal in Python
1768 - The cd and CD modules for IRIX have been deprecated for removal in
1771 - The al and AL modules for IRIX have been deprecated for removal in
1774 - Issue #1713041: fix pprint's handling of maximum depth.
1776 - The timing module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0.
1778 - The sv module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0.
1780 - The multifile module has been deprecated as per PEP 4.
1782 - The imageop module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0.
1784 - Issue #2250: Exceptions raised during evaluation of names in
1785 rlcompleter's ``Completer.complete()`` method are now caught and
1788 - Issue #2659: Added ``break_on_hyphens`` option to textwrap
1791 - The mhlib module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0.
1793 - The linuxaudiodev module has been deprecated for removal in Python
1796 - The ihooks module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0.
1798 - The fpformat module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0.
1800 - The dl module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0.
1802 - The Canvas module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0.
1804 - The compiler package has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0.
1806 - The Bastion and rexec modules have been deprecated for removal in
1809 - The bsddb185 module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0.
1811 - The pure module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0.
1813 - Issue #2487: change the semantics of math.ldexp(x, n) when n is too
1814 large to fit in a C long. ldexp(x, n) now returns a zero (with
1815 suitable sign) if n is large and negative; previously, it raised
1818 - The toaiff module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0.
1820 - The test.testall module has been deprecated for removal in Python
1823 - The new module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0.
1825 - The user module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0.
1827 - The stringold module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0.
1829 - The mutex module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0.
1831 - The imputil module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0.
1833 - test.test_support.catch_warning() gained a 'record' argument.
1835 - os.path.walk is deprecated in favor of os.walk.
1837 - pdb gained the "until" command.
1839 - The Mac Modules (including Carbon) have been deprecated for removal
1842 - Library: on MacOS X you can now set ``ARCHFLAGS`` in the shell
1843 environment to control the '-arch' flags that are used to build
1844 an extension. This was added for compatibility with Apple's build
1847 - The bundled OSX-specific copy of libbffi is now in sync with the version
1848 shipped with PyObjC 2.0 and includes support for x86_64 and ppc64 platforms.
1850 - The threading module gained aliases for names that will be removed in the
1856 - The Windows installer now includes Tk 8.5, bzip2 1.0.5, and SQLite 3.5.9.
1858 - Patch #1722225: Support QNX 6.
1860 - ``Lib/lib-old`` is now added to sys.path.
1862 - On MacOS X it is now possible to install the framework in 64-bit
1863 mode or even as a 4-way universal binary (that is, PPC, i386,
1864 PPC64 and x86_64 support in one binary).
1866 This is controlled by the configure argument ``--with-universal-archs``:
1868 - ``--with-universal-archs=all``: install 4-way universal
1870 - ``--with-universal-archs=32-bit``: install 2-way universal, 32-bit (the default)
1872 - ``--with-universal-archs=64-bit``: install 2-way universal, 64-bit
1874 This option should be used in combination with ``--enable-universalsdk=``.
1876 NOTE: 64-bit and 4-way builds are only suppported on Mac OS X 10.5 (or later).
1882 - Add ``PyType_Modified()`` as a public API to clear the type cache.
1884 - The PyBytes functions have been renamed to PyByteArray.
1886 - The PyString functions have been renamed to PyBytes. A batch of
1887 defines were added so that the linker still sees the original
1891 What's New in Python 2.6 alpha 3?
1892 =================================
1894 *Release date: 08-May-2008*
1899 - Issue #2719: backported the ``next()`` builtin from Python 3.
1901 - Issue #2681: The octal literal ``0o8`` was incorrecly acctepted. Now
1902 it properly raises a SyntaxError.
1904 - Issue #2617: Reserved -J and -X arguments for Jython, IronPython and
1905 other implementations of Python.
1907 - Implemented PEP 370: Per user site-packages directory.
1912 - Issue #2670: Fix a failure in urllib2.build_opener(), when passed
1913 two handlers that derive the same default base class.
1915 - Added kill, terminate and send_signal(sig) to subprocess.Popen.
1917 - Added phase(z) -> phi, polar(z) -> r, phi and rect(r, phi) -> z to
1920 - Four new methods were added to the math and cmath modules: acosh,
1921 asinh, atanh and log1p.
1923 - zlib.decompressobj().flush(value) no longer crashes the interpreter
1924 when passed a value less than or equal to zero.
1926 - Issue #1631171: Re-implement the 'warnings' module in C (the
1927 original Python code has been kept as backup). This will allow for
1928 using the 'warning's machinery in such places as the parser where
1929 use of pure Python code is not possible. Both the ``showarning()``
1930 and ``formatwarning()`` gain an optional 'line' argument which is
1931 not called by default for backwards-compatibility reasons. Setting
1932 ``warnings.showwarning()`` to an implementation that lacks support
1933 for the ``line`` argument will raise a DeprecationWarning.
1938 - The audiodev module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0.
1940 - Issue #2750: Add the 'json' package. Based on simplejson 1.9 and
1941 contributed by Bob Ippolito.
1943 - Issue #1734346: Support Unicode file names for zipfiles.
1945 - Issue #2581: distutils: Vista UAC/elevation support for
1948 - Issue #2635: Fix bug in 'fix_sentence_endings' textwrap.fill option,
1949 where an extra space was added after a word containing (but not
1950 ending in) '.', '!' or '?'.
1952 - Add from_buffer() and from_buffer_copy() class methods to ctypes
1955 - Issue #2682: ctypes callback functions no longer contain a cyclic
1956 reference to themselves.
1958 - The getpass module has been improved on Unix. It now uses /dev/tty
1959 by default and uses stderr instead of stdout. A GetPassWarning is
1960 issued when input echo cannot be controlled.
1962 - Issue #2014: Allow XML-RPC datetime objects to have dates before
1965 - Issue #2439: Added new function pkgutil.get_data(), which is a
1966 convenience wrapper for the PEP 302 get_data() API.
1968 - Issue #2616: The ctypes.pointer() and ctypes.POINTER() functions are
1969 now implemented in C for better performance.
1971 - Issue #2408: The ``_types`` module, which was used as in
1972 implementation detail of the public ``types`` module, has been
1973 removed and replaced by pure python code.
1975 - Issue #2513: distutils on Windows is now capable of cross-compiling
1976 extension modules between 32 and 64 bit platforms. See the distutls
1977 build documentation for more information.
1979 - Issue #815646: Individual file objects may now be used from multiple
1980 threads at once without fear of crashing the Python interpreter. If
1981 file.close() is called while an object is in use by another thread
1982 an IOError exception will be raised and the file will not be closed.
1984 - The bundled libffi copy is now in sync with the recently released
1985 libffi3.0.5 version, apart from some small changes to
1986 Modules/_ctypes/libffi/configure.ac.
1988 - Issue #2385: distutils.core.run_script() makes __file__ available,
1989 so the controlled environment will more closely mirror the typical
1990 script environment. This supports setup.py scripts that refer to
1996 - Issue #2550: The approach used by client/server code for obtaining
1997 ports to listen on in network-oriented tests has been refined in an
1998 effort to facilitate running multiple instances of the entire
1999 regression test suite in parallel without issue.
2000 test_support.bind_port() has been fixed such that it will always
2001 return a unique port -- which wasn't always the case with the
2002 previous implementation, especially if socket options had been set
2003 that affected address reuse (i.e. SO_REUSEADDR, SO_REUSEPORT). The
2004 new implementation of bind_port() will actually raise an exception
2005 if it is passed an AF_INET/SOCK_STREAM socket with either the
2006 SO_REUSEADDR or SO_REUSEPORT socket option set. Furthermore, if
2007 available, bind_port() will set the SO_EXCLUSIVEADDRUSE option on
2008 the socket it's been passed. This currently only applies to
2009 Windows. This option prevents any other sockets from binding to the
2010 host/port we've bound to, thus removing the possibility of the
2011 'non-deterministic' behaviour, as Microsoft puts it, that occurs
2012 when a second SOCK_STREAM socket binds and accepts to a host/port
2013 that's already been bound by another socket. The optional preferred
2014 port parameter to bind_port() has been removed. Under no
2015 circumstances should tests be hard coding ports!
2017 test_support.find_unused_port() has also been introduced, which will
2018 pass a temporary socket object to bind_port() in order to obtain an
2019 unused port. The temporary socket object is then closed and
2020 deleted, and the port is returned. This method should only be used
2021 for obtaining an unused port in order to pass to an external program
2022 (i.e. the -accept [port] argument to openssl's s_server mode) or as
2023 a parameter to a server-oriented class that doesn't give you direct
2024 access to the underlying socket used.
2026 Finally, test_support.HOST has been introduced, which should be used
2027 for the host argument of any relevant socket calls (i.e. bind and
2030 The following tests were updated to following the new conventions:
2031 test_socket, test_smtplib, test_asyncore, test_ssl, test_httplib,
2032 test_poplib, test_ftplib, test_telnetlib, test_socketserver,
2033 test_asynchat and test_socket_ssl.
2035 It is now possible for multiple instances of the regression test
2036 suite to run in parallel without issue.
2041 - Issue #1496032: On alpha, use -mieee when gcc is the compiler.
2043 - Issue #2544: On HP-UX systems, use 'gcc -shared' for linking when
2044 gcc is used as compiler.
2046 - Issue #2573: On MacOS X it is now possible to install the framework
2047 with a different name using --with-framework-name=NAME.
2052 - Added implementation of copysign, acosh, asinh, atanh and log1p to
2053 the new files Include/pymath.h and Python/pymath.h for platforms
2054 which provide the functions through their libm. The files also
2055 contains several helpers and constants for math.
2057 - Added a new convenience macro, PyErr_WarnPy3k, for issuing Py3k warnings.
2060 What's New in Python 2.6 alpha 2?
2061 =================================
2063 *Release date: 02-Apr-2008*
2068 - Issue #1733757: The interpreter would hang on shutdown if the
2069 tracing function set by sys.settrace is still active and happens to
2070 call threading.currentThread().
2072 - Patch #1442: properly report exceptions when the PYTHONSTARTUP file
2075 - The compilation of a class nested in another class used to leak one
2076 reference on the outer class name.
2078 - Patch #1810: compile() can now compile _ast trees as returned by
2079 ``compile(..., PyCF_ONLY_AST)``.
2081 - Patch #2426: Added sqlite3.Connection.iterdump method to allow easy
2082 dumping of databases. Contributed by Paul Kippes at PyCon 2008.
2084 - Patch #2477: Added from __future__ import unicode_literals.
2086 - Added backport of bytearray type.
2088 - Issue #2355: add Py3k warning for buffer().
2090 - Issue #1477: With narrow Unicode builds, the unicode escape sequence
2091 \Uxxxxxxxx did not accept values outside the Basic Multilingual
2092 Plane. This affected raw unicode literals and the
2093 'raw-unicode-escape' codec. Now UTF-16 surrogates are generated in
2094 this case, like normal unicode literals and the 'unicode-escape'
2097 - Issue #2348: add Py3k warning for file.softspace.
2099 - Issue #2346/#2347: add Py3k warnings for __methods__ and
2102 - Issue #2358: Add a Py3k warning on sys.exc_clear() usage.
2104 - Issue #2400: Allow relative imports to "import *".
2106 - Issue #1745: Backport print function with ``from __future__ import
2109 - Issue #2332: add new attribute names for instance method objects.
2110 The two changes are: im_self -> __self__ and im_func -> __func__
2112 - Issue #2379: Raise a Py3K warning for __getitem__ or __getslice__ on
2113 exception instances.
2115 - Issue #2371: Add a Py3k warning when catching an exception that
2116 doesn't derive from BaseException.
2118 - Issue #2341: Add a Py3k warning when raising an exception that
2119 doesn't derive from BaseException.
2121 - Issue #2321: use pymalloc for unicode object string data to reduce
2122 memory usage in some circumstances.
2124 - PEP 3127: octal literals now start with "0o". Old-style octal
2125 literals are still valid. There are binary literals with a prefix of
2126 "0b". This also affects int(x, 0).
2128 - Issue #2359: Adding deprecation warnings for array.{read,write}.
2130 - Issue #1779871: GNU gcc can now build Python on OS X because the
2131 flags -Wno-long-double, -no-cpp-precomp, and -mno-fused-madd are no
2134 - Add a warning when asserting a non-empty tuple which is always true.
2136 - Issue #2179: speed up with statement execution by storing the exit
2137 method on the stack instead of in a temporary variable (patch by
2140 - Issue #2238: Some syntax errors in *args and **kwargs expressions
2141 could give bogus error messages.
2143 - Issue #2143: Fix embedded readline() hang on SSL socket EOF.
2148 - Patch #2240: Implement signal.setitimer and signal.getitimer.
2153 - Issue #2315: logging.handlers: TimedRotatingFileHandler now accounts
2154 for daylight savings time in calculating the next rollover.
2156 - Issue #2316: logging.handlers: TimedRotatingFileHandler now
2157 calculates rollovers correctly even when nothing is logged for a
2160 - Issue #2317: logging.handlers: TimedRotatingFileHandler now uses
2161 improved logic for removing old files.
2163 - Issue #2495: tokenize.untokenize now inserts a space between two
2164 consecutive string literals; previously, ["" ""] was rendered as
2165 [""""], which is incorrect python code.
2167 - Issue #2248: return the result of the QUIT command. from
2170 - Backport of Python 3.0's io module.
2172 - Issue #2482: Make sure that the coefficient of a Decimal is always
2173 stored as a str instance, not as a unicode instance. This ensures
2174 that str(Decimal) is always an instance of str.
2176 - Issue #2478: fix failure of decimal.Decimal(0).sqrt()
2178 - Issue #2432: give DictReader the dialect and line_num attributes
2179 advertised in the docs.
2181 - Issue #2460: Make Ellipsis object copyable.
2183 - Issue #1681432: Add triangular distribution to the random module
2185 - Issue #2136: urllib2's auth handler now allows single-quoted realms
2186 in the WWW-Authenticate header.
2188 - Issue #2434: Enhanced platform.win32_ver() to also work on Python
2189 installation which do not have the win32all package installed.
2191 - Added support to platform.uname() to also report the machine and
2192 processor information on Windows XP and later. As a result,
2193 platform.machine() and platform.processor() will report this
2194 information as well.
2196 - The library implementing the 2to3 conversion, lib2to3, was added to
2197 the standard distribution.
2199 - Issue #1747858: Fix chown to work with large uid's and gid's on
2202 - Issue #1202: zlib.crc32 and zlib.adler32 no longer return different
2203 values on 32-bit vs. 64-bit python interpreters. Both were correct,
2204 but they now both return a signed integer object for consistency.
2206 - Issue #1158: add %f format (fractions of a second represented as
2207 microseconds) to datetime objects. Understood by both strptime and
2210 - Issue #705836: struct.pack(">f", x) now raises OverflowError on all
2211 platforms when x is too large to fit into an IEEE 754 float;
2212 previously it only raised OverflowError on non IEEE 754 platforms.
2214 - Issues #2166, #1741 and #1531505: now distutils deals with HOME
2215 correctly under win32
2217 - Patch #1858: distutils: added multiple server support in .pypirc
2219 - Issue #1106316: pdb.post_mortem()'s parameter, "traceback", is now
2220 optional: it defaults to the traceback of the exception that is
2221 currently being handled (is mandatory to be in the middle of an
2222 exception, otherwise it raises ValueError).
2224 - Issue #1193577: A .shutdown() method has been added to SocketServers
2225 which terminates the .serve_forever() loop.
2227 - Issue #2220: handle rlcompleter attribute match failure more
2230 - Issue #2225: py_compile, when executed as a script, now returns a
2231 non- zero status code if not all files could be compiled
2234 - Bug #1725737: In distutils' sdist, exclude RCS, CVS etc. also in the
2235 root directory, and also exclude .hg, .git, .bzr, and _darcs.
2237 - Issue #1872: The struct module typecode for _Bool has been changed
2240 - The bundled libffi copy is now in sync with the recently released
2241 libffi3.0.4 version, apart from some small changes to
2242 Modules/_ctypes/libffi/configure.ac. On OS X, preconfigured libffi
2243 files are used. On all linux systems the --with-system-ffi
2244 configure option defaults to "yes".
2246 - Issue #1577: shutil.move() now calls os.rename() if the destination
2247 is a directory instead of copying-then-remove-source.
2252 - test_nis no longer fails when test.test_support.verbose is true and
2253 NIS is not set up on the testing machine.
2255 - Output comparison tests are no longer supported.
2257 - Rewrite test_errno to use unittest and no longer be a no-op.
2259 - GHOP 234: Convert test_extcall to doctest.
2261 - GHOP 290: Convert test_dbm and test_dummy_threading to unittest.
2263 - GHOP 293: Convert test_strftime, test_getargs, and test_pep247 to
2266 - Issue #2055: Convert test_fcntl to unittest.
2268 - Issue 1960: Convert test_gdbm to unittest.
2270 - GHOP 294: Convert test_contains, test_crypt, and test_select to
2273 - GHOP 238: Convert test_tokenize to use doctest.
2275 - GHOP 237: Rewrite test_thread using unittest.
2277 - Patch #2232: os.tmpfile might fail on Windows if the user has no
2278 permission to create files in the root directory.
2283 - A new script 2to3 is now installed, to run the 2.x to 3.x converter.
2285 - Python/memmove.c and Python/strerror.c have been removed; both
2286 functions are in the C89 standard library.
2288 - Patch #2284: Add -x64 option to rt.bat.
2293 - Patch #2477: Added PyParser_ParseFileFlagsEx() and
2294 PyParser_ParseStringFlagsFilenameEx().
2297 What's New in Python 2.6 alpha 1?
2298 =================================
2300 *Release date: 29-Feb-2008*
2305 - Issue #2051: pyc and pyo files are no longer created with permission
2306 644. The mode is now inherited from the py file.
2308 - Issue #2067: file.__exit__() now calls subclasses' close() method.
2310 - Patch #1759: Backport of PEP 3129 class decorators.
2312 - Issue #1881: An internal parser limit has been increased. Also see
2313 issue 215555 for a discussion.
2315 - Added the future_builtins module, which contains hex() and oct().
2316 These are the PEP 3127 version of these functions, designed to be
2317 compatible with the hex() and oct() builtins from Python 3.0. They
2318 differ slightly in their output formats from the existing, unchanged
2319 Python 2.6 builtins. The expected usage of the future_builtins
2321 from future_builtins import hex, oct
2323 - Issue #1600: Modifed PyOS_ascii_formatd to use at most 2 digit
2324 exponents for exponents with absolute value < 100. Follows C99
2325 standard. This is a change on Windows, which would use 3 digits.
2326 Also, added 'n' to the formats that PyOS_ascii_formatd understands,
2327 so that any alterations it does to the resulting string will be
2328 available in stringlib/formatter.h (for float.__format__).
2330 - Implemented PEP 3101, Advanced String Formatting. This adds a new
2331 builtin format(); a format() method for str and unicode; a
2332 __format__() method to object, str, unicode, int, long, float, and
2333 datetime; the class string.Formatter; and the C API
2336 - Fixed several potential crashes, all caused by specially crafted
2337 __del__ methods exploiting objects in temporarily inconsistent
2340 - Issue #2115: Important speedup in setting __slot__ attributes. Also
2341 prevent a possible crash: an Abstract Base Class would try to access
2342 a slot on a registered virtual subclass.
2344 - Fixed repr() and str() of complex numbers with infinity or nan as
2345 real or imaginary part.
2347 - Clear all free lists during a gc.collect() of the highest generation
2348 in order to allow pymalloc to free more arenas. Python may give back
2349 memory to the OS earlier.
2351 - Issue #2045: Fix an infinite recursion triggered when printing a
2352 subclass of collections.defaultdict, if its default_factory is set
2355 - Fixed a minor memory leak in dictobject.c. The content of the free
2356 list was not freed on interpreter shutdown.
2358 - Limit free list of method and builtin function objects to 256
2361 - Patch #1953: Added ``sys._compact_freelists()`` and the C API
2362 functions ``PyInt_CompactFreeList`` and ``PyFloat_CompactFreeList``
2363 to compact the internal free lists of pre-allocted ints and floats.
2365 - Issue #1983: Fixed return type of fork(), fork1() and forkpty()
2366 calls. Python expected the return type int but the fork familie
2369 - Issue #1678380: Fix a bug that identifies 0j and -0j when they
2370 appear in the same code unit.
2372 - Issue #2025: Add tuple.count() and tuple.index() methods to comply
2373 with the collections.Sequence API.
2375 - Patch #1970 by Antoine Pitrou: Speedup unicode whitespace and
2378 - Added ``PyType_ClearCache()`` and ``sys._clear_type_cache`` to clear
2379 the internal lookup cache for ref leak tests.
2381 - Patch #1473257: generator objects gain a gi_code attribute. This is
2382 the same object as the func_code attribute of the function that
2383 produced the generator.
2385 - Issue #1920: "while 0" statements were completely removed by the
2386 compiler, even in the presence of an "else" clause, which is
2387 supposed to be run when the condition is false. Now the compiler
2388 correctly emits bytecode for the "else" suite.
2390 - A few crashers fixed: weakref_in_del.py (issue #1377858);
2391 loosing_dict_ref.py (issue #1303614, test67.py);
2392 borrowed_ref_[34].py (not in tracker).
2394 - Issue #1069410: The "can't load dll" message box on Windows is
2395 suppressed while an extension is loaded by calling SetErrorMode in
2396 dynload_win.c. The error is still reported properly.
2398 - Issue #1915: Python compiles with --enable-unicode=no again. However
2399 several extension methods and modules do not work without unicode
2402 - Issue #1882: when compiling code from a string, encoding cookies in the
2403 second line of code were not always recognized correctly.
2405 - Issue #1679: "0x" was taken as a valid integer literal.
2407 - Issue #1865: ``bytes`` as an alias for ``str`` and b"" as an alias "" were
2410 - sys.float_info / PyFloat_GetInfo: The floating point information
2411 object was converted from a dict to a specialized structseq object.
2413 - Patch #1816: Added sys.flags structseq. It exposes the status of
2414 most command line arguments and PYTHON* environment variables.
2416 - Objects/structseq.c: Implemented new structseq representation. The
2417 patch makes structseqs (e.g. the return value of os.stat) more
2420 - Patch #1700288: added a type attribute cache that caches method
2421 accesses, resulting in speedups in heavily object-oriented code.
2423 - Bug #1776: __import__() no longer accepts filenames on any platform.
2424 The first parameter to __import__() must be a valid module name.
2426 - Patch #1668: renamed THREADDEBUG envvar to PYTHONTHREADDEBUG.
2428 - Patch #602345: Add -B command line option, PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE
2429 envvar and sys.dont_write_bytecode attribute. All these can be set
2430 to forbid Python to attempt to write compiled bytecode files.
2432 - Improve some exception messages when Windows fails to load an
2433 extension module. Now we get for example '%1 is not a valid Win32
2434 application' instead of 'error code 193'.
2436 - Bug #1481296: Fixed long(float('nan')) != 0L.
2438 - Issue #1640: Added math.isinf(x), math.isnan(x) and math.copysign(x,
2441 - Issue #1635: Platform independent creation and representation of NaN
2442 and INF. float("nan"), float("inf") and float("-inf") now work on
2443 every platform with IEEE 754 semantics.
2445 - Compiler now generates simpler and faster code for dictionary
2446 literals. The oparg for BUILD_MAP now indicates an estimated
2447 dictionary size. There is a new opcode, STORE_MAP, for adding
2448 entries to the dictionary.
2450 - Issue #1638: %zd configure test fails on Linux.
2452 - Issue #1620: New property decorator syntax was modifying the
2453 decorator in place instead of creating a new decorator object.
2455 - Issue #1538: Avoid copying string in split/rsplit if the split char
2458 - Issue #1553: An erroneous __length_hint__ can make list() raise a
2461 - PEP 366: Allow explicit relative imports when executing modules
2462 inside packages with the -m switch via a new module level
2463 __package__ attribute.
2465 - Issue #1402: Fix a crash on exit, when another thread is still
2466 running, and if the deallocation of its frames somehow calls the
2467 PyGILState_Ensure() / PyGILState_Release() functions.
2469 - Expose the Py_Py3kWarningFlag as sys.py3kwarning.
2471 - Issue #1445: Fix a SystemError when accessing the ``cell_contents``
2472 attribute of an empty cell object.
2474 - Issue #1460: The utf-7 incremental decoder did not accept truncated
2475 input. It now correctly saves its state between chunks of data.
2477 - Patch #1739468: Directories and zipfiles containing a __main__.py
2478 file can now be directly executed by passing their name to the
2479 interpreter. The directory/zipfile is automatically inserted as the
2480 first entry in sys.path.
2482 - Issue #1265: Fix a problem with sys.settrace, if the tracing
2483 function uses a generator expression when at the same time the
2484 executed code is closing a paused generator.
2486 - sets and frozensets now have an isdisjoint() method.
2488 - optimize the performance of builtin.sum().
2490 - Fix warnings found by the new version of the Coverity checker.
2492 - The enumerate() builtin function is no longer bounded to sequences
2493 smaller than LONG_MAX. Formerly, it raised an OverflowError. Now,
2494 automatically shifts from ints to longs.
2496 - Issue #1686386: Tuple's tp_repr did not take into account the
2497 possibility of having a self-referential tuple, which is possible
2498 from C code. Nor did object's tp_str consider that a type's tp_str
2499 could do something that could lead to an inifinite recursion.
2500 Py_ReprEnter() and Py_EnterRecursiveCall(), respectively, fixed the
2503 - Issue #1164: It was possible to trigger deadlock when using the
2504 'print' statement to write to a file since the GIL was not released
2505 as needed. Now PyObject_Print() does the right thing along with
2506 various tp_print implementations of the built-in types and those in
2507 the collections module.
2509 - Issue #1147: Exceptions were directly allowing string exceptions in
2510 their throw() method even though string exceptions no longer
2513 - Issue #1096: Prevent a segfault from getting the repr of a very
2514 deeply nested list by using the recursion counter.
2516 - Issue #1202533: Fix infinite recursion calls triggered by calls to
2517 PyObject_Call() never calling back out to Python code to trigger
2518 recursion depth updates/checks. Required the creation of a static
2519 RuntimeError instance in case normalizing an exception put the
2520 recursion check value past its limit. Fixes crashers
2521 infinite_rec_(1|2|4|5).py.
2523 - Patch #1031213: Decode source line in SyntaxErrors back to its
2524 original source encoding.
2526 - Patch #1673759: add a missing overflow check when formatting floats
2529 - Prevent expandtabs() on string and unicode objects from causing a
2530 segfault when a large width is passed on 32-bit platforms.
2532 - Issue #1733488: Fix compilation of bufferobject.c on AIX.
2534 - Issue #1722485: remove docstrings again when running with -OO.
2536 - Add new attribute names for function objects. All the func_* become
2537 __*__ attributes. (Some already existed, e.g., __doc__ and
2540 - Add -3 option to the interpreter to warn about features that are
2541 deprecated and will be changed/removed in Python 3.0.
2543 - Patch #1686487: you can now pass any mapping after '**' in function
2546 - except clauses may now be spelled either "except E, target:" or
2547 "except E as target:". This is to provide forwards compatibility
2550 - Deprecate BaseException.message as per PEP 352.
2552 - Issue #1303614: don't expose object's __dict__ when the dict is
2553 inherited from a builtin base.
2555 - When __slots__ are set to a unicode string, make it work the same as
2556 setting a plain string, ie don't expand to single letter identifiers.
2558 - Request #1191699: Slices can now be pickled.
2560 - Request #1193128: str.translate() now allows a None argument for
2561 translations that only remove characters without re-mapping the
2562 remaining characters.
2564 - Patch #1682205: a TypeError while unpacking an iterable is no longer
2565 masked by a generic one with the message "unpack non-sequence".
2567 - Remove unused file Python/fmod.c.
2569 - Bug #1683368: The object.__init__() and object.__new__() methods are
2570 now stricter in rejecting excess arguments. The only time when
2571 either allows excess arguments is when it is not overridden and the
2572 other one is. For backwards compatibility, when both are
2573 overridden, it is a deprecation warning (for now; maybe a Py3k
2574 warning later). Also, type.__init__() insists on the same signature
2575 as supported by type.__new__().
2577 - Patch #1675423: PyComplex_AsCComplex() now tries to convert an
2578 object to complex using its __complex__() method before falling back
2579 to the __float__() method. Therefore, the functions in the cmath
2580 module now can operate on objects that define a __complex__()
2583 - Patch #1623563: allow __class__ assignment for classes with
2584 __slots__. The old and the new class are still required to have the
2587 - Patch #1642547: Fix an error/crash when encountering syntax errors
2588 in complex if statements.
2590 - Patch #1462488: Python no longer segfaults when
2591 ``object.__reduce_ex__()`` is called with an object that is faking
2594 - Patch #1680015: Don't modify __slots__ tuple if it contains an
2597 - Patch #1444529: the builtin compile() now accepts keyword arguments.
2599 - Bug #1678647: write a newline after printing an exception in any
2600 case, even when converting the value to a string failed.
2602 - The dir() function has been extended to call the __dir__() method on
2603 its argument, if it exists. If not, it will work like before. This
2604 allows customizing the output of dir() in the presence of a
2607 - Patch #922167: Python no longer segfaults when faced with infinitely
2608 self-recursive reload() calls (as reported by bug #742342).
2610 - Patch #1675981: remove unreachable code from ``type.__new__()``
2613 - Patch #1491866: change the complex() constructor to allow
2614 parthensized forms. This means complex(repr(x)) now works instead of
2615 raising a ValueError.
2617 - Patch #703779: unset __file__ in __main__ after running a file. This
2618 makes the filenames the warning module prints much more sensible
2619 when a PYTHONSTARTUP file is used.
2621 - Variant of patch #697613: don't exit the interpreter on a SystemExit
2622 exception if the -i command line option or PYTHONINSPECT environment
2623 variable is given, but break into the interactive interpreter just
2624 like on other exceptions or normal program exit.
2626 - Patch #1638879: don't accept strings with embedded NUL bytes in
2629 - Bug #1674503: close the file opened by execfile() in an error
2632 - Patch #1674228: when assigning a slice (old-style), check for the
2633 sq_ass_slice instead of the sq_slice slot.
2635 - When printing an unraisable error, don't print exceptions. before
2636 the name. This duplicates the behavior whening normally printing
2639 - Bug #1653736: Properly discard third argument to
2640 slot_nb_inplace_power.
2642 - PEP 352: Raising a string exception now triggers a TypeError.
2643 Attempting to catch a string exception raises DeprecationWarning.
2645 - Bug #1377858: Fix the segfaulting of the interpreter when an object
2646 created a weakref on itself during a __del__ call for new-style
2647 classes (classic classes still have the bug).
2649 - Bug #1579370: Make PyTraceBack_Here use the current thread, not the
2650 frame's thread state.
2652 - patch #1630975: Fix crash when replacing sys.stdout in
2655 - Prevent seg fault on shutdown which could occur if an object raised
2658 - Bug #1566280: Explicitly invoke threading._shutdown from Py_Main, to
2659 avoid relying on atexit.
2661 - Bug #1590891: random.randrange don't return correct value for big
2664 - Patch #1586791: Better exception messages for some operations on
2665 strings, tuples and lists.
2667 - Bug #1067760: Deprecate passing floats to file.seek.
2669 - Bug #1591996: Correctly forward exception in instance_contains().
2671 - Bug #1588287: fix invalid assertion for `1,2` in debug builds.
2673 - Bug #1576657: when setting a KeyError for a tuple key, make sure
2674 that the tuple isn't used as the "exception arguments tuple".
2676 - Bug #1565514: SystemError not raised on too many nested blocks.
2678 - Bug #1576174: WindowsError now displays the windows error code
2679 again, no longer the posix error code.
2681 - Patch #1549049: Support long values in structmember, issue warnings
2682 if the assigned value for structmember fields gets truncated.
2684 - Update the peephole optimizer to remove more dead code (jumps after
2685 returns) and inline unconditional jumps to returns.
2687 - Bug #1545497: when given an explicit base, int() did ignore NULs
2688 embedded in the string to convert.
2690 - Bug #1569998: break inside a try statement (outside a loop) is now
2691 recognized and rejected.
2693 - list.pop(x) accepts any object x following the __index__ protocol.
2695 - A number of places, including integer negation and absolute value,
2696 were fixed to not rely on undefined behaviour of the C compiler
2699 - Bug #1566800: make sure that EnvironmentError can be called with any
2700 number of arguments, as was the case in Python 2.4.
2702 - Patch #1567691: super() and new.instancemethod() now don't accept
2703 keyword arguments any more (previously they accepted them, but
2706 - Fix a bug in the parser's future statement handling that led to
2707 "with" not being recognized as a keyword after, e.g., this
2708 statement: from __future__ import division, with_statement
2710 - Bug #1557232: fix seg fault with def f((((x)))) and def f(((x),)).
2712 - Fix %zd string formatting on Mac OS X so it prints negative numbers.
2714 - Allow exception instances to be directly sliced again.
2716 - Bug #1551432: Exceptions do not define an explicit __unicode__
2717 method. This allows calling unicode() on exceptions classes
2718 directly to succeed.
2720 - Bug #1542051: Exceptions now correctly call PyObject_GC_UnTrack.
2721 Also make sure that every exception class has __module__ set to
2724 - Bug #1550983: emit better error messages for erroneous relative
2725 imports (if not in package and if beyond toplevel package).
2727 - Overflow checking code in integer division ran afoul of new gcc
2728 optimizations. Changed to be more standard-conforming.
2730 - Patch #1542451: disallow continue anywhere under a finally.
2732 - Patch #1546288: fix seg fault in dict_equal due to ref counting bug.
2734 - The return tuple from str.rpartition(sep) is (tail, sep, head) where
2735 head is the original string if sep was not found.
2737 - Bug #1520864: unpacking singleton tuples in list comprehensions and
2738 generator expressions (x for x, in ... ) works again. Fixing this
2739 problem required changing the .pyc magic number. This means that
2740 .pyc files generated before 2.5c2 will be regenerated.
2742 - ``with`` and ``as`` are now keywords.
2744 - Bug #1664966: Fix crash in exec if Unicode filename can't be
2747 - Issue #1537: Changed GeneratorExit's base class from Exception to
2750 - Issue #1703448: A joined thread could show up in the
2751 threading.enumerate() list after the join() for a brief period until
2758 - Patch #2274: Add heapq.heappushpop().
2760 - Add inspect.isabstract(object) to fix bug #2223
2762 - Add a __format__ method to Decimal, to support PEP 3101.
2764 - Add a timing parameter when using trace.Trace to print out
2767 - Issue #1627: httplib now ignores negative Content-Length headers.
2769 - Issue #900744: If an invalid chunked-encoding header is sent by a
2770 server, httplib will now raise IncompleteRead and close the
2771 connection instead of raising ValueError.
2773 - Issue #1492: The content type of BaseHTTPServer error messages can
2776 - Issue #1781: ConfigParser now does not let you add the "default" section
2779 - Removed uses of dict.has_key() from distutils, and uses of
2780 callable() from copy_reg.py, so the interpreter now starts up
2781 without warnings when '-3' is given. More work like this needs to
2782 be done in the rest of the stdlib.
2784 - Issue #1916: added isgenerator() and isgeneratorfunction() to
2787 - Issue #1224: Fixed bad url parsing when path begins with double
2790 - ctypes instances that are not or do not contain pointers can now be
2793 - Patch #1966: Break infinite loop in httplib when the servers
2794 implements the chunked encoding incorrectly.
2796 - Rename rational.py to fractions.py and the rational.Rational class
2797 to fractions.Fraction, to avoid the name clash with the abstract
2798 base class numbers.Rational. See discussion in issue #1682.
2800 - The pickletools module now provides an optimize() function that
2801 eliminates unused PUT opcodes from a pickle string.
2803 - Patch #2021: Allow tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile and
2804 SpooledTemporaryFile to be used in with statements by correctly
2805 supporting the context management protocol.
2807 - Patch #1979: Add rich comparisons to Decimal, and make Decimal
2808 comparisons involving a NaN follow the IEEE 754 standard.
2810 - Issue #2004: tarfile.py: Use mode 0700 for temporary directories and
2811 default permissions for missing directories.
2813 - Issue #175006: The debugger used to skip the condition of a "while"
2814 statement after the first iteration. Now it correctly steps on the
2815 expression, and breakpoints on the "while" statement are honored on
2818 - Issue #1765140: add an optional delay argument to FileHandler and
2819 its subclasses. Defaults to false (existing behaviour), but if true,
2820 defers opening the file until the first call to emit().
2822 - The pprint module now supports sets and frozensets.
2824 - Issue #1221598: add optional callbacks to ftplib.FTP's storbinary()
2825 and storlines() methods. (Contributed by Phil Schwartz)
2827 - Issue #1715: include sub-extension modules in pydoc's text output.
2829 - Issue #1836: fix an off-by-one bug in TimedRotatingHandler's
2830 rollover time calculation.
2832 - Issue #1021: fix a bug to allow basicConfig to accept NOTSET as a
2835 - Issue #932563: add LoggerAdapter convenience class to make it easier
2836 to add contextual information in logging output.
2838 - Issue #1760556: fix a bug to avoid FileHandler throwing an exception
2841 - Bug #1530959: distutils' build command now uses different build
2842 directory when building extension modules against versions of Python
2843 compiled with ``--with-pydebug``.
2845 - Issue #1555501: move plistlib from plat-mac directory to general
2848 - Issue #1269: fix a bug in pstats.add_callers() and add a unit test
2851 - Issue #1669: don't allow shutil.rmtree() to be called on a symlink
2854 - Issue #1664522: in urllib, don't read non-existing directories in
2855 ftp mode, returning a 0-byte file -- raise an IOError instead.
2857 - Issue #856047: respect the ``no_proxy`` environment variable when
2858 using the ``http_proxy`` etc. environment variables in urllib.
2860 - Issue #1178141: add a getcode() method to the addinfourls that
2861 urllib.open() returns so that you can retrieve the HTTP status code.
2863 - Issue #1003: Fix zipfile decryption check, it would fail zip files
2864 with extended local headers.
2866 - Issue #1189216: Fix the zipfile module to work on archives with
2867 headers past the 2**31 byte boundary.
2869 - Issue #1336: fix a race condition in subprocess.Popen if the garbage
2870 collector kicked in at the wrong time that would cause the process
2871 to hang when the child wrote to stderr.
2873 - Issue #1146: fix how textwrap breaks a long word that would start in
2874 the last column of a line.
2876 - Issue #1693149: trace.py --ignore-module - accept multiple
2877 comma-separated modules to be given.
2879 - Issue #1822: MIMEMultipart.is_multipart() behaves correctly for a
2880 just-created (and empty) instance. Thanks Jonathan Share.
2882 - Issue #1861: Added an attribute to the sched module which returns an
2883 ordered list of upcoming events (displayed as named tuples).
2885 - Issue #1837: The queue module now also supports a LIFO queue and a
2888 - Patch #1048820: Add insert-mode editing to curses.textpad.Textbox
2889 (patch by Stefan Wehr). Also, fix an off-by-one bug in
2892 - Issue #1831: ctypes now raises a TypeError if conflicting positional
2893 and named arguments are passed to a Structure or Union initializer.
2894 When too many positional arguments are passed, also a TypeError is
2895 raised instead of a ValueError.
2897 - Convert the internal ctypes array type cache to a WeakValueDict so
2898 that array types do not live longer than needed.
2900 - Issue #1786: pdb should use its own stdin/stdout around an exec call
2901 and when creating a recursive instance.
2903 - Issue #1698398: ZipFile.printdir() crashed because the format string
2904 expected a tuple type of length six instead of time.struct_time
2907 - Issue #1780: The Decimal constructor now accepts arbitrary leading
2908 and trailing whitespace when constructing from a string.
2909 Context.create_decimal no longer accepts trailing newlines.
2911 - Decimal.as_tuple(), difflib.find_longest_match() and inspect
2912 functions that returned a tuple now return a named tuple.
2914 - Doctest now returns results as a named tuple for readability:
2915 (0, 7) --> TestResults(failed=0, attempted=7)
2917 - Issue #846388:q re.match is interruptible now, which is particularly
2918 good for long regular expression matches.
2920 - Patch #1137: allow setting buffer_size attribute on pyexpat Parser
2921 objects to set the character data buffer size.
2923 - Issue #1757: The hash of a Decimal instance is no longer affected by
2924 the current context.
2926 - Patch #467924: add ZipFile.extract() and ZipFile.extractall() in the
2929 - Issue #1646: Make socket support the TIPC protocol.
2931 - Bug #1742: return os.curdir from os.path.relpath() if both arguments
2932 are equal instead of raising an exception.
2934 - Patch #1637: fix urlparse for URLs like 'http://x.com?arg=/foo'.
2936 - Patch #1698: allow '@' in username parsed by urlparse.py.
2938 - Issue #1735: TarFile.extractall() now correctly sets directory
2939 permissions and times.
2941 - Bug #1713: posixpath.ismount() claims symlink to a mountpoint is a mountpoint.
2943 - Bug #1687: Fxed plistlib.py restricts <integer> to Python int when
2946 - Issue #1700: Regular expression inline flags incorrectly handle
2947 certain unicode characters.
2949 - Issue #1689: PEP 3141, numeric abstract base classes.
2951 - Tk issue #1851526: Return results from Python callbacks to Tcl as
2954 - Issue #1642: Fix segfault in ctypes when trying to delete attributes.
2956 - Issue #1727780: Support loading pickles of random.Random objects
2957 created on 32-bit systems on 64-bit systems, and vice versa. As a
2958 consequence of the change, Random pickles created by Python 2.6
2959 cannot be loaded in Python 2.5.
2961 - Issue #1455: The distutils package now supports VS 2005 and VS 2008
2962 for both the msvccompiler and cygwincompiler.
2964 - Issue #1531: tarfile.py: Read fileobj from the current offset, do
2965 not seek to the start.
2967 - Issue #1534: Added a dictionary sys.float_info with information
2968 about the internal floating point type to the sys module.
2970 - Issue #1429818: patch for trace and doctest modules so they play
2973 - doctest made a bad assumption that a package's __loader__.get_data()
2974 method used universal newlines.
2976 - Issue #1705170: contextlib.contextmanager was still swallowing
2977 StopIteration in some cases. This should no longer happen.
2979 - Issue #1292: On alpha, arm, ppc, and s390 linux systems the
2980 --with-system-ffi configure option defaults to "yes".
2982 - IN module for FreeBSD 8 is added and preexisting FreeBSD 6 and 7
2985 - Issues #1181, #1287: unsetenv() is now called when the
2986 os.environ.pop() and os.environ.clear() methods are used.
2988 - ctypes will now work correctly on 32-bit systems when Python is
2989 configured with --with-system-ffi.
2991 - Patch #1203: ctypes now does work on OS X when Python is built with
2992 --disable-toolbox-glue.
2994 - collections.deque() now supports a "maxlen" argument.
2996 - itertools.count() is no longer bounded to LONG_MAX. Formerly, it
2997 raised an OverflowError. Now, automatically shifts from ints to
3000 - Added itertools.product() which forms the Cartesian product of the
3003 - Added itertools.combinations() and itertools.permutations().
3005 - Patch #1541463: optimize performance of cgi.FieldStorage operations.
3007 - Decimal is fully updated to the latest Decimal Specification
3010 - Bug #1153: repr.repr() now doesn't require set and dictionary items
3011 to be orderable to properly represent them.
3013 - A 'c_longdouble' type was added to the ctypes module.
3015 - Bug #1709599: Run test_1565150 only if the file system is NTFS.
3017 - When encountering a password-protected robots.txt file the
3018 RobotFileParser no longer prompts interactively for a username and
3019 password (bug 813986).
3021 - TarFile.__init__() no longer fails if no name argument is passed and
3022 the fileobj argument has no usable name attribute (e.g. StringIO).
3024 - The functools module now provides 'reduce', for forward
3025 compatibility with Python 3000.
3027 - Server-side SSL support and cert verification added, by Bill
3030 - socket.ssl deprecated; use new ssl module instead.
3032 - uuid creation is now threadsafe.
3034 - EUC-KR codec now handles the cheot-ga-keut composed make-up hangul
3037 - GB18030 codec now can encode additional two-byte characters that are
3040 - Add new codecs for UTF-32, UTF-32-LE and UTF-32-BE.
3042 - Bug #1704793: Return UTF-16 pair if unicodedata.lookup cannot
3043 represent the result in a single character.
3045 - Bug #978833: Close https sockets by releasing the _ssl object.
3047 - Change location of the package index to pypi.python.org/pypi
3049 - Bug #1701409: Fix a segfault in printing ctypes.c_char_p and
3050 ctypes.c_wchar_p when they point to an invalid location. As a
3051 sideeffect the representation of these instances has changed.
3053 - tarfile.py: Added "exclude" keyword argument to TarFile.add().
3055 - Bug #1734723: Fix repr.Repr() so it doesn't ignore the maxtuple
3058 - The urlopen function of urllib2 now has an optional timeout
3059 parameter (note that it actually works with HTTP, HTTPS, FTP and
3062 - In ftplib, the FTP.ntransfercmd method, when in passive mode, now
3063 uses the socket.create_connection function, using the timeout
3064 specified at connection time.
3066 - Bug #1728403: Fix a bug that CJKCodecs StreamReader hangs when it
3067 reads a file that ends with incomplete sequence and sizehint
3068 argument for .read() is specified.
3070 - Bug #1730389: Change time.strptime() to use ``\s+`` instead of
3071 ``\s*`` when matching spaces in the specified format argument.
3073 - Bugs #1668596/#1720897: distutils now copies data files even if
3074 package_dir is empty.
3076 - sha now raises a DeprecationWarning upon import.
3078 - md5 now raises a DeprecationWarning upon import.
3080 - Issue #1385: The hmac module now computes the correct hmac when
3081 using hashes with a block size other than 64 bytes (such as sha384
3084 - mimify now raises a DeprecationWarning upon import.
3086 - MimeWriter now raises a DeprecationWarning upon import.
3088 - tarfile.py: Improved unicode support. Unicode input names are now
3089 officially supported. Added "errors" argument to the TarFile class.
3091 - urllib.ftpwrapper class now accepts an optional timeout.
3093 - shlex.split() now has an optional "posix" parameter.
3095 - The posixfile module now raises a DeprecationWarning.
3097 - Remove the gopherlib module. This also leads to the removal of
3098 gopher support in urllib/urllib2.
3100 - Fix bug in marshal where bad data would cause a segfault due to lack
3101 of an infinite recursion check.
3103 - Removed plat-freebsd2 and plat-freebsd3 directories (and IN.py in
3106 - HTML-escape the plain traceback in cgitb's HTML output, to prevent
3107 the traceback inadvertently or maliciously closing the comment and
3108 injecting HTML into the error page.
3110 - The popen2 module and os.popen* are deprecated. Use the subprocess
3113 - Added an optional credentials argument to SMTPHandler, for use with
3114 SMTP servers which require authentication.
3116 - Patch #1695948: Added optional timeout parameter to SocketHandler.
3118 - Bug #1652788: Minor fix for currentframe.
3120 - Patch #1598415: Added WatchedFileHandler to better support external
3121 log file rotation using e.g. newsyslog or logrotate. This handler is
3122 only useful in Unix/Linux environments.
3124 - Bug #1706381: Specifying the SWIG option "-c++" in the setup.py file
3125 (as opposed to the command line) will now write file names ending in
3128 - As specified in RFC 2616, an HTTP response like 2xx indicates that
3129 the client's request was successfully received, understood, and
3130 accepted. Now in these cases no error is raised in urllib (issue
3133 - Bug #1290505: time.strptime's internal cache of locale information
3134 is now properly recreated when the locale is changed.
3136 - Patch #1685563: remove (don't add) duplicate paths in
3137 distutils.MSVCCompiler.
3139 - Added a timeout parameter to the constructor of other protocols
3140 (telnetlib, ftplib, smtplib and poplib). This is second part of the
3141 work started with create_connection() and timeout in httplib, and
3142 closes patch #723312.
3144 - Patch #1676823: Added create_connection() to socket.py, which may be
3145 called with a timeout, and use it from httplib (whose HTTPConnection
3146 and HTTPSConnection now accept an optional timeout).
3148 - Bug #978833: Revert r50844, as it broke _socketobject.dup.
3150 - Bug #1675967: re patterns pickled with Python 2.4 and earlier can
3151 now be unpickled with Python 2.5 and newer.
3153 - Patch #1630118: add a SpooledTemporaryFile class to tempfile.py.
3155 - Patch #1273829: os.walk() now has a "followlinks" parameter. If set
3156 to True (which is not the default), it visits symlinks pointing to
3159 - Bug #1681228: the webbrowser module now correctly uses the default
3160 GNOME or KDE browser, depending on whether there is a session of one
3161 of those present. Also, it tries the Windows default browser before
3162 trying Mozilla variants.
3164 - Patch #1339796: add a relpath() function to os.path.
3166 - Patch #1681153: the wave module now closes a file object it opened if
3167 initialization failed.
3169 - Bug #767111: fix long-standing bug in urllib which caused an
3170 AttributeError instead of an IOError when the server's response
3171 didn't contain a valid HTTP status line.
3173 - Patch #957650: "%var%" environment variable references are now
3174 properly expanded in ntpath.expandvars(), also "~user" home
3175 directory references are recognized and handled on Windows.
3177 - Patch #1429539: pdb now correctly initializes the __main__ module
3178 for the debugged script, which means that imports from __main__ work
3181 - The nonobvious commands.getstatus() function is now deprecated.
3183 - Patch #1393667: pdb now has a "run" command which restarts the
3184 debugged Python program, optionally with different arguments.
3186 - Patch #1649190: Adding support for _Bool to ctypes as c_bool.
3188 - Patch #1530482: add pydoc.render_doc() which returns the
3189 documentation for a thing instead of paging it to stdout, which
3192 - Patch #1533909: the timeit module now accepts callables in addition
3193 to strings for the code to time and the setup code. Also added two
3194 convenience functions for instantiating a Timer and calling its
3197 - Patch #1537850: tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile now has a "delete"
3198 parameter which can be set to False to prevent the default
3199 delete-on-close behavior.
3201 - Patch #1581073: add a flag to textwrap that prevents the dropping of
3202 whitespace while wrapping.
3204 - Patch #1603688: ConfigParser.SafeConfigParser now checks values that
3205 are set for invalid interpolation sequences that would lead to
3206 errors on reading back those values.
3208 - Added support for the POSIX.1-2001 (pax) format to
3209 tarfile.py. Extended and cleaned up the test suite. Added a new
3212 - Patch #1449244: Support Unicode strings in
3213 email.message.Message.{set_charset,get_content_charset}.
3215 - Patch #1542681: add entries for "with", "as" and "CONTEXTMANAGERS"
3216 to pydoc's help keywords.
3218 - Patch #1555098: use str.join() instead of repeated string
3219 concatenation in robotparser.
3221 - Patch #1635454: the csv.DictWriter class now includes the offending
3222 field names in its exception message if you try to write a record
3223 with a dictionary containing fields not in the CSV field names list.
3225 - Patch #1668100: urllib2 now correctly raises URLError instead of
3226 OSError if accessing a local file via the file:// protocol fails.
3228 - Patch #1677862: Require a space or tab after import in .pth files.
3230 - Patch #1192590: Fix pdb's "ignore" and "condition" commands so they
3231 trap the IndexError caused by passing in an invalid breakpoint
3234 - Patch #1599845: Add an option to disable the implicit calls to
3235 server_bind() and server_activate() in the constructors for
3236 TCPServer, SimpleXMLRPCServer and DocXMLRPCServer.
3238 - Bug #1531963: Make SocketServer.TCPServer's server_address always be
3239 equal to calling getsockname() on the server's socket. Fixed by
3242 - Patch #742598: Add .timeout attribute to SocketServer that calls
3243 .handle_timeout() when no requests are received.
3245 - Bug #1651235: When a tuple was passed to a ctypes function call,
3246 Python would crash instead of raising an error.
3248 - Bug #1646630: ctypes.string_at(buf, 0) and ctypes.wstring_at(buf, 0)
3249 returned string up to the first NUL character.
3251 - Patch #957003: Implement smtplib.LMTP.
3253 - Patch #1481079: add support for HTTP_REFERER to CGIHTTPServer.
3255 - Patch #1675424: Added tests for uncovered code in the zipfile
3256 module. The KeyError raised by Zipfile.getinfo for nonexistent
3257 names now has a descriptive message.
3259 - Bug #1115886: os.path.splitext('.cshrc') gives now ('.cshrc', '').
3261 - unittest now verifies more of its assumptions. In particular,
3262 TestCase and TestSuite subclasses (not instances) are no longer
3263 accepted in TestSuite.addTest(). This should cause no
3264 incompatibility since it never made sense with ordinary subclasses
3265 -- the failure just occurred later, with a more cumbersome
3268 - Patch #787789: allow to pass custom TestRunner instances to
3269 unittest's main() function.
3271 - Patches #1550273, #1550272: fix a few bugs in unittest and add a
3272 comprehensive test suite for the module.
3274 - Patch #1001604: glob.glob() now returns unicode filenames if it was
3275 given a unicode argument and os.listdir() returns unicode filenames.
3277 - Patch #1673619: setup.py identifies extension modules it doesn't
3278 know how to build and those it knows how to build but that fail to
3281 - Patch #912410: Replace HTML entity references for attribute values
3284 - Patch #1663234: you can now run doctest on test files and modules
3285 using "python -m doctest [-v] filename ...".
3287 - Patch #1121142: Implement ZipFile.open.
3289 - Taught setup.py how to locate Berkeley DB on Macs using MacPorts.
3291 - Added heapq.merge() for merging sorted input streams.
3293 - Added collections.namedtuple() for assigning field names to tuples.
3295 - Added itertools.izip_longest().
3297 - Have the encoding package's search function dynamically import using
3298 absolute import semantics.
3300 - Patch #1647484: Renamed GzipFile's filename attribute to name.
3302 - Patch #1517891: Mode 'a' for ZipFile now creates the file if it
3305 - Patch #698833: Support file decryption in zipfile.
3307 - Patch #685268: Consider a package's __path__ in imputil.
3309 - Patch #1463026: Support default namespace in XMLGenerator.
3311 - Patch #1571379: Make trace's --ignore-dir facility work in the face
3312 of relative directory names.
3314 - Bug #1600860: Search for shared python library in LIBDIR, not
3315 lib/python/config, on "linux" and "gnu" systems.
3317 - Patch #1652681: tarfile.py: create nonexistent files in append mode
3318 and allow appending to empty files.
3320 - Bug #1124861: Automatically create pipes if GetStdHandle fails in
3323 - Patch #1634778: add missing encoding aliases for iso8859_15 and
3326 - Patch #1638243: the compiler package is now able to correctly
3327 compile a with statement; previously, executing code containing a
3328 with statement compiled by the compiler package crashed the
3331 - Bug #1643943: Fix time.strptime's support for the %U directive.
3333 - Patch #1507247: tarfile.py: use current umask for intermediate
3336 - Patch #1627441: close sockets properly in urllib2.
3338 - Bug #494589: make ntpath.expandvars behave according to its
3341 - Changed platform module API python_version_tuple() to actually
3342 return a tuple (it used to return a list).
3344 - Added new platform module APIs python_branch(), python_revision(),
3345 python_implementation() and linux_distribution().
3347 - Added support for IronPython and Jython to the platform module.
3349 - The sets module has been deprecated. Use the built-in set/frozenset
3352 - Bug #1610795: make ctypes.util.find_library work on BSD systems.
3354 - Fixes for 64-bit Windows: In ctypes.wintypes, correct the
3355 definitions of HANDLE, WPARAM, LPARAM data types. Make
3356 parameterless foreign function calls work.
3358 - The version number of the ctypes package changed to "1.1.0".
3360 - Bug #1627575: logging: Added _open() method to FileHandler which can
3361 be used to reopen files. The FileHandler instance now saves the
3362 encoding (which can be None) in an attribute called "encoding".
3364 - Bug #411881: logging.handlers: bare except clause removed from
3365 SMTPHandler.emit. Now, only ImportError is trapped.
3367 - Bug #411881: logging.handlers: bare except clause removed from
3368 SocketHandler.createSocket. Now, only socket.error is trapped.
3370 - Bug #411881: logging: bare except clause removed from
3371 LogRecord.__init__. Now, only ValueError, TypeError and
3372 AttributeError are trapped.
3374 - Patch #1504073: Fix tarfile.open() for mode "r" with a fileobj
3377 - Patch #1182394 from Shane Holloway: speed up HMAC.hexdigest.
3379 - Patch #1262036: Prevent TarFiles from being added to themselves
3380 under certain conditions.
3382 - Patch #1230446: tarfile.py: fix ExFileObject so that read() and
3383 tell() work correctly together with readline().
3385 - Patch #1484695: The tarfile module now raises a HeaderError
3386 exception if a buffer given to frombuf() is invalid.
3388 - Bug #1503765: Fix a problem in logging.config with spaces in comma-
3389 separated lists read from logging config files.
3391 - Patch #1604907: Fix problems in logging.handlers caused at logging
3392 shutdown when syslog handlers fail to initialize because of syslogd
3395 - Patch #1608267: fix a race condition in os.makedirs() if the
3396 directory to be created is already there.
3398 - Patch #1610437: fix a tarfile bug with long filename headers.
3400 - Patch #1371075: Make ConfigParser accept optional dict type for
3401 ordering, sorting, etc.
3403 - Bug #1563807: _ctypes built on AIX fails with ld ffi error.
3405 - Bug #1598620: A ctypes Structure cannot contain itself.
3407 - Patch #1070046: Marshal new-style objects like InstanceType in
3410 - cStringIO.truncate(-1) now raises an IOError, like StringIO and
3413 - Patch #1472877: Fix Tix subwidget name resolution.
3415 - Patch #1594554: Always close a tkSimpleDialog on ok(), even if an
3418 - Patch #1538878: Don't make tkSimpleDialog dialogs transient if the
3419 parent window is withdrawn.
3421 - Bug #1597824: return the registered function from atexit.register()
3422 to facilitate usage as a decorator.
3424 - Patch #1360200: Use unmangled_version RPM spec field to deal with
3427 - Patch #1359217: Process 2xx response in an ftplib transfer that
3428 precedes an 1xx response.
3430 - Patch #1355023: support whence argument for GzipFile.seek.
3432 - Patch #1065257: Support passing open files as body in
3433 HTTPConnection.request().
3435 - Bug #1569790: mailbox.py: Maildir.get_folder() and MH.get_folder()
3436 weren't passing the message factory on to newly created Maildir/MH
3439 - Patch #1514543: mailbox.py: In the Maildir class, report errors if
3440 there's a filename clash instead of possibly losing a message.
3441 (Patch by David Watson.)
3443 - Patch #1514544: Try to ensure that messages/indexes have been
3444 physically written to disk after calling .flush() or
3445 .close(). (Patch by David Watson.)
3447 - Patch #1592250: Add elide argument to Tkinter.Text.search.
3449 - Patch #838546: Make terminal become controlling in pty.fork().
3451 - Patch #1351744: Add askyesnocancel helper for tkMessageBox.
3453 - Patch #1060577: Extract list of RPM files from spec file in
3456 - Bug #1586613: fix zlib and bz2 codecs' incremental en/decoders.
3458 - Patch #1583880: fix tarfile's problems with long names and posix/
3461 - Bug #1586448: the compiler module now emits the same bytecode for
3462 list comprehensions as the builtin compiler, using the LIST_APPEND
3465 - Fix codecs.EncodedFile which did not use file_encoding in 2.5.0, and
3466 fix all codecs file wrappers to work correctly with the "with"
3467 statement (bug #1586513).
3469 - Lib/modulefinder.py now handles absolute and relative imports
3472 - Patch #1567274: Support SMTP over TLS.
3474 - Patch #1560695: Add .note.GNU-stack to ctypes' sysv.S so that ctypes
3475 isn't considered as requiring executable stacks.
3477 - ctypes callback functions only support 'fundamental' data types as
3478 result type. Raise an error when something else is used. This is a
3479 partial fix for Bug #1574584.
3481 - Fix turtle so that time.sleep is imported for the entire library.
3482 Allows the demo2 function to be executed on its own instead of only
3483 when the module is run as a script.
3485 - Bug #813342: Start the IDLE subprocess with -Qnew if the parent is
3486 started with that option.
3488 - Bug #1565150: Fix subsecond processing for os.utime on Windows.
3490 - Support for MSVC 8 was added to bdist_wininst.
3492 - Bug #1446043: correctly raise a LookupError if an encoding name
3493 given to encodings.search_function() contains a dot.
3495 - Bug #1560617: in pyclbr, return full module name not only for
3496 classes, but also for functions.
3498 - Bug #1457823: cgi.(Sv)FormContentDict's constructor now takes
3499 keep_blank_values and strict_parsing keyword arguments.
3501 - Bug #1566602: correct failure of posixpath unittest when $HOME ends
3504 - Bug #1565661: in webbrowser, split() the command for the default
3505 GNOME browser in case it is a command with args.
3507 - Made the error message for time.strptime when the data data and
3508 format do match be more clear.
3510 - Fix a bug in traceback.format_exception_only() that led to an error
3511 being raised when print_exc() was called without an exception set.
3512 In version 2.4, this printed "None", restored that behavior.
3514 - Make webbrowser.BackgroundBrowser usable in Windows (it wasn't
3515 because the close_fds arg to subprocess.Popen is not supported).
3517 - Reverted patch #1504333 to sgmllib because it introduced an infinite
3520 - Patch #1553314: Fix the inspect.py slowdown that was hurting IPython
3521 & SAGE by adding smarter caching in inspect.getmodule()
3523 - Fix missing import of the types module in logging.config.
3525 - Patch #1550886: Fix decimal module context management implementation
3526 to match the localcontext() example from PEP 343.
3528 - Bug #1545341: The 'classifier' keyword argument to the Distutils
3529 setup() function now accepts tuples as well as lists.
3531 - Bug #1541863: uuid.uuid1 failed to generate unique identifiers on
3532 systems with low clock resolution.
3534 - Bug #1531862: Do not close standard file descriptors in subprocess.
3536 - idle: Honor the "Cancel" action in the save dialog (Debian bug
3539 - Fix utf-8-sig incremental decoder, which didn't recognise a BOM when
3540 the first chunk fed to the decoder started with a BOM, but was
3541 longer than 3 bytes.
3543 - The implementation of UnicodeError objects has been simplified
3544 (start and end attributes are now stored directly as Py_ssize_t
3547 - Issue #829951: In the smtplib module, SMTP.starttls() now complies
3548 with RFC 3207 and forgets any knowledge obtained from the server not
3549 obtained from the TLS negotiation itself. Patch contributed by Bill
3552 - Issue #1339: The smtplib.SMTP class has been refactored a bit such
3553 that the SMTP.starttls() caller no longer needs to call ehlo()
3554 beforehand. SMTP.starttls() now raises an exception of the server
3555 does not claim to support starttls. Adds the
3556 SMTP.ehlo_or_helo_if_needed() method. Patch contributed by Bill
3559 - Patch #1089358: Add signal.siginterrupt, a wrapper around
3565 - Patch #1657: added select.epoll and select.kqueue.
3567 - Patch #1506171: added operator.methodcaller().
3569 - Patch #1826: operator.attrgetter() now supports dotted attribute paths.
3571 - Patch #1957: syslogmodule: Release GIL when calling syslog(3).
3573 - Bug #2112: mmap.error is now a subclass of EnvironmentError and not
3574 a direct EnvironmentError.
3576 - Bug #2111: mmap segfaults when trying to write a block opened with
3579 - Bug #2063: correct order of utime and stime in os.times() result on
3582 - Patch #1736: Fix file name handling of _msi.FCICreate.
3584 - Updated ``big5hkscs`` codec to the HKSCS revision of 2004.
3586 - Issue #1940: make it possible to use curses.filter() before
3587 curses.initscr() as the documentation says.
3589 - Backport of _fileio module from Python 3.0.
3591 - Patch #1087741: mmap.mmap is now a class, not a factory function. It
3592 is also subclassable now.
3594 - Patch #1648: added ``sys.getprofile()`` and ``sys.gettrace()``.
3596 - Patch #1663329: added ``os.closerange()`` function to quickly close
3597 a range of file descriptors without considering errors.
3599 - Patch #976880: ``mmap`` objects now have an ``rfind`` method that
3600 works as expected. ``mmap.find`` also takes an optional ``end``
3603 - _winreg's HKEY object has gained __enter__ and __exit__ methods to
3604 support the context manager protocol. The _winreg module also
3605 gained a new function ``ExpandEnvironmentStrings`` to expand
3608 - itertools.starmap() now accepts any iterable input. Previously, it
3609 required the function inputs to be tuples.
3611 - itertools.chain() now has an alternate constructor,
3612 chain.from_iterable().
3614 - Issue #1646: Make socket support TIPC. The socket module now has
3615 support for TIPC under Linux, see http://tipc.sf.net/ for more
3618 - Added interface for Windows' WSAIoctl to socket object and added an
3619 example for a simple network sniffer.
3621 - Bug #1301: Bad assert in _tkinter fixed.
3623 - Added bdist_wininst executable for VS 2008.
3625 - Bug #1604: collections.deque.__init__(iterable) now clears any prior
3626 contents before adding elements from the iterable. This fix brings
3627 the behavior into line with that for list.__init__().
3629 - Added wide char functions to msvcrt module: getwch, getwche, putwch
3630 and ungetwch. The functions accept or return unicode.
3632 - os.access now returns True on Windows for any existing directory.
3634 - Added warnpy3k function to the warnings module.
3636 - Marshal.dumps() now expects exact type matches for int, long, float,
3637 complex, tuple, list, dict, set, and frozenset. Formerly, it would
3638 silently miscode subclasses of those types. Now, it raises a
3641 - Patch #1388440: Add set_completion_display_matches_hook and
3642 get_completion_type to readline.
3644 - Bug #1649098: Avoid declaration of zero-sized array declaration in
3647 - Removed the rgbimg module; been deprecated since Python 2.5.
3649 - Bug #1721309: prevent bsddb module from freeing random memory.
3651 - Bug #1233: fix bsddb.dbshelve.DBShelf append method to work as
3652 intended for RECNO databases.
3654 - pybsddb.sf.net Bug #477182: Load the database flags at database open
3655 time so that opening a database previously created with the DB_DUP
3656 or DB_DUPSORT flag set will keep the proper behavior on subsequent
3657 opens. Specifically: dictionary assignment to a DB object will
3658 replace all values for a given key when the database allows
3659 duplicate values. DB users should use DB.put(k, v) when they want
3660 to store duplicates; not DB[k] = v.
3662 - Add the bsddb.db.DBEnv.lock_id_free method.
3664 - Bug #1686475: Support stat'ing open files on Windows again.
3666 - Patch #1185447: binascii.b2a_qp() now correctly quotes binary
3667 characters with ASCII value less than 32. Also, it correctly quotes
3668 dots only if they occur on a single line, as opposed to the previous
3669 behavior of quoting dots if they are the second character of any
3672 - Bug #1622896: fix a rare corner case where the bz2 module raised an
3673 error in spite of a succesful compression.
3675 - Patch #1654417: make operator.{get,set,del}slice use the full range
3678 - Patch #1646728: datetime.fromtimestamp fails with negative
3679 fractional times. With unittest.
3681 - Patch #1490190: posixmodule now includes os.chflags() and
3682 os.lchflags() functions on platforms where the underlying system
3683 calls are available.
3685 - Patch #1494140: Add documentation for the new struct.Struct object.
3687 - Patch #1432399: Support the HCI protocol for bluetooth sockets
3689 - Patch #1657276: Make NETLINK_DNRTMSG conditional.
3691 - Bug #1653736: Complain about keyword arguments to time.isoformat.
3693 - Bug #1486663: don't reject keyword arguments for subclasses of
3696 - Patch #1610575: The struct module now supports the 't' code, for C99
3699 - Patch #1635058: ensure that htonl and friends never accept or return
3700 negative numbers, per the underlying C implementation.
3702 - Patch #1544279: Improve thread-safety of the socket module by moving
3703 the sock_addr_t storage out of the socket object.
3705 - Patch #1019808: fix bug that causes an incorrect error to be
3706 returned when a socket timeout is set and a connection attempt
3709 - Speed up function calls into the math module.
3711 - Bug #1588217: don't parse "= " as a soft line break in binascii's
3712 a2b_qp() function, instead leave it in the string as quopri.decode()
3715 - Bug #1599782: Fix segfault on bsddb.db.DB().type().
3717 - Bug #1567666: Emulate GetFileAttributesExA for Win95.
3719 - Patch #1576166: Support os.utime for directories on Windows NT+.
3721 - Patch #1572724: fix typo ('=' instead of '==') in _msi.c.
3723 - Bug #1572832: fix a bug in ISO-2022 codecs which may cause segfault
3724 when encoding non-BMP unicode characters.
3726 - Bug #1556784: allow format strings longer than 127 characters in
3727 datetime's strftime function.
3729 - Fix itertools.count(n) to work with negative numbers again.
3731 - RLIMIT_SBSIZE was added to the resource module where available.
3733 - Bug #1551427: fix a wrong NULL pointer check in the win32 version of
3736 - Bug #1548092: fix curses.tparm seg fault on invalid input.
3738 - Patch #1114: fix curses module compilation on 64-bit AIX, & possibly
3739 other 64-bit LP64 platforms where attr_t is not the same size as a
3740 long. (Contributed by Luke Mewburn.)
3742 - Bug #1550714: fix SystemError from itertools.tee on negative value
3745 - Fixed a few bugs on cjkcodecs:
3746 - gbk and gb18030 codec now handle U+30FB KATAKANA MIDDLE DOT
3748 - iso2022_jp_2 codec now encodes into G0 for KS X 1001, GB2312
3749 codepoints to conform the standard.
3750 - iso2022_jp_3 and iso2022_jp_2004 codec can encode JIS X 0213:2
3753 - Bug #1552726: in readline.c, avoid repeatedly polling in interactive
3754 mode by only placing a timeout on the select() if an input hook has
3755 been defined. This prevents an interactive Python from waking up 10
3756 times per second. Patch by Richard Boulton.
3758 - fixed a bug with bsddb.DB.stat: the flags and txn keyword arguments
3761 - Added support for linking the bsddb module against BerkeleyDB 4.5.x,
3764 - Bug #1633621: if curses.resizeterm() or curses.resize_term() is
3765 called, update _curses.LINES, _curses.COLS, curses.LINES and
3768 - Fix an off-by-one bug in locale.strxfrm().
3770 - Fix libffi configure for hppa*-*-linux* | parisc*-*-linux*.
3772 - Build using system ffi library on arm*-linux*.
3774 - Bug #1372: zlibmodule.c: int overflow in PyZlib_decompress
3776 - bsddb module: Fix memory leak when using database cursors on
3777 databases without a DBEnv.
3779 - The sqlite3 module was updated to pysqlite 2.4.1.
3784 - Refactor test_logging to use unittest.
3786 - Refactor test_profile and test_cprofile to use the same code to
3789 - Make test_runpy reentrant by fixing _check_module to clear out any
3790 module being tested. Was causing an error by __import__ doing a
3791 reload on the second run and thus suppressing bytecode recreation.
3793 - Capture socket connection resets and timeouts in test_socket_ssl and
3794 test_urllib2net and raise test.test_support.ResourceDenied.
3796 - Patch #1559413: Fix test_cmd_line if sys.executable contains a
3799 - Added test.test_support.TransientResource which is a context manager
3800 to surround calls to resources that are not guaranteed to work even
3801 if test.test_support.requires says that the resource should exist.
3803 - Added a test for slicing of an exception.
3805 - Added test.test_support.EnvironmentVarGuard. It's a class that
3806 provides a context manager so that one can temporarily set or unset
3807 environment variables.
3809 - Added some tests for modulefinder.
3811 - Converted test_imp to use unittest.
3813 - Fix bsddb test_basics.test06_Transactions to check the version
3816 - test.test_support.catch_warning is a new context manager that can be
3817 used to catch the warnings issued by the warning framework.
3822 - Tools/scripts/reindent.py now creates the backup file using
3823 shutil.copy to preserve user/group and permissions. Added also a
3824 --nobackup option to not create the backup if the user is concerned
3825 regarding this. Check issue 1050828 for more details.
3827 - Tools/scripts/win_add2path.py was added. The simple script modifes
3828 the PATH environment var of the HKCU tree and adds the python bin
3829 and script directory.
3831 - Tools/18n/pygettext.py was added to the list of scripts installed by
3832 Tools/scripts/setup.py (tracker item 642309).
3834 - Added IronPython and Jython support to pybench (part of which was
3837 - Made some minor changes to pybench output to allow the user to see
3838 which Python version is running pybench.
3840 - Added support for the new platform module feature
3841 platform.python_implementation(); this will now be saved in the
3848 - RFE #1765140: Updated documentation on FileHandler and subclasses to
3849 include new optional delay argument.
3851 - Bug #932563: Added section on getting contextual information into
3852 logging output, and added documentation for the new LoggerAdapter
3855 - Bug #1295: Added information about caching of formatted exception
3856 information in the LogRecord by Formatter.format().
3858 - Bug #1637365: add subsection about "__name__ == __main__" to the
3861 - Patch #1698768: updated the "using Python on the Mac" intro.
3863 - Bug #1569057: Document that calling file.next() when the file is
3864 open for writing is undefined.
3866 - Patch #1489771: the syntax rules in Python Reference Manual were
3867 updated to reflect the current Python syntax.
3869 - Patch #1686451: Fix return type for
3870 PySequence_{Count,Index,Fast_GET_SIZE}.
3872 - Patch #1679379: add documentation for fnmatch.translate().
3874 - Bug #1629566: clarify the docs on the return values of parsedate()
3875 and parsedate_tz() in email.utils and rfc822.
3877 - Patch #1671450: add a section about subclassing builtin types to the
3878 "extending and embedding" tutorial.
3880 - Bug #1629125: fix wrong data type (int -> Py_ssize_t) in PyDict_Next
3883 - Bug #1565919: document set types in the Language Reference.
3885 - Bug #1546052: clarify that PyString_FromString(AndSize) copies the
3886 string pointed to by its parameter.
3888 - Bug #1566663: remove obsolete example from datetime docs.
3890 - Bug #1541682: Fix example in the "Refcount details" API docs.
3891 Additionally, remove a faulty example showing PySequence_SetItem
3892 applied to a newly created list object and add notes that this isn't
3899 - Patch #1552024: add decorator support to unparse.py demo script.
3901 - Make auto-generated python.vim file list built-ins and exceptions in
3902 alphatbetical order. Makes output more deterministic and easier to
3903 tell if the file is stale or not.
3905 - Bug #1546372: Fixed small bugglet in pybench that caused a missing
3906 file not to get reported properly.
3912 - Have the search path for building extensions follow the declared
3913 order in $CPPFLAGS and $LDFLAGS when adding directories from those
3914 environment variables.
3916 - Bug #1983: Added a check to pyport to verify that sizeof(pid_t) is
3917 smaller or equal sizeof(long).
3919 - Bug #1234: Fixed semaphore errors on AIX 5.2
3921 - Issue #1726: Remove Python/atof.c from PCBuild/pythoncore.vcproj.
3923 - Removed PCbuild8/ directory and added a new build directory for VS
3924 2005 based on the VS 2008 build directory to PC/VS8.0. The script
3925 PCbuild/vs8to9.py was added to sync changes from PCbuild to
3928 - Moved PCbuild/ directory for VS 2003 to PC/VS7.1 and renamed
3929 PCBuild9/ directory to PCBuild/.
3931 - Bug #1699: Define _BSD_SOURCE only on OpenBSD.
3933 - Bug #1608: use -fwrapv when GCC supports it. This is important,
3934 newer GCC versions may optimize away overflow buffer overflow checks
3935 without this option!
3937 - Patch #1418: Make the AC_REPLACE_FUNCS object files actually work.
3939 - Add a FAST_LOOPS build option that speeds-up looping by trading away
3940 periodic threadstate and signal checking in tight loops. By
3941 default, this option is turned-off. It should only be enabled in
3942 debugged, performance critical applications.
3944 - Patch #786737: Allow building in a tree of symlinks pointing to a
3947 - Bug #1737210: Change Manufacturer of Windows installer to PSF.
3949 - Bug #1746880: Correctly install DLLs into system32 folder on Win64.
3951 - Define _BSD_SOURCE, to get access to POSIX extensions on OpenBSD
3954 - Stop supporting AtheOS and cause a build error in configure for the
3957 - Bug #1655392: don't add -L/usr/lib/pythonX.Y/config to the LDFLAGS
3958 returned by python-config if Python was built with --enable-shared
3959 because that prevented the shared library from being used.
3961 - Patch #1569798: fix a bug in distutils when building Python from a
3962 directory within sys.exec_prefix.
3964 - Bug #1675511: Use -Kpic instead of -xcode=pic32 on Solaris/x86.
3966 - Disable _XOPEN_SOURCE on NetBSD 1.x.
3968 - configure now checks whether gcc supports the PyArg_ParseTuple
3971 - Bug #1578513: Cross compilation was broken by a change to configure.
3972 Repair so that it's back to how it was in 2.4.3.
3974 - Patch #1576954: Update VC6 build directory; remove redundant files
3977 - Bug #1568842: Fix test for uintptr_t.
3979 - Patch #1540470: for OpenBSD 4.0.
3981 - Fix build failure on kfreebsd and on the hurd.
3983 - Fix the build of the library reference in info format.
3985 - Allow Emacs 22 for building the documentation in info format.
3987 - Makefile.pre.in(buildbottest): Run an optional script
3988 pybuildbot.identify to include some information about the build
3995 - Unified naming convention for free lists and their limits. All free
3996 lists in Object/ are named ``free_list``, the counter ``numfree``
3997 and the upper limit is a macro ``PyName_MAXFREELIST`` inside an
4000 - ``PySet_Add()`` can now modify a newly created frozenset. Similarly
4001 to ``PyTuple_SetItem``, it can be used to populate a brand new
4002 frozenset; but it does not steal a reference to the added item.
4004 - Added ``PySet_Check()`` and ``PyFrozenSet_Check()`` to the set API.
4006 - Backport of PyUnicode_FromString(), _FromStringAndSize(), _Format
4007 and _FormatV from Python 3.0. Made PyLong_AsSsize_t and
4008 PyLong_FromSsize_t public functions.
4010 - Patch #1720595: add T_BOOL to the range of structmember types.
4012 - Issue #1534: Added ``PyFloat_GetMax()``, ``PyFloat_GetMin()`` and
4013 ``PyFloat_GetInfo()`` to the float API.
4015 - Issue #1521: On 64bit platforms, using PyArgs_ParseTuple with the t#
4016 of w# format code incorrectly truncated the length to an int, even
4017 when PY_SSIZE_T_CLEAN is set. The str.decode method used to return
4018 incorrect results with huge strings.
4020 - Issue #1629: Renamed Py_Size, Py_Type and Py_Refcnt to Py_SIZE,
4021 Py_TYPE and Py_REFCNT.
4023 - PEP 3123: Provide forward compatibility with Python 3.0, while
4024 keeping backwards compatibility. Add Py_Refcnt, Py_Type, Py_Size,
4025 and PyVarObject_HEAD_INIT.
4027 - Py_ssize_t fields work in structmember when HAVE_LONG_LONG is not
4030 - Patch #1733960: Allow T_LONGLONG to accept ints.
4032 - T_PYSSIZET can now be used in PyMemberDef lists for Py_ssize_t members.
4034 - Added a new API function ``PyImport_ImportModuleNoBlock``.
4036 - Bug #1637022: Prefix AST symbols with _Py_.
4038 - Fix some leftovers from the conversion from int to Py_ssize_t
4039 (relevant to strings and sequences of more than 2**31 items).
4041 - Make _PyGILState_NoteThreadState() static, it was not used anywhere
4042 outside of pystate.c and should not be necessary.
4044 - ``PyImport_Import`` and ``PyImport_ImportModule`` now always do
4045 absolute imports. In earlier versions they might have used relative
4046 imports under some conditions.
4048 - Added case insensitive comparison methods ``PyOS_stricmp(char*,
4049 char*)`` and ``PyOS_strnicmp(char*, char*, Py_ssize_t)``.
4051 - Bug #1542693: remove semi-colon at end of PyImport_ImportModuleEx
4052 macro so it can be used as an expression.
4058 - Patch #1706: Drop support for Win9x, WinME and NT4. Python now
4059 requires Windows 2000 or greater. The _WINVER and NTDDI_VERSION
4060 macros are set to Win2k for x86/32bit builds and WinXP for AMD64
4063 - Conditionalize definition of _CRT_SECURE_NO_DEPRECATE and
4064 _CRT_NONSTDC_NO_DEPRECATE.
4066 - Bug #1216: Restore support for Visual Studio 2002.
4072 - cfmfile now raises a DeprecationWarning.
4074 - buildtools now raises a DeprecationWarning.
4076 - Removed the macfs module. It had been deprecated since Python 2.5.
4077 This lead to the deprecation of macostools.touched() as it relied
4078 solely on macfs and was a no-op under OS X.
4082 **(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**