5 (editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
7 What's New in Python 2.6 alpha 1?
8 =================================
10 *Release date: XX-XXX-200X*
15 - Bug #1566280: Explicitly invoke threading._shutdown from Py_Main,
16 to avoid relying on atexit.
18 - Bug #1590891: random.randrange don't return correct value for big number
20 - Patch #1586791: Better exception messages for some operations on strings,
23 - Bug #1067760: Deprecate passing floats to file.seek.
25 - Bug #1591996: Correctly forward exception in instance_contains().
27 - Bug #1588287: fix invalid assertion for `1,2` in debug builds.
29 - Bug #1576657: when setting a KeyError for a tuple key, make sure that
30 the tuple isn't used as the "exception arguments tuple".
32 - Bug #1565514, SystemError not raised on too many nested blocks.
34 - Bug #1576174: WindowsError now displays the windows error code
35 again, no longer the posix error code.
37 - Patch #1549049: Support long values in structmember, issue warnings
38 if the assigned value for structmember fields gets truncated.
40 - Update the peephole optimizer to remove more dead code (jumps after returns)
41 and inline unconditional jumps to returns.
43 - Bug #1545497: when given an explicit base, int() did ignore NULs
44 embedded in the string to convert.
46 - Bug #1569998: break inside a try statement (outside a loop) is now
47 recognized and rejected.
49 - list.pop(x) accepts any object x following the __index__ protocol.
51 - Fix some leftovers from the conversion from int to Py_ssize_t
52 (relevant to strings and sequences of more than 2**31 items).
54 - A number of places, including integer negation and absolute value,
55 were fixed to not rely on undefined behaviour of the C compiler
58 - Bug #1566800: make sure that EnvironmentError can be called with any
59 number of arguments, as was the case in Python 2.4.
61 - Patch #1567691: super() and new.instancemethod() now don't accept
62 keyword arguments any more (previously they accepted them, but didn't
65 - Fix a bug in the parser's future statement handling that led to "with"
66 not being recognized as a keyword after, e.g., this statement:
67 from __future__ import division, with_statement
69 - Bug #1557232: fix seg fault with def f((((x)))) and def f(((x),)).
71 - Fix %zd string formatting on Mac OS X so it prints negative numbers.
73 - Allow exception instances to be directly sliced again.
75 - Bug #1551432: Exceptions do not define an explicit __unicode__ method. This
76 allows calling unicode() on exceptions classes directly to succeed.
78 - Make _PyGILState_NoteThreadState() static, it was not used anywhere
79 outside of pystate.c and should not be necessary.
81 - Bug #1542051: Exceptions now correctly call PyObject_GC_UnTrack.
82 Also make sure that every exception class has __module__ set to
85 - Bug #1550983: emit better error messages for erroneous relative
86 imports (if not in package and if beyond toplevel package).
88 - Overflow checking code in integer division ran afoul of new gcc
89 optimizations. Changed to be more standard-conforming.
91 - Patch #1542451: disallow continue anywhere under a finally.
93 - Patch #1546288: fix seg fault in dict_equal due to ref counting bug.
95 - The return tuple from str.rpartition(sep) is (tail, sep, head) where
96 head is the original string if sep was not found.
98 - Bug #1520864: unpacking singleton tuples in list comprehensions and
99 generator expressions (x for x, in ... ) works again. Fixing this problem
100 required changing the .pyc magic number. This means that .pyc files
101 generated before 2.5c2 will be regenerated.
103 - with and as are now keywords.
109 - Patch #1504073: Fix tarfile.open() for mode "r" with a fileobj argument.
111 - Patch #1182394 from Shane Holloway: speed up HMAC.hexdigest.
113 - Patch #1262036: Prevent TarFiles from being added to themselves under
116 - Patch #1230446: tarfile.py: fix ExFileObject so that read() and tell()
117 work correctly together with readline().
119 - Patch #1484695: The tarfile module now raises a HeaderError exception
120 if a buffer given to frombuf() is invalid.
122 - Bug #1503765: Fix a problem in logging.config with spaces in comma-
123 separated lists read from logging config files.
125 - Patch #1604907: Fix problems in logging.handlers caused at logging shutdown
126 when syslog handlers fail to initialize because of syslogd problems.
128 - Patch #1608267: fix a race condition in os.makedirs() is the directory
129 to be created is already there.
131 - Patch #1610437: fix a tarfile bug with long filename headers.
133 - Patch #1371075: Make ConfigParser accept optional dict type
134 for ordering, sorting, etc.
136 - Bug #1563807: _ctypes built on AIX fails with ld ffi error.
138 - Bug #1598620: A ctypes Structure cannot contain itself.
140 - Patch #1070046: Marshal new-style objects like InstanceType
143 - cStringIO.truncate(-1) now raises an IOError, like StringIO and
146 - Patch #1472877: Fix Tix subwidget name resolution.
148 - Patch #1594554: Always close a tkSimpleDialog on ok(), even
149 if an exception occurs.
151 - Patch #1538878: Don't make tkSimpleDialog dialogs transient if
152 the parent window is withdrawn.
154 - Bug #1597824: return the registered function from atexit.register()
155 to facilitate usage as a decorator.
157 - Patch #1360200: Use unmangled_version RPM spec field to deal with
160 - Patch #1359217: Process 2xx response in an ftplib transfer
161 that precedes an 1xx response.
163 - Patch #1355023: support whence argument for GzipFile.seek.
165 - Patch #1065257: Support passing open files as body in
166 HTTPConnection.request().
168 - Bug #1569790: mailbox.py: Maildir.get_folder() and MH.get_folder()
169 weren't passing the message factory on to newly created Maildir/MH
172 - Patch #1514543: mailbox.py: In the Maildir class, report errors if there's
173 a filename clash instead of possibly losing a message. (Patch by David
176 - Patch #1514544: Try to ensure that messages/indexes have been physically
177 written to disk after calling .flush() or .close(). (Patch by David
180 - Patch #1592250: Add elidge argument to Tkinter.Text.search.
182 - Patch #838546: Make terminal become controlling in pty.fork()
184 - Patch #1351744: Add askyesnocancel helper for tkMessageBox.
186 - Patch #1060577: Extract list of RPM files from spec file in
189 - Bug #1586613: fix zlib and bz2 codecs' incremental en/decoders.
191 - Patch #1583880: fix tarfile's problems with long names and posix/
194 - Bug #1586448: the compiler module now emits the same bytecode for
195 list comprehensions as the builtin compiler, using the LIST_APPEND
198 - Fix codecs.EncodedFile which did not use file_encoding in 2.5.0, and
199 fix all codecs file wrappers to work correctly with the "with"
200 statement (bug #1586513).
202 - Lib/modulefinder.py now handles absolute and relative imports
205 - Patch #1567274: Support SMTP over TLS.
207 - Patch #1560695: Add .note.GNU-stack to ctypes' sysv.S so that
208 ctypes isn't considered as requiring executable stacks.
210 - ctypes callback functions only support 'fundamental' data types as
211 result type. Raise an error when something else is used. This is a
212 partial fix for Bug #1574584.
214 - Fix turtle so that time.sleep is imported for the entire library. Allows
215 the demo2 function to be executed on its own instead of only when the
216 module is run as a script.
218 - Bug #813342: Start the IDLE subprocess with -Qnew if the parent
219 is started with that option.
221 - Bug #1565150: Fix subsecond processing for os.utime on Windows.
223 - Support for MSVC 8 was added to bdist_wininst.
225 - Bug #1446043: correctly raise a LookupError if an encoding name given
226 to encodings.search_function() contains a dot.
228 - Bug #1560617: in pyclbr, return full module name not only for classes,
229 but also for functions.
231 - Bug #1457823: cgi.(Sv)FormContentDict's constructor now takes
232 keep_blank_values and strict_parsing keyword arguments.
234 - Bug #1566602: correct failure of posixpath unittest when $HOME ends
237 - Bug #1565661: in webbrowser, split() the command for the default
238 GNOME browser in case it is a command with args.
240 - Made the error message for time.strptime when the data data and format do
243 - Fix a bug in traceback.format_exception_only() that led to an error
244 being raised when print_exc() was called without an exception set.
245 In version 2.4, this printed "None", restored that behavior.
247 - Make webbrowser.BackgroundBrowser usable in Windows (it wasn't because
248 the close_fds arg to subprocess.Popen is not supported).
250 - Reverted patch #1504333 to sgmllib because it introduced an infinite loop.
252 - Patch #1553314: Fix the inspect.py slowdown that was hurting IPython & SAGE
253 by adding smarter caching in inspect.getmodule()
255 - Fix missing import of the types module in logging.config.
257 - Patch #1550886: Fix decimal module context management implementation
258 to match the localcontext() example from PEP 343.
260 - Bug #1545341: The 'classifier' keyword argument to the Distutils setup()
261 function now accepts tuples as well as lists.
263 - Bug #1541863: uuid.uuid1 failed to generate unique identifiers
264 on systems with low clock resolution.
266 - Bug #1531862: Do not close standard file descriptors in subprocess.
268 - fixed a bug with bsddb.DB.stat: the flags and txn keyword arguments
275 - Patch #1544279: Improve thread-safety of the socket module by moving
276 the sock_addr_t storage out of the socket object.
278 - Speed up function calls into the math module.
280 - Bug #1588217: don't parse "= " as a soft line break in binascii's
281 a2b_qp() function, instead leave it in the string as quopri.decode()
284 - Bug #1599782: Fix segfault on bsddb.db.DB().type().
286 - Bug #1567666: Emulate GetFileAttributesExA for Win95.
288 - Patch #1576166: Support os.utime for directories on Windows NT+.
290 - Bug #1548891: The cStringIO.StringIO() constructor now encodes unicode
291 arguments with the system default encoding just like the write()
292 method does, instead of converting it to a raw buffer.
294 - Patch #1572724: fix typo ('=' instead of '==') in _msi.c.
296 - Bug #1572832: fix a bug in ISO-2022 codecs which may cause segfault
297 when encoding non-BMP unicode characters.
299 - Bug #1556784: allow format strings longer than 127 characters in
300 datetime's strftime function.
302 - Fix itertools.count(n) to work with negative numbers again.
304 - RLIMIT_SBSIZE was added to the resource module where available.
306 - Bug #1551427: fix a wrong NULL pointer check in the win32 version
309 - Bug #1548092: fix curses.tparm seg fault on invalid input.
311 - Bug #1550714: fix SystemError from itertools.tee on negative value for n.
313 - Fixed a few bugs on cjkcodecs:
314 - gbk and gb18030 codec now handle U+30FB KATAKANA MIDDLE DOT correctly.
315 - iso2022_jp_2 codec now encodes into G0 for KS X 1001, GB2312
316 codepoints to conform the standard.
317 - iso2022_jp_3 and iso2022_jp_2004 codec can encode JIS X 0213:2
320 - Bug #1552726: in readline.c, avoid repeatedly polling in interactive
321 mode by only placing a timeout on the select() if an input hook has
322 been defined. This prevents an interactive Python from waking up 10
323 times per second. Patch by Richard Boulton.
325 - Added support for linking the bsddb module against BerkeleyDB 4.5.x.
331 - Added test.test_support.EnvironmentVarGuard. It's a class that provides a
332 context manager so that one can temporarily set or unset environment
335 - Added guard_warnings_filter to test.test_support. It returns a context
336 manager that protects the 'warnings' module's filter from being mutated
337 once the context has been exited.
339 - Added some tests for modulefinder.
341 - Converted test_imp to use unittest.
343 - Fix bsddb test_basics.test06_Transactions to check the version
350 - Bug #1565919: document set types in the Language Reference.
352 - Bug #1546052: clarify that PyString_FromString(AndSize) copies the
353 string pointed to by its parameter.
355 - Bug #1566663: remove obsolete example from datetime docs.
357 - Bug #1541682: Fix example in the "Refcount details" API docs.
358 Additionally, remove a faulty example showing PySequence_SetItem applied
359 to a newly created list object and add notes that this isn't a good idea.
365 - Patch #1552024: add decorator support to unparse.py demo script.
367 - Make auto-generated python.vim file list built-ins and exceptions in
368 alphatbetical order. Makes output more deterministic and easier to tell if
369 the file is stale or not.
371 - Bug #1546372: Fixed small bugglet in pybench that caused a missing
372 file not to get reported properly.
378 - Disable _XOPEN_SOURCE on NetBSD 1.x.
380 - configure now checks whether gcc supports the PyArg_ParseTuple format
383 - Bug #1578513: Cross compilation was broken by a change to configure.
384 Repair so that it's back to how it was in 2.4.3.
386 - Patch #1576954: Update VC6 build directory; remove redundant
389 - Bug #1568842: Fix test for uintptr_t.
391 - Patch #1540470, for OpenBSD 4.0.
393 - Fix build failure on kfreebsd and on the hurd.
395 - Fix the build of the library reference in info format.
401 - Bug #1542693: remove semi-colon at end of PyImport_ImportModuleEx macro
402 so it can be used as an expression.
408 - Conditionalize definition of _CRT_SECURE_NO_DEPRECATE
409 and _CRT_NONSTDC_NO_DEPRECATE.
416 What's New in Python 2.5 release candidate 1?
417 =============================================
419 *Release date: 17-AUG-2006*
424 - Unicode objects will no longer raise an exception when being
425 compared equal or unequal to a string and a UnicodeDecodeError
426 exception occurs, e.g. as result of a decoding failure.
428 Instead, the equal (==) and unequal (!=) comparison operators will
429 now issue a UnicodeWarning and interpret the two objects as
430 unequal. The UnicodeWarning can be filtered as desired using
431 the warning framework, e.g. silenced completely, turned into an
432 exception, logged, etc.
434 Note that compare operators other than equal and unequal will still
435 raise UnicodeDecodeError exceptions as they've always done.
437 - Fix segfault when doing string formatting on subclasses of long.
439 - Fix bug related to __len__ functions using values > 2**32 on 64-bit machines
440 with new-style classes.
442 - Fix bug related to __len__ functions returning negative values with
445 - Patch #1538606, Fix __index__() clipping. There were some problems
446 discovered with the API and how integers that didn't fit into Py_ssize_t
447 were handled. This patch attempts to provide enough alternatives
448 to effectively use __index__.
450 - Bug #1536021: __hash__ may now return long int; the final hash
451 value is obtained by invoking hash on the long int.
453 - Bug #1536786: buffer comparison could emit a RuntimeWarning.
455 - Bug #1535165: fixed a segfault in input() and raw_input() when
458 - On Windows, the PyErr_Warn function is now exported from
459 the Python dll again.
461 - Bug #1191458: tracing over for loops now produces a line event
462 on each iteration. Fixing this problem required changing the .pyc
463 magic number. This means that .pyc files generated before 2.5c1
466 - Bug #1333982: string/number constants were inappropriately stored
467 in the byte code and co_consts even if they were not used, ie
468 immediately popped off the stack.
470 - Fixed a reference-counting problem in property().
476 - Fix a bug in the ``compiler`` package that caused invalid code to be
477 generated for generator expressions.
479 - The distutils version has been changed to 2.5.0. The change to
480 keep it programmatically in sync with the Python version running
481 the code (introduced in 2.5b3) has been reverted. It will continue
482 to be maintained manually as static string literal.
484 - If the Python part of a ctypes callback function returns None,
485 and this cannot be converted to the required C type, an exception is
486 printed with PyErr_WriteUnraisable. Before this change, the C
487 callback returned arbitrary values to the calling code.
489 - The __repr__ method of a NULL ctypes.py_object() no longer raises
492 - uuid.UUID now has a bytes_le attribute. This returns the UUID in
493 little-endian byte order for Windows. In addition, uuid.py gained some
494 workarounds for clocks with low resolution, to stop the code yielding
497 - Patch #1540892: site.py Quitter() class attempts to close sys.stdin
498 before raising SystemExit, allowing IDLE to honor quit() and exit().
500 - Bug #1224621: make tabnanny recognize IndentationErrors raised by tokenize.
502 - Patch #1536071: trace.py should now find the full module name of a
503 file correctly even on Windows.
505 - logging's atexit hook now runs even if the rest of the module has
506 already been cleaned up.
508 - Bug #1112549, fix DoS attack on cgi.FieldStorage.
510 - Bug #1531405, format_exception no longer raises an exception if
511 str(exception) raised an exception.
513 - Fix a bug in the ``compiler`` package that caused invalid code to be
514 generated for nested functions.
520 - Patch #1511317: don't crash on invalid hostname (alias) info.
522 - Patch #1535500: fix segfault in BZ2File.writelines and make sure it
523 raises the correct exceptions.
525 - Patch # 1536908: enable building ctypes on OpenBSD/AMD64. The
526 '-no-stack-protector' compiler flag for OpenBSD has been removed.
528 - Patch #1532975 was applied, which fixes Bug #1533481: ctypes now
529 uses the _as_parameter_ attribute when objects are passed to foreign
530 function calls. The ctypes version number was changed to 1.0.1.
532 - Bug #1530559, struct.pack raises TypeError where it used to convert.
533 Passing float arguments to struct.pack when integers are expected
534 now triggers a DeprecationWarning.
540 - test_socketserver should now work on cygwin and not fail sporadically
543 - test_mailbox should now work on cygwin versions 2006-08-10 and later.
545 - Bug #1535182: really test the xreadlines() method of bz2 objects.
547 - test_threading now skips testing alternate thread stack sizes on
548 platforms that don't support changing thread stack size.
554 - Patch #1534922: unittest docs were corrected and enhanced.
560 - Bug #1535502, build _hashlib on Windows, and use masm assembler
563 - Bug #1534738, win32 debug version of _msi should be _msi_d.pyd.
565 - Bug #1530448, ctypes build failure on Solaris 10 was fixed.
571 - New API for Unicode rich comparisons: PyUnicode_RichCompare()
573 - Bug #1069160. Internal correctness changes were made to
574 ``PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc()``. A test case was added, and
575 the documentation was changed to state that the return value
576 is always 1 (normal) or 0 (if the specified thread wasn't found).
579 What's New in Python 2.5 beta 3?
580 ================================
582 *Release date: 03-AUG-2006*
587 - _PyWeakref_GetWeakrefCount() now returns a Py_ssize_t; it previously
588 returned a long (see PEP 353).
590 - Bug #1515471: string.replace() accepts character buffers again.
592 - Add PyErr_WarnEx() so C code can pass the stacklevel to warnings.warn().
593 This provides the proper warning for struct.pack().
594 PyErr_Warn() is now deprecated in favor of PyErr_WarnEx().
596 - Patch #1531113: Fix augmented assignment with yield expressions.
597 Also fix a SystemError when trying to assign to yield expressions.
599 - Bug #1529871: The speed enhancement patch #921466 broke Python's compliance
600 with PEP 302. This was fixed by adding an ``imp.NullImporter`` type that is
601 used in ``sys.path_importer_cache`` to cache non-directory paths and avoid
602 excessive filesystem operations during imports.
604 - Bug #1521947: When checking for overflow, ``PyOS_strtol()`` used some
605 operations on signed longs that are formally undefined by C.
606 Unfortunately, at least one compiler now cares about that, so complicated
607 the code to make that compiler happy again.
609 - Bug #1524310: Properly report errors from FindNextFile in os.listdir.
611 - Patch #1232023: Stop including current directory in search
614 - Fix some potential crashes found with failmalloc.
616 - Fix warnings reported by Klocwork's static analysis tool.
618 - Bug #1512814, Fix incorrect lineno's when code within a function
619 had more than 255 blank lines.
621 - Patch #1521179: Python now accepts the standard options ``--help`` and
622 ``--version`` as well as ``/?`` on Windows.
624 - Bug #1520864: unpacking singleton tuples in a 'for' loop (for x, in) works
625 again. Fixing this problem required changing the .pyc magic number.
626 This means that .pyc files generated before 2.5b3 will be regenerated.
628 - Bug #1524317: Compiling Python ``--without-threads`` failed.
629 The Python core compiles again, and, in a build without threads, the
630 new ``sys._current_frames()`` returns a dictionary with one entry,
631 mapping the faux "thread id" 0 to the current frame.
633 - Bug #1525447: build on MacOS X on a case-sensitive filesystem.
639 - Correction of patch #1455898: In the mbcs decoder, set final=False
640 for stream decoder, but final=True for the decode function.
642 - os.urandom no longer masks unrelated exceptions like SystemExit or
645 - Bug #1525866: Don't copy directory stat times in
646 shutil.copytree on Windows
648 - Bug #1002398: The documentation for os.path.sameopenfile now correctly
649 refers to file descriptors, not file objects.
651 - The renaming of the xml package to xmlcore, and the import hackery done
652 to make it appear at both names, has been removed. Bug #1511497,
653 #1513611, and probably others.
655 - Bug #1441397: The compiler module now recognizes module and function
656 docstrings correctly as it did in Python 2.4.
658 - Bug #1529297: The rewrite of doctest for Python 2.4 unintentionally
659 lost that tests are sorted by name before being run. This rarely
660 matters for well-written tests, but can create baffling symptoms if
661 side effects from one test to the next affect outcomes. ``DocTestFinder``
662 has been changed to sort the list of tests it returns.
664 - The distutils version has been changed to 2.5.0, and is now kept
665 in sync with sys.version_info[:3].
667 - Bug #978833: Really close underlying socket in _socketobject.close.
669 - Bug #1459963: urllib and urllib2 now normalize HTTP header names with
672 - Patch #1525766: In pkgutil.walk_packages, correctly pass the onerror callback
673 to recursive calls and call it with the failing package name.
675 - Bug #1525817: Don't truncate short lines in IDLE's tool tips.
677 - Patch #1515343: Fix printing of deprecated string exceptions with a
678 value in the traceback module.
680 - Resync optparse with Optik 1.5.3: minor tweaks for/to tests.
682 - Patch #1524429: Use repr() instead of backticks in Tkinter again.
684 - Bug #1520914: Change time.strftime() to accept a zero for any position in its
685 argument tuple. For arguments where zero is illegal, the value is forced to
686 the minimum value that is correct. This is to support an undocumented but
687 common way people used to fill in inconsequential information in the time
690 - Patch #1220874: Update the binhex module for Mach-O.
692 - The email package has improved RFC 2231 support, specifically for
693 recognizing the difference between encoded (name*0*=<blah>) and non-encoded
694 (name*0=<blah>) parameter continuations. This may change the types of
695 values returned from email.message.Message.get_param() and friends.
696 Specifically in some cases where non-encoded continuations were used,
697 get_param() used to return a 3-tuple of (None, None, string) whereas now it
698 will just return the string (since non-encoded continuations don't have
699 charset and language parts).
701 Also, whereas % values were decoded in all parameter continuations, they are
702 now only decoded in encoded parameter parts.
704 - Bug #1517990: IDLE keybindings on MacOS X now work correctly
706 - Bug #1517996: IDLE now longer shows the default Tk menu when a
707 path browser, class browser or debugger is the frontmost window on MacOS X
709 - Patch #1520294: Support for getset and member descriptors in types.py,
710 inspect.py, and pydoc.py. Specifically, this allows for querying the type
711 of an object against these built-in types and more importantly, for getting
712 their docstrings printed in the interactive interpreter's help() function.
718 - Patch #1519025 and bug #926423: If a KeyboardInterrupt occurs during
719 a socket operation on a socket with a timeout, the exception will be
720 caught correctly. Previously, the exception was not caught.
722 - Patch #1529514: The _ctypes extension is now compiled on more
723 openbsd target platforms.
725 - The ``__reduce__()`` method of the new ``collections.defaultdict`` had
726 a memory leak, affecting pickles and deep copies.
728 - Bug #1471938: Fix curses module build problem on Solaris 8; patch by
731 - Patch #1448199: Release interpreter lock in _winreg.ConnectRegistry.
733 - Patch #1521817: Index range checking on ctypes arrays containing
734 exactly one element enabled again. This allows iterating over these
735 arrays, without the need to check the array size before.
737 - Bug #1521375: When the code in ctypes.util.find_library was
738 run with root privileges, it could overwrite or delete
739 /dev/null in certain cases; this is now fixed.
741 - Bug #1467450: On Mac OS X 10.3, RTLD_GLOBAL is now used as the
742 default mode for loading shared libraries in ctypes.
744 - Because of a misspelled preprocessor symbol, ctypes was always
745 compiled without thread support; this is now fixed.
747 - pybsddb Bug #1527939: bsddb module DBEnv dbremove and dbrename
748 methods now allow their database parameter to be None as the
749 sleepycat API allows.
751 - Bug #1526460: Fix socketmodule compile on NetBSD as it has a different
752 bluetooth API compared with Linux and FreeBSD.
757 - Bug #1501330: Change test_ossaudiodev to be much more tolerant in terms of
758 how long the test file should take to play. Now accepts taking 2.93 secs
759 (exact time) +/- 10% instead of the hard-coded 3.1 sec.
761 - Patch #1529686: The standard tests ``test_defaultdict``, ``test_iterlen``,
762 ``test_uuid`` and ``test_email_codecs`` didn't actually run any tests when
763 run via ``regrtest.py``. Now they do.
768 - Bug #1439538: Drop usage of test -e in configure as it is not portable.
773 - PythonLauncher now works correctly when the path to the script contains
774 characters that are treated specially by the shell (such as quotes).
776 - Bug #1527397: PythonLauncher now launches scripts with the working directory
777 set to the directory that contains the script instead of the user home
778 directory. That latter was an implementation accident and not what users
782 What's New in Python 2.5 beta 2?
783 ================================
785 *Release date: 11-JUL-2006*
790 - Bug #1441486: The literal representation of -(sys.maxint - 1)
791 again evaluates to a int object, not a long.
793 - Bug #1501934: The scope of global variables that are locally assigned
794 using augmented assignment is now correctly determined.
796 - Bug #927248: Recursive method-wrapper objects can now safely
799 - Bug #1417699: Reject locale-specific decimal point in float()
802 - Bug #1511381: codec_getstreamcodec() in codec.c is corrected to
803 omit a default "error" argument for NULL pointer. This allows
804 the parser to take a codec from cjkcodecs again.
806 - Bug #1519018: 'as' is now validated properly in import statements.
808 - On 64 bit systems, int literals that use less than 64 bits are
809 now ints rather than longs.
811 - Bug #1512814, Fix incorrect lineno's when code at module scope
812 started after line 256.
814 - New function ``sys._current_frames()`` returns a dict mapping thread
815 id to topmost thread stack frame. This is for expert use, and is
816 especially useful for debugging application deadlocks. The functionality
817 was previously available in Fazal Majid's ``threadframe`` extension
818 module, but it wasn't possible to do this in a wholly threadsafe way from
824 - Bug #1257728: Mention Cygwin in distutils error message about a missing
827 - Patch #1519566: Update turtle demo, make begin_fill idempotent.
829 - Bug #1508010: msvccompiler now requires the DISTUTILS_USE_SDK
830 environment variable to be set in order to the SDK environment
831 for finding the compiler, include files, etc.
833 - Bug #1515998: Properly generate logical ids for files in bdist_msi.
835 - warnings.py now ignores ImportWarning by default
837 - string.Template() now correctly handles tuple-values. Previously,
838 multi-value tuples would raise an exception and single-value tuples would
839 be treated as the value they contain, instead.
841 - Bug #822974: Honor timeout in telnetlib.{expect,read_until}
842 even if some data are received.
844 - Bug #1267547: Put proper recursive setup.py call into the
845 spec file generated by bdist_rpm.
847 - Bug #1514693: Update turtle's heading when switching between
850 - Reimplement turtle.circle using a polyline, to allow correct
853 - Bug #1514703: Only setup canvas window in turtle when the canvas
856 - Bug #1513223: .close() of a _socketobj now releases the underlying
857 socket again, which then gets closed as it becomes unreferenced.
859 - Bug #1504333: Make sgmllib support angle brackets in quoted
862 - Bug #853506: Fix IPv6 address parsing in unquoted attributes in
863 sgmllib ('[' and ']' were not accepted).
865 - Fix a bug in the turtle module's end_fill function.
867 - Bug #1510580: The 'warnings' module improperly required that a Warning
868 category be either a types.ClassType and a subclass of Warning. The proper
869 check is just that it is a subclass with Warning as the documentation states.
871 - The compiler module now correctly compiles the new try-except-finally
872 statement (bug #1509132).
874 - The wsgiref package is now installed properly on Unix.
876 - A bug was fixed in logging.config.fileConfig() which caused a crash on
877 shutdown when fileConfig() was called multiple times.
879 - The sqlite3 module did cut off data from the SQLite database at the first
880 null character before sending it to a custom converter. This has been fixed
886 - #1494314: Fix a regression with high-numbered sockets in 2.4.3. This
887 means that select() on sockets > FD_SETSIZE (typically 1024) work again.
888 The patch makes sockets use poll() internally where available.
890 - Assigning None to pointer type fields in ctypes structures possible
891 overwrote the wrong fields, this is fixed now.
893 - Fixed a segfault in _ctypes when ctypes.wintypes were imported
894 on non-Windows platforms.
896 - Bug #1518190: The ctypes.c_void_p constructor now accepts any
897 integer or long, without range checking.
899 - Patch #1517790: It is now possible to use custom objects in the ctypes
900 foreign function argtypes sequence as long as they provide a from_param
901 method, no longer is it required that the object is a ctypes type.
903 - The '_ctypes' extension module now works when Python is configured
904 with the --without-threads option.
906 - Bug #1513646: os.access on Windows now correctly determines write
909 - Bug #1512695: cPickle.loads could crash if it was interrupted with
912 - Bug #1296433: parsing XML with a non-default encoding and
913 a CharacterDataHandler could crash the interpreter in pyexpat.
915 - Patch #1516912: improve Modules support for OpenVMS.
920 - Automate Windows build process for the Win64 SSL module.
922 - 'configure' now detects the zlib library the same way as distutils.
923 Previously, the slight difference could cause compilation errors of the
924 'zlib' module on systems with more than one version of zlib.
926 - The MSI compileall step was fixed to also support a TARGETDIR
929 - Bug #1517388: sqlite3.dll is now installed on Windows independent
932 - Bug #1513032: 'make install' failed on FreeBSD 5.3 due to lib-old
933 trying to be installed even though it's empty.
938 - Call os.waitpid() at the end of tests that spawn child processes in order
939 to minimize resources (zombies).
944 - Cover ImportWarning, PendingDeprecationWarning and simplefilter() in the
945 documentation for the warnings module.
947 - Patch #1509163: MS Toolkit Compiler no longer available.
949 - Patch #1504046: Add documentation for xml.etree.
952 What's New in Python 2.5 beta 1?
953 ================================
955 *Release date: 20-JUN-2006*
960 - Patch #1507676: Error messages returned by invalid abstract object operations
961 (such as iterating over an integer) have been improved and now include the
962 type of the offending object to help with debugging.
964 - Bug #992017: A classic class that defined a __coerce__() method that returned
965 its arguments swapped would infinitely recurse and segfault the interpreter.
967 - Fix the socket tests so they can be run concurrently.
969 - Removed 5 integers from C frame objects (PyFrameObject).
970 f_nlocals, f_ncells, f_nfreevars, f_stack_size, f_restricted.
972 - Bug #532646: object.__call__() will continue looking for the __call__
973 attribute on objects until one without one is found. This leads to recursion
974 when you take a class and set its __call__ attribute to an instance of the
975 class. Originally fixed for classic classes, but this fix is for new-style.
976 Removes the infinite_rec_3 crasher.
978 - The string and unicode methods startswith() and endswith() now accept
979 a tuple of prefixes/suffixes to look for. Implements RFE #1491485.
981 - Buffer objects, at the C level, never used the char buffer
982 implementation even when the char buffer for the wrapped object was
983 explicitly requested (originally returned the read or write buffer).
984 Now a TypeError is raised if the char buffer is not present but is
987 - Patch #1346214: Statements like "if 0: suite" are now again optimized
988 away like they were in Python 2.4.
990 - Builtin exceptions are now full-blown new-style classes instead of
991 instances pretending to be classes, which speeds up exception handling
992 by about 80% in comparison to 2.5a2.
994 - Patch #1494554: Update unicodedata.numeric and unicode.isnumeric to
997 - Patch #921466: sys.path_importer_cache is now used to cache valid and
998 invalid file paths for the built-in import machinery which leads to
999 fewer open calls on startup.
1001 - Patch #1442927: ``long(str, base)`` is now up to 6x faster for non-power-
1002 of-2 bases. The largest speedup is for inputs with about 1000 decimal
1003 digits. Conversion from non-power-of-2 bases remains quadratic-time in
1004 the number of input digits (it was and remains linear-time for bases
1005 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32).
1007 - Bug #1334662: ``int(string, base)`` could deliver a wrong answer
1008 when ``base`` was not 2, 4, 8, 10, 16 or 32, and ``string`` represented
1009 an integer close to ``sys.maxint``. This was repaired by patch
1010 #1335972, which also gives a nice speedup.
1012 - Patch #1337051: reduced size of frame objects.
1014 - PyErr_NewException now accepts a tuple of base classes as its
1017 - Patch #876206: function call speedup by retaining allocated frame
1020 - Bug #1462152: file() now checks more thoroughly for invalid mode
1021 strings and removes a possible "U" before passing the mode to the
1024 - Patch #1488312, Fix memory alignment problem on SPARC in unicode
1026 - Bug #1487966: Fix SystemError with conditional expression in assignment
1028 - WindowsError now has two error code attributes: errno, which carries
1029 the error values from errno.h, and winerror, which carries the error
1030 values from winerror.h. Previous versions put the winerror.h values
1031 (from GetLastError()) into the errno attribute.
1033 - Patch #1475845: Raise IndentationError for unexpected indent.
1035 - Patch #1479181: split open() and file() from being aliases for each other.
1037 - Patch #1497053 & bug #1275608: Exceptions occurring in ``__eq__()``
1038 methods were always silently ignored by dictionaries when comparing keys.
1039 They are now passed through (except when using the C API function
1040 ``PyDict_GetItem()``, whose semantics did not change).
1042 - Bug #1456209: In some obscure cases it was possible for a class with a
1043 custom ``__eq__()`` method to confuse dict internals when class instances
1044 were used as a dict's keys and the ``__eq__()`` method mutated the dict.
1045 No, you don't have any code that did this ;-)
1050 - Bug #1295808: expat symbols should be namespaced in pyexpat
1052 - Patch #1462338: Upgrade pyexpat to expat 2.0.0
1054 - Change binascii.hexlify to accept a read-only buffer instead of only a char
1055 buffer and actually follow its documentation.
1057 - Fixed a potentially invalid memory access of CJKCodecs' shift-jis decoder.
1059 - Patch #1478788 (modified version): The functional extension module has
1060 been renamed to _functools and a functools Python wrapper module added.
1061 This provides a home for additional function related utilities that are
1062 not specifically about functional programming. See PEP 309.
1064 - Patch #1493701: performance enhancements for struct module.
1066 - Patch #1490224: time.altzone is now set correctly on Cygwin.
1068 - Patch #1435422: zlib's compress and decompress objects now have a
1071 - Patch #1454481: thread stack size is now tunable at runtime for thread
1072 enabled builds on Windows and systems with Posix threads support.
1074 - On Win32, os.listdir now supports arbitrarily-long Unicode path names
1075 (up to the system limit of 32K characters).
1077 - Use Win32 API to implement os.{access,chdir,chmod,mkdir,remove,rename,rmdir,utime}.
1078 As a result, these functions now raise WindowsError instead of OSError.
1080 - ``time.clock()`` on Win64 should use the high-performance Windows
1081 ``QueryPerformanceCounter()`` now (as was already the case on 32-bit
1084 - Calling Tk_Init twice is refused if the first call failed as that
1087 - bsddb: added the DB_ARCH_REMOVE flag and fixed db.DBEnv.log_archive() to
1088 accept it without potentially using an uninitialized pointer.
1090 - bsddb: added support for the DBEnv.log_stat() and DBEnv.lsn_reset() methods
1091 assuming BerkeleyDB >= 4.0 and 4.4 respectively. [pybsddb project SF
1092 patch numbers 1494885 and 1494902]
1094 - bsddb: added an interface for the BerkeleyDB >= 4.3 DBSequence class.
1095 [pybsddb project SF patch number 1466734]
1097 - bsddb: fix DBCursor.pget() bug with keyword argument names when no data
1098 parameter is supplied. [SF pybsddb bug #1477863]
1100 - bsddb: the __len__ method of a DB object has been fixed to return correct
1101 results. It could previously incorrectly return 0 in some cases.
1102 Fixes SF bug 1493322 (pybsddb bug 1184012).
1104 - bsddb: the bsddb.dbtables Modify method now raises the proper error and
1105 aborts the db transaction safely when a modifier callback fails.
1106 Fixes SF python patch/bug #1408584.
1108 - bsddb: multithreaded DB access using the simple bsddb module interface
1109 now works reliably. It has been updated to use automatic BerkeleyDB
1110 deadlock detection and the bsddb.dbutils.DeadlockWrap wrapper to retry
1111 database calls that would previously deadlock. [SF python bug #775414]
1113 - Patch #1446489: add support for the ZIP64 extensions to zipfile.
1115 - Patch #1506645: add Python wrappers for the curses functions
1116 is_term_resized, resize_term and resizeterm.
1121 - Patch #815924: Restore ability to pass type= and icon= in tkMessageBox
1124 - Patch #812986: Update turtle output even if not tracing.
1126 - Patch #1494750: Destroy master after deleting children in
1129 - Patch #1096231: Add ``default`` argument to Tkinter.Wm.wm_iconbitmap.
1131 - Patch #763580: Add name and value arguments to Tkinter variable
1134 - Bug #1117556: SimpleHTTPServer now tries to find and use the system's
1135 mime.types file for determining MIME types.
1137 - Bug #1339007: Shelf objects now don't raise an exception in their
1138 __del__ method when initialization failed.
1140 - Patch #1455898: The MBCS codec now supports the incremental mode for
1141 double-byte encodings.
1143 - ``difflib``'s ``SequenceMatcher.get_matching_blocks()`` was changed to
1144 guarantee that adjacent triples in the return list always describe
1145 non-adjacent blocks. Previously, a pair of matching blocks could end
1146 up being described by multiple adjacent triples that formed a partition
1147 of the matching pair.
1149 - Bug #1498146: fix optparse to handle Unicode strings in option help,
1150 description, and epilog.
1152 - Bug #1366250: minor optparse documentation error.
1154 - Bug #1361643: fix textwrap.dedent() so it handles tabs appropriately;
1157 - The wsgiref package has been added to the standard library.
1159 - The functions update_wrapper() and wraps() have been added to the functools
1160 module. These make it easier to copy relevant metadata from the original
1161 function when writing wrapper functions.
1163 - The optional ``isprivate`` argument to ``doctest.testmod()``, and the
1164 ``doctest.is_private()`` function, both deprecated in 2.4, were removed.
1166 - Patch #1359618: Speed up charmap encoder by using a trie structure
1169 - The functions in the ``pprint`` module now sort dictionaries by key
1170 before computing the display. Before 2.5, ``pprint`` sorted a dictionary
1171 if and only if its display required more than one line, although that
1172 wasn't documented. The new behavior increases predictability; e.g.,
1173 using ``pprint.pprint(a_dict)`` in a doctest is now reliable.
1175 - Patch #1497027: try HTTP digest auth before basic auth in urllib2
1176 (thanks for J. J. Lee).
1178 - Patch #1496206: improve urllib2 handling of passwords with respect to
1179 default HTTP and HTTPS ports.
1181 - Patch #1080727: add "encoding" parameter to doctest.DocFileSuite.
1183 - Patch #1281707: speed up gzip.readline.
1185 - Patch #1180296: Two new functions were added to the locale module:
1186 format_string() to get the effect of "format % items" but locale-aware,
1187 and currency() to format a monetary number with currency sign.
1189 - Patch #1486962: Several bugs in the turtle Tk demo module were fixed
1190 and several features added, such as speed and geometry control.
1192 - Patch #1488881: add support for external file objects in bz2 compressed
1195 - Patch #721464: pdb.Pdb instances can now be given explicit stdin and
1196 stdout arguments, making it possible to redirect input and output
1197 for remote debugging.
1199 - Patch #1484695: Update the tarfile module to version 0.8. This fixes
1200 a couple of issues, notably handling of long file names using the
1201 GNU LONGNAME extension.
1203 - Patch #1478292. ``doctest.register_optionflag(name)`` shouldn't create a
1204 new flag when ``name`` is already the name of an option flag.
1206 - Bug #1385040: don't allow "def foo(a=1, b): pass" in the compiler
1209 - Patch #1472854: make the rlcompleter.Completer class usable on non-
1212 - Patch #1470846: fix urllib2 ProxyBasicAuthHandler.
1214 - Bug #1472827: correctly escape newlines and tabs in attribute values in
1215 the saxutils.XMLGenerator class.
1221 - Bug #1502728: Correctly link against librt library on HP-UX.
1223 - OpenBSD 3.9 is supported now.
1225 - Patch #1492356: Port to Windows CE.
1227 - Bug/Patch #1481770: Use .so extension for shared libraries on HP-UX for ia64.
1229 - Patch #1471883: Add --enable-universalsdk.
1245 What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 2?
1246 =================================
1248 *Release date: 27-APR-2006*
1253 - Bug #1465834: 'bdist_wininst preinstall script support' was fixed
1254 by converting these apis from macros into exported functions again:
1256 PyParser_SimpleParseFile PyParser_SimpleParseString PyRun_AnyFile
1257 PyRun_AnyFileEx PyRun_AnyFileFlags PyRun_File PyRun_FileEx
1258 PyRun_FileFlags PyRun_InteractiveLoop PyRun_InteractiveOne
1259 PyRun_SimpleFile PyRun_SimpleFileEx PyRun_SimpleString
1260 PyRun_String Py_CompileString
1262 - Under COUNT_ALLOCS, types are not necessarily immortal anymore.
1264 - All uses of PyStructSequence_InitType have been changed to initialize
1265 the type objects only once, even if the interpreter is initialized
1268 - Bug #1454485, array.array('u') could crash the interpreter. This was
1269 due to PyArgs_ParseTuple(args, 'u#', ...) trying to convert buffers (strings)
1270 to unicode when it didn't make sense. 'u#' now requires a unicode string.
1272 - Py_UNICODE is unsigned. It was always documented as unsigned, but
1273 due to a bug had a signed value in previous versions.
1275 - Patch #837242: ``id()`` of any Python object always gives a positive
1276 number now, which might be a long integer. ``PyLong_FromVoidPtr`` and
1277 ``PyLong_AsVoidPtr`` have been changed accordingly. Note that it has
1278 never been correct to implement a ``__hash()__`` method that returns the
1279 ``id()`` of an object:
1282 return id(self) # WRONG
1284 because a hash result must be a (short) Python int but it was always
1285 possible for ``id()`` to return a Python long. However, because ``id()``
1286 could return negative values before, on a 32-bit box an ``id()`` result
1287 was always usable as a hash value before this patch. That's no longer
1290 - Python on OS X 10.3 and above now uses dlopen() (via dynload_shlib.c)
1291 to load extension modules and now provides the dl module. As a result,
1292 sys.setdlopenflags() now works correctly on these systems. (SF patch
1295 - Patch #1463867: enhanced garbage collection to allow cleanup of cycles
1296 involving generators that have paused outside of any ``try`` or ``with``
1297 blocks. (In 2.5a1, a paused generator that was part of a reference
1298 cycle could not be garbage collected, regardless of whether it was
1299 paused in a ``try`` or ``with`` block.)
1304 - Patch #1191065: Fix preprocessor problems on systems where recvfrom
1307 - Bug #1467952: os.listdir() now correctly raises an error if readdir()
1308 fails with an error condition.
1310 - Fixed bsddb.db.DBError derived exceptions so they can be unpickled.
1312 - Bug #1117761: bsddb.*open() no longer raises an exception when using
1313 the cachesize parameter.
1315 - Bug #1149413: bsddb.*open() no longer raises an exception when using
1316 a temporary db (file=None) with the 'n' flag to truncate on open.
1318 - Bug #1332852: bsddb module minimum BerkeleyDB version raised to 3.3
1319 as older versions cause excessive test failures.
1321 - Patch #1062014: AF_UNIX sockets under Linux have a special
1322 abstract namespace that is now fully supported.
1327 - Bug #1223937: subprocess.CalledProcessError reports the exit status
1328 of the process using the returncode attribute, instead of
1331 - Patch #1475231: ``doctest`` has a new ``SKIP`` option, which causes
1332 a doctest to be skipped (the code is not run, and the expected output
1333 or exception is ignored).
1335 - Fixed contextlib.nested to cope with exceptions being raised and
1336 caught inside exit handlers.
1338 - Updated optparse module to Optik 1.5.1 (allow numeric constants in
1339 hex, octal, or binary; add ``append_const`` action; keep going if
1340 gettext cannot be imported; added ``OptionParser.destroy()`` method;
1341 added ``epilog`` for better help generation).
1343 - Bug #1473760: ``tempfile.TemporaryFile()`` could hang on Windows, when
1344 called from a thread spawned as a side effect of importing a module.
1346 - The pydoc module now supports documenting packages contained in
1349 - The pkgutil module now has several new utility functions, such
1350 as ``walk_packages()`` to support working with packages that are either
1351 in the filesystem or zip files.
1353 - The mailbox module can now modify and delete messages from
1354 mailboxes, in addition to simply reading them. Thanks to Gregory
1355 K. Johnson for writing the code, and to the 2005 Google Summer of
1356 Code for funding his work.
1358 - The ``__del__`` method of class ``local`` in module ``_threading_local``
1359 returned before accomplishing any of its intended cleanup.
1361 - Patch #790710: Add breakpoint command lists in pdb.
1363 - Patch #1063914: Add Tkinter.Misc.clipboard_get().
1365 - Patch #1191700: Adjust column alignment in bdb breakpoint lists.
1367 - SimpleXMLRPCServer relied on the fcntl module, which is unavailable on
1368 Windows. Bug #1469163.
1370 - The warnings, linecache, inspect, traceback, site, and doctest modules
1371 were updated to work correctly with modules imported from zipfiles or
1372 via other PEP 302 __loader__ objects.
1374 - Patch #1467770: Reduce usage of subprocess._active to processes which
1375 the application hasn't waited on.
1377 - Patch #1462222: Fix Tix.Grid.
1379 - Fix exception when doing glob.glob('anything*/')
1381 - The pstats.Stats class accepts an optional stream keyword argument to
1382 direct output to an alternate file-like object.
1387 - The Makefile now has a reindent target, which runs reindent.py on
1390 - Patch #1470875: Building Python with MS Free Compiler
1392 - Patch #1161914: Add a python-config script.
1394 - Patch #1324762:Remove ccpython.cc; replace --with-cxx with
1395 --with-cxx-main. Link with C++ compiler only if --with-cxx-main was
1396 specified. (Can be overridden by explicitly setting LINKCC.) Decouple
1397 CXX from --with-cxx-main, see description in README.
1399 - Patch #1429775: Link extension modules with the shared libpython.
1401 - Fixed a libffi build problem on MIPS systems.
1403 - ``PyString_FromFormat``, ``PyErr_Format``, and ``PyString_FromFormatV``
1404 now accept formats "%u" for unsigned ints, "%lu" for unsigned longs,
1405 and "%zu" for unsigned integers of type ``size_t``.
1410 - test_contextlib now checks contextlib.nested can cope with exceptions
1411 being raised and caught inside exit handlers.
1413 - test_cmd_line now checks operation of the -m and -c command switches
1415 - The test_contextlib test in 2.5a1 wasn't actually run unless you ran
1416 it separately and by hand. It also wasn't cleaning up its changes to
1417 the current Decimal context.
1419 - regrtest.py now has a -M option to run tests that test the new limits of
1420 containers, on 64-bit architectures. Running these tests is only sensible
1421 on 64-bit machines with more than two gigabytes of memory. The argument
1422 passed is the maximum amount of memory for the tests to use.
1427 - Added the Python benchmark suite pybench to the Tools/ directory;
1428 contributed by Marc-Andre Lemburg.
1433 - Patch #1473132: Improve docs for ``tp_clear`` and ``tp_traverse``.
1435 - PEP 343: Added Context Types section to the library reference
1436 and attempted to bring other PEP 343 related documentation into
1437 line with the implementation and/or python-dev discussions.
1439 - Bug #1337990: clarified that ``doctest`` does not support examples
1440 requiring both expected output and an exception.
1443 What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
1444 =================================
1446 *Release date: 05-APR-2006*
1451 - PEP 338: -m command line switch now delegates to runpy.run_module
1452 allowing it to support modules in packages and zipfiles
1454 - On Windows, .DLL is not an accepted file name extension for
1455 extension modules anymore; extensions are only found if they
1458 - Bug #1421664: sys.stderr.encoding is now set to the same value as
1459 sys.stdout.encoding.
1461 - __import__ accepts keyword arguments.
1463 - Patch #1460496: round() now accepts keyword arguments.
1465 - Fixed bug #1459029 - unicode reprs were double-escaped.
1467 - Patch #1396919: The system scope threads are reenabled on FreeBSD
1468 5.4 and later versions.
1470 - Bug #1115379: Compiling a Unicode string with an encoding declaration
1471 now gives a SyntaxError.
1473 - Previously, Python code had no easy way to access the contents of a
1474 cell object. Now, a ``cell_contents`` attribute has been added
1475 (closes patch #1170323).
1477 - Patch #1123430: Python's small-object allocator now returns an arena to
1478 the system ``free()`` when all memory within an arena becomes unused
1479 again. Prior to Python 2.5, arenas (256KB chunks of memory) were never
1480 freed. Some applications will see a drop in virtual memory size now,
1481 especially long-running applications that, from time to time, temporarily
1482 use a large number of small objects. Note that when Python returns an
1483 arena to the platform C's ``free()``, there's no guarantee that the
1484 platform C library will in turn return that memory to the operating system.
1485 The effect of the patch is to stop making that impossible, and in tests it
1486 appears to be effective at least on Microsoft C and gcc-based systems.
1487 Thanks to Evan Jones for hard work and patience.
1489 - Patch #1434038: property() now uses the getter's docstring if there is
1490 no "doc" argument given. This makes it possible to legitimately use
1491 property() as a decorator to produce a read-only property.
1493 - PEP 357, patch 1436368: add an __index__ method to int/long and a matching
1494 nb_index slot to the PyNumberMethods struct. The slot is consulted instead
1495 of requiring an int or long in slicing and a few other contexts, enabling
1496 other objects (e.g. Numeric Python's integers) to be used as slice indices.
1498 - Fixed various bugs reported by Coverity's Prevent tool.
1500 - PEP 352, patch #1104669: Make exceptions new-style objects. Introduced the
1501 new exception base class, BaseException, which has a new message attribute.
1502 KeyboardInterrupt and SystemExit to directly inherit from BaseException now.
1503 Raising a string exception now raises a DeprecationWarning.
1505 - Patch #1438387, PEP 328: relative and absolute imports. Imports can now be
1506 explicitly relative, using 'from .module import name' to mean 'from the same
1507 package as this module is in. Imports without dots still default to the
1508 old relative-then-absolute, unless 'from __future__ import
1509 absolute_import' is used.
1511 - Properly check if 'warnings' raises an exception (usually when a filter set
1512 to "error" is triggered) when raising a warning for raising string
1515 - CO_GENERATOR_ALLOWED is no longer defined. This behavior is the default.
1516 The name was removed from Include/code.h.
1518 - PEP 308: conditional expressions were added: (x if cond else y).
1521 - The copy module now "copies" function objects (as atomic objects).
1522 - dict.__getitem__ now looks for a __missing__ hook before raising
1525 - PEP 343: with statement implemented. Needs ``from __future__ import
1526 with_statement``. Use of 'with' as a variable will generate a warning.
1527 Use of 'as' as a variable will also generate a warning (unless it's
1528 part of an import statement).
1529 The following objects have __context__ methods:
1530 - The built-in file type.
1531 - The thread.LockType type.
1532 - The following types defined by the threading module:
1533 Lock, RLock, Condition, Semaphore, BoundedSemaphore.
1534 - The decimal.Context class.
1536 - Fix the encodings package codec search function to only search
1537 inside its own package. Fixes problem reported in patch #1433198.
1539 Note: Codec packages should implement and register their own
1540 codec search function. PEP 100 has the details.
1542 - PEP 353: Using ``Py_ssize_t`` as the index type.
1544 - ``PYMALLOC_DEBUG`` builds now add ``4*sizeof(size_t)`` bytes of debugging
1545 info to each allocated block, since the ``Py_ssize_t`` changes (PEP 353)
1546 now allow Python to make use of memory blocks exceeding 2**32 bytes for
1547 some purposes on 64-bit boxes. A ``PYMALLOC_DEBUG`` build was limited
1548 to 4-byte allocations before.
1550 - Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
1551 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
1552 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
1554 - Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
1555 configure would break checking curses.h.
1557 - Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
1558 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
1560 - Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
1562 - Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
1564 - Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
1566 - Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
1567 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
1569 - Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
1570 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.subversion. Build number
1571 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
1573 - Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
1574 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
1575 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
1577 - Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
1578 now encodes backslash correctly.
1580 - Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
1582 - Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correctly even with unsigned longs
1585 - SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
1586 It was possible for dlerror() to return a NULL pointer, so
1587 it will now use a default error message in this case.
1589 - Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
1590 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
1591 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
1592 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
1593 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
1595 - Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
1597 - Sped up some Unicode operations.
1599 - A new AST parser implementation was completed. The abstract
1600 syntax tree is available for read-only (non-compile) access
1601 to Python code; an _ast module was added.
1603 - SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being produced for generator expressions.
1604 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
1606 - SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
1608 - SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
1609 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
1611 - Fix segfault with invalid coding.
1613 - SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
1615 - All iterators now have a Boolean value of True. Formerly, some iterators
1616 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
1619 - On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
1620 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
1622 - test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
1625 - SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
1628 - Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
1629 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
1630 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
1632 - Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
1633 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
1635 - Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
1636 (fixes bug #1119418).
1638 - Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
1640 - SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
1641 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
1643 - The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
1644 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
1645 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
1647 - SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
1649 - SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
1650 reference counts in some error exit cases.
1652 - SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
1653 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
1654 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
1655 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so there's no
1656 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
1657 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
1658 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
1661 - SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
1662 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
1664 - SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
1665 like their int counterparts.
1667 - SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
1668 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
1669 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
1670 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
1671 for a longer write-up of the problem).
1673 - SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
1676 - SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
1677 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
1678 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
1680 - bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
1683 - patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
1684 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
1685 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
1686 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
1687 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
1689 Thanks Walter D�rwald.
1691 - Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
1692 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
1693 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
1694 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
1696 - It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
1697 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
1698 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
1699 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
1700 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
1702 - Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
1703 disabled caused a crash.
1705 - Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
1706 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
1708 - Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
1709 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
1711 - Added two new builtins, any() and all().
1713 - Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
1714 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
1715 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
1716 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
1718 - Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
1720 - Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
1723 - Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
1724 ('\') with a specific error message.
1726 - Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
1728 - Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
1729 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
1731 - Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
1734 - min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
1737 - The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
1740 - set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
1742 - Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
1743 in calls to os.read().
1745 - The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
1746 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
1747 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
1749 - Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
1750 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
1751 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
1753 - Patch #1413181: changed ``PyThreadState_Delete()`` to forget about the
1754 current thread state when the auto-GIL-state machinery knows about
1755 it (since the thread state is being deleted, continuing to remember it
1756 can't help, but can hurt if another thread happens to get created with
1757 the same thread id).
1762 - Patch #1380952: fix SSL objects timing out on consecutive read()s
1764 - Patch #1309579: wait3 and wait4 were added to the posix module.
1766 - Patch #1231053: The audioop module now supports encoding/decoding of alaw.
1767 In addition, the existing ulaw code was updated.
1769 - RFE #567972: Socket objects' family, type and proto properties are
1770 now exposed via new attributes.
1772 - Everything under lib-old was removed. This includes the following modules:
1773 Para, addpack, cmp, cmpcache, codehack, dircmp, dump, find, fmt, grep,
1774 lockfile, newdir, ni, packmail, poly, rand, statcache, tb, tzparse,
1775 util, whatsound, whrandom, zmod
1777 - The following modules were removed: regsub, reconvert, regex, regex_syntax.
1779 - re and sre were swapped, so help(re) provides full help. importing sre
1780 is deprecated. The undocumented re.engine variable no longer exists.
1782 - Bug #1448490: Fixed a bug that ISO-2022 codecs could not handle
1783 SS2 (single-shift 2) escape sequences correctly.
1785 - The unicodedata module was updated to the 4.1 version of the Unicode
1786 database. The 3.2 version is still available as unicodedata.db_3_2_0
1787 for applications that require this specific version (such as IDNA).
1789 - The timing module is no longer built by default. It was deprecated
1790 in PEP 4 in Python 2.0 or earlier.
1792 - Patch 1433928: Added a new type, defaultdict, to the collections module.
1793 This uses the new __missing__ hook behavior added to dict (see above).
1795 - Bug #854823: socketmodule now builds on Sun platforms even when
1796 INET_ADDRSTRLEN is not defined.
1798 - Patch #1393157: os.startfile() now has an optional argument to specify
1799 a "command verb" to invoke on the file.
1801 - Bug #876637, prevent stack corruption when socket descriptor
1802 is larger than FD_SETSIZE.
1804 - Patch #1407135, bug #1424041: harmonize mmap behavior of anonymous memory.
1805 mmap.mmap(-1, size) now returns anonymous memory in both Unix and Windows.
1806 mmap.mmap(0, size) should not be used on Windows for anonymous memory.
1808 - Patch #1422385: The nis module now supports access to domains other
1809 than the system default domain.
1811 - Use Win32 API to implement os.stat/fstat. As a result, subsecond timestamps
1812 are reported, the limit on path name lengths is removed, and stat reports
1813 WindowsError now (instead of OSError).
1815 - Add bsddb.db.DBEnv.set_tx_timestamp allowing time based database recovery.
1817 - Bug #1413192, fix seg fault in bsddb if a transaction was deleted
1820 - Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
1822 - Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
1824 - Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
1825 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
1826 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
1828 - Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
1829 without prior setting of the userptr.
1831 - Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
1833 - Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
1835 - Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
1838 - Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
1840 - Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
1842 - Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
1844 - Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
1845 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
1847 - Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using
1848 BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1.
1850 - Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4
1852 - Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2
1854 - Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
1855 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
1857 - Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
1859 - Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
1860 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
1862 - Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
1863 returns in cStringIO.c.
1865 - Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
1866 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
1868 - Fix memory leak in posix.access().
1870 - Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
1872 - Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
1873 the file system encoding.
1875 - Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
1876 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
1878 - Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
1880 - Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
1881 line without newlines.
1883 - Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
1886 - Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
1887 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
1889 - Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
1890 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
1891 for large or negative values.
1893 - Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
1894 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
1896 - Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
1898 - Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
1899 if available on the platform.
1901 - Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
1902 available on the platform.
1904 - Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
1905 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
1907 - collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
1909 - operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
1910 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
1911 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
1913 - os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
1915 - Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
1916 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
1918 - Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
1921 - Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
1923 - Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
1924 {remove_history,replace_history}
1926 - The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
1929 - stat_float_times is now True.
1931 - array.array objects are now picklable.
1933 - the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
1934 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
1936 - itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
1937 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
1938 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
1940 - datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
1941 create datetime object using a string and format.
1943 - Patch #1117961: Replace the MD5 implementation from RSA Data Security Inc
1944 with the implementation from http://sourceforge.net/projects/libmd5-rfc/.
1949 - Patch #1388073: Numerous __-prefixed attributes of unittest.TestCase have
1950 been renamed to have only a single underscore prefix. This was done to
1951 make subclassing easier.
1953 - PEP 338: new module runpy defines a run_module function to support
1954 executing modules which provide access to source code or a code object
1955 via the PEP 302 import mechanisms.
1957 - The email module's parsedate_tz function now sets the daylight savings
1958 flag to -1 (unknown) since it can't tell from the date whether it should
1961 - Patch #624325: urlparse.urlparse() and urlparse.urlsplit() results
1962 now sport attributes that provide access to the parts of the result.
1964 - Patch #1462498: sgmllib now handles entity and character references
1965 in attribute values.
1967 - Added the sqlite3 package. This is based on pysqlite2.1.3, and provides
1968 a DB-API interface in the standard library. You'll need sqlite 3.0.8 or
1969 later to build this - if you have an earlier version, the C extension
1970 module will not be built.
1972 - Bug #1460340: ``random.sample(dict)`` failed in various ways. Dicts
1973 aren't officially supported here, and trying to use them will probably
1974 raise an exception some day. But dicts have been allowed, and "mostly
1975 worked", so support for them won't go away without warning.
1977 - Bug #1445068: getpass.getpass() can now be given an explicit stream
1978 argument to specify where to write the prompt.
1980 - Patch #1462313, bug #1443328: the pickle modules now can handle classes
1981 that have __private names in their __slots__.
1983 - Bug #1250170: mimetools now handles socket.gethostname() failures gracefully.
1985 - patch #1457316: "setup.py upload" now supports --identity to select the
1986 key to be used for signing the uploaded code.
1988 - Queue.Queue objects now support .task_done() and .join() methods
1989 to make it easier to monitor when daemon threads have completed
1990 processing all enqueued tasks. Patch #1455676.
1992 - popen2.Popen objects now preserve the command in a .cmd attribute.
1994 - Added the ctypes ffi package.
1996 - email 4.0 package now integrated. This is largely the same as the email 3.0
1997 package that was included in Python 2.3, except that PEP 8 module names are
1998 now used (e.g. mail.message instead of email.Message). The MIME classes
1999 have been moved to a subpackage (e.g. email.mime.text instead of
2000 email.MIMEText). The old names are still supported for now. Several
2001 deprecated Message methods have been removed and lots of bugs have been
2002 fixed. More details can be found in the email package documentation.
2004 - Patches #1436130/#1443155: codecs.lookup() now returns a CodecInfo object
2005 (a subclass of tuple) that provides incremental decoders and encoders
2006 (a way to use stateful codecs without the stream API). Python functions
2007 codecs.getincrementaldecoder() and codecs.getincrementalencoder() as well
2008 as C functions PyCodec_IncrementalEncoder() and PyCodec_IncrementalDecoder()
2011 - Patch #1359365: Calling next() on a closed StringIO.String object raises
2012 a ValueError instead of a StopIteration now (like file and cString.String do).
2013 cStringIO.StringIO.isatty() will raise a ValueError now if close() has been
2014 called before (like file and StringIO.StringIO do).
2016 - A regrtest option -w was added to re-run failed tests in verbose mode.
2018 - Patch #1446372: quit and exit can now be called from the interactive
2019 interpreter to exit.
2021 - The function get_count() has been added to the gc module, and gc.collect()
2022 grew an optional 'generation' argument.
2024 - A library msilib to generate Windows Installer files, and a distutils
2025 command bdist_msi have been added.
2027 - PEP 343: new module contextlib.py defines decorator @contextmanager
2028 and helpful context managers nested() and closing().
2030 - The compiler package now supports future imports after the module docstring.
2032 - Bug #1413790: zipfile now sanitizes absolute archive names that are
2033 not allowed by the specs.
2035 - Patch #1215184: FileInput now can be given an opening hook which can
2036 be used to control how files are opened.
2038 - Patch #1212287: fileinput.input() now has a mode parameter for
2039 specifying the file mode input files should be opened with.
2041 - Patch #1215184: fileinput now has a fileno() function for getting the
2042 current file number.
2044 - Patch #1349274: gettext.install() now optionally installs additional
2045 translation functions other than _() in the builtin namespace.
2047 - Patch #1337756: fileinput now accepts Unicode filenames.
2049 - Patch #1373643: The chunk module can now read chunks larger than
2052 - Patch #1417555: SimpleHTTPServer now returns Last-Modified headers.
2054 - Bug #1430298: It is now possible to send a mail with an empty
2055 return address using smtplib.
2057 - Bug #1432260: The names of lambda functions are now properly displayed
2060 - Patch #1412872: zipfile now sets the creator system to 3 (Unix)
2061 unless the system is Win32.
2063 - Patch #1349118: urllib now supports user:pass@ style proxy
2064 specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols
2065 are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections.
2067 - Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications.
2069 - Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.
2071 - Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
2073 - Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
2076 - Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
2077 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
2079 - Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
2081 - Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
2083 - Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
2084 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
2085 LoadError subclasses IOError.
2087 - Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
2088 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
2089 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
2090 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
2091 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
2093 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
2094 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
2095 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
2096 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
2097 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
2099 - Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
2100 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
2101 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
2103 - Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
2105 - Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
2107 - Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
2108 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
2111 - Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
2112 is an error in the format string.
2114 - Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
2116 - Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
2119 - Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
2122 - Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
2123 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
2125 - Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
2126 to get the correct encoding.
2128 - Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
2131 - Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
2133 - Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
2135 - Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
2137 - Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
2140 - Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
2142 - Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
2143 separator and do not output trailing semicolon.
2145 - Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
2146 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
2147 match the Content-Length header.
2149 - Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
2151 - Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
2152 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
2153 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
2155 - Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
2157 - Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
2159 - Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
2160 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
2162 - Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
2163 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
2166 - Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
2167 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
2169 - Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
2170 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
2172 - textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
2173 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
2175 - urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
2176 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
2178 - Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
2179 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
2181 - Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module;
2182 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
2184 - Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
2186 - Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
2189 - Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
2191 - The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
2194 - The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
2195 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python source code. In addition,
2196 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
2197 terminates by raising StopIteration.
2199 - Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
2201 - Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
2202 component of the path.
2204 - Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
2205 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
2206 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
2209 - distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
2212 - distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
2215 - decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
2216 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
2217 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
2220 - Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
2221 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
2223 - Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
2224 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
2226 - Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
2228 - Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
2231 - Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
2232 symbolic links on Windows.
2234 - Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
2235 profile.py if available.
2237 - Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
2239 - Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
2242 - Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
2244 - Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
2246 - Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
2248 - Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
2250 - Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
2252 - Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
2254 - Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
2256 - Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
2258 - Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
2259 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
2260 be exploited in various ways.
2262 - Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
2263 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
2265 - Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
2266 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
2268 - Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to
2269 constructors of SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
2271 - Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
2273 - Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
2275 - os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
2277 - Enhancements to the csv module:
2279 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
2280 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
2282 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
2284 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
2286 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
2287 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
2288 types, rather than any object that can be represented as a numeric.
2289 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
2291 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
2293 + writer doublequote handling improved.
2294 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
2295 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
2296 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
2297 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
2298 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
2299 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
2300 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
2301 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
2302 without first creating a dialect class.
2303 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
2304 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
2305 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
2306 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
2307 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
2309 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
2310 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
2311 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
2313 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
2314 This has been fixed.
2316 - _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
2317 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
2318 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
2319 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
2321 - The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
2323 - StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
2326 - locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
2327 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
2328 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
2329 encoding alias table.
2331 - moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
2333 - the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
2334 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
2336 - optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
2338 - the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
2340 - the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
2342 - the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
2344 - the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
2346 - unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
2347 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
2348 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
2350 - heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
2351 the same meaning as in list.sort().
2353 - Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
2354 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
2355 tokenizer with very long source lines.
2357 - Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
2358 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
2359 ``.decompress()`` calls.
2361 - The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
2362 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
2364 - ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
2365 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
2367 - Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
2370 - Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
2371 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
2372 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
2373 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
2376 - Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
2377 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
2380 - Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
2381 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
2382 encoding instead of a unicode string.
2384 - Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
2385 considering it exactly like a '*'.
2387 - Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
2388 ``encodings.aliases``.
2390 - ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
2392 - Patch #1413711: Certain patterns of differences were making difflib
2393 touch the recursion limit.
2395 - Bug #947906: An object oriented interface has been added to the calendar
2396 module. It's possible to generate HTML calendar now and the module can be
2397 called as a script (e.g. via ``python -mcalendar``). Localized month and
2398 weekday names can be ouput (even if an exotic encoding is used) using
2399 special classes that use unicode.
2404 - Fix test_float, test_long, and test_struct failures on Tru64 with gcc
2405 by using -mieee gcc option.
2407 - Patch #1432345: Make python compile on DragonFly.
2409 - Build support for Win64-AMD64 was added.
2411 - Patch #1428494: Prefer linking against ncursesw over ncurses library.
2413 - Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
2415 - The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
2416 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
2418 - Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
2420 - Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
2421 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
2423 - Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
2424 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
2426 - EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
2427 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
2428 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
2429 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
2431 - SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
2432 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
2433 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
2435 - Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
2437 - spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
2438 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
2440 - setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
2441 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
2442 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
2443 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
2444 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
2445 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
2446 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
2447 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
2449 - Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
2450 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
2451 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
2452 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
2457 - ``PyMem_{Del, DEL}`` and ``PyMem_{Free, FREE}`` no longer map to
2458 ``PyObject_{Free, FREE}``. They map to the system ``free()`` now. If memory
2459 is obtained via the ``PyObject_`` family, it must be released via the
2460 ``PyObject_`` family, and likewise for the ``PyMem_`` family. This has
2461 always been officially true, but when Python's small-object allocator was
2462 introduced, an attempt was made to cater to a few extension modules
2463 discovered at the time that obtained memory via ``PyObject_New`` but
2464 released it via ``PyMem_DEL``. It's years later, and if such code still
2465 exists it will fail now (probably with segfaults, but calling wrong
2466 low-level memory management functions can yield many symptoms).
2468 - Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
2470 - Removed PyRange_New().
2472 - Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
2473 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
2474 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
2481 - In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
2483 - Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
2484 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
2490 - Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.
2492 - Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
2493 values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
2495 - Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
2497 - Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
2499 - Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
2501 - Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
2503 - Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
2505 - Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
2507 - Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
2509 - Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
2511 - Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
2513 - Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
2514 Closes bug #1166582.
2516 - Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
2517 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
2518 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
2527 - FreeBSD 7 support is added.
2533 - Created Misc/Vim/vim_syntax.py to auto-generate a python.vim file in that
2534 directory for syntax highlighting in Vim. Vim directory was added and placed
2535 vimrc to it (was previous up a level).
2537 - Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
2538 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
2539 source files that need an encoding declaration.
2540 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
2542 - Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
2544 - Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
2546 - Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
2547 wiggle over by a pixel.
2551 **(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**