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7 What's New in Python 2.5 beta 1?
8 =================================
10 *Release date: XX-JUN-2006*
15 - Removed 5 integers from C frame objects (PyFrameObject).
16 f_nlocals, f_ncells, f_nfreevars, f_stack_size, f_restricted.
18 - Bug #532646: object.__call__() will continue looking for the __call__
19 attribute on objects until one without one is found. This leads to recursion
20 when you take a class and set its __call__ attribute to an instance of the
21 class. Originally fixed for classic classes, but this fix is for new-style.
22 Removes the infinite_rec_3 crasher.
24 - The string and unicode methods startswith() and endswith() now accept
25 a tuple of prefixes/suffixes to look for. Implements RFE #1491485.
27 - Buffer objects, at the C level, never used the char buffer
28 implementation even when the char buffer for the wrapped object was
29 explicitly requested (originally returned the read or write buffer).
30 Now a TypeError is raised if the char buffer is not present but is
33 - Patch #1346214: Statements like "if 0: suite" are now again optimized
34 away like they were in Python 2.4.
36 - Builtin exceptions are now full-blown new-style classes instead of
37 instances pretending to be classes, which speeds up exception handling
38 by about 80% in comparison to 2.5a2.
40 - Patch #1494554: Update unicodedata.numeric and unicode.isnumeric to
43 - Patch #921466: sys.path_importer_cache is now used to cache valid and
44 invalid file paths for the built-in import machinery which leads to
45 fewer open calls on startup.
47 - Patch #1442927: ``long(str, base)`` is now up to 6x faster for non-power-
48 of-2 bases. The largest speedup is for inputs with about 1000 decimal
49 digits. Conversion from non-power-of-2 bases remains quadratic-time in
50 the number of input digits (it was and remains linear-time for bases
53 - Bug #1334662: ``int(string, base)`` could deliver a wrong answer
54 when ``base`` was not 2, 4, 8, 10, 16 or 32, and ``string`` represented
55 an integer close to ``sys.maxint``. This was repaired by patch
56 #1335972, which also gives a nice speedup.
58 - Patch #1337051: reduced size of frame objects.
60 - PyErr_NewException now accepts a tuple of base classes as its
63 - Patch #876206: function call speedup by retaining allocated frame
66 - Bug #1462152: file() now checks more thoroughly for invalid mode
67 strings and removes a possible "U" before passing the mode to the
70 - Patch #1488312, Fix memory alignment problem on SPARC in unicode
72 - Bug #1487966: Fix SystemError with conditional expression in assignment
74 - WindowsError now has two error code attributes: errno, which carries
75 the error values from errno.h, and winerror, which carries the error
76 values from winerror.h. Previous versions put the winerror.h values
77 (from GetLastError()) into the errno attribute.
79 - Patch #1475845: Raise IndentationError for unexpected indent.
81 - Patch #1479181: split open() and file() from being aliases for each other.
83 - Patch #1497053 & bug #1275608: Exceptions occurring in ``__eq__()``
84 methods were always silently ignored by dictionaries when comparing keys.
85 They are now passed through (except when using the C API function
86 ``PyDict_GetItem()``, whose semantics did not change).
88 - Bug #1456209: In some obscure cases it was possible for a class with a
89 custom ``__eq__()`` method to confuse dict internals when class instances
90 were used as a dict's keys and the ``__eq__()`` method mutated the dict.
91 No, you don't have any code that did this ;-)
96 - Change binascii.hexlify to accept a read-only buffer instead of only a char
97 buffer and actually follow its documentation.
99 - Fixed a potentially invalid memory access of CJKCodecs' shift-jis decoder.
101 - Patch #1478788 (modified version): The functional extension module has
102 been renamed to _functools and a functools Python wrapper module added.
103 This provides a home for additional function related utilities that are
104 not specifically about functional programming. See PEP 309.
106 - Patch #1493701: performance enhancements for struct module.
108 - Patch #1490224: time.altzone is now set correctly on Cygwin.
110 - Patch #1435422: zlib's compress and decompress objects now have a
113 - On Win32, os.listdir now supports arbitrarily-long Unicode path names
114 (up to the system limit of 32K characters).
116 - Use Win32 API to implement os.{access,chdir,chmod,mkdir,remove,rename,rmdir,utime}.
117 As a result, these functions now raise WindowsError instead of OSError.
119 - ``time.clock()`` on Win64 should use the high-performance Windows
120 ``QueryPerformanceCounter()`` now (as was already the case on 32-bit
123 - Calling Tk_Init twice is refused if the first call failed as that
126 - bsddb: added the DB_ARCH_REMOVE flag and fixed db.DBEnv.log_archive() to
127 accept it without potentially using an uninitialized pointer.
129 - bsddb: added support for the DBEnv.log_stat() and DBEnv.lsn_reset() methods
130 assuming BerkeleyDB >= 4.0 and 4.4 respectively. [pybsddb project SF
131 patch numbers 1494885 and 1494902]
133 - bsddb: added an interface for the BerkeleyDB >= 4.3 DBSequence class.
134 [pybsddb project SF patch number 1466734]
136 - bsddb: fix DBCursor.pget() bug with keyword argument names when no data
137 parameter is supplied. [SF pybsddb bug #1477863]
139 - bsddb: the __len__ method of a DB object has been fixed to return correct
140 results. It could previously incorrectly return 0 in some cases.
141 Fixes SF bug 1493322 (pybsddb bug 1184012).
143 - bsddb: the bsddb.dbtables Modify method now raises the proper error and
144 aborts the db transaction safely when a modifier callback fails.
145 Fixes SF python patch/bug #1408584.
151 - Bug #1498146: fix optparse to handle Unicode strings in option help,
152 description, and epilog.
154 - Bug #1366250: minor optparse documentation error.
156 - Bug #1361643: fix textwrap.dedent() so it handles tabs appropriately;
159 - The wsgiref package has been added to the standard library.
161 - The functions update_wrapper() and wraps() have been added to the functools
162 module. These make it easier to copy relevant metadata from the original
163 function when writing wrapper functions.
165 - The optional ``isprivate`` argument to ``doctest.testmod()``, and the
166 ``doctest.is_private()`` function, both deprecated in 2.4, were removed.
168 - Patch #1359618: Speed up charmap encoder by using a trie structure
171 - The functions in the ``pprint`` module now sort dictionaries by key
172 before computing the display. Before 2.5, ``pprint`` sorted a dictionary
173 if and only if its display required more than one line, although that
174 wasn't documented. The new behavior increases predictability; e.g.,
175 using ``pprint.pprint(a_dict)`` in a doctest is now reliable.
177 - Patch #1497027: try HTTP digest auth before basic auth in urllib2
178 (thanks for J. J. Lee).
180 - Patch #1496206: improve urllib2 handling of passwords with respect to
181 default HTTP and HTTPS ports.
183 - Patch #1080727: add "encoding" parameter to doctest.DocFileSuite.
185 - Patch #1281707: speed up gzip.readline.
187 - Patch #1180296: Two new functions were added to the locale module:
188 format_string() to get the effect of "format % items" but locale-aware,
189 and currency() to format a monetary number with currency sign.
191 - Patch #1486962: Several bugs in the turtle Tk demo module were fixed
192 and several features added, such as speed and geometry control.
194 - Patch #1488881: add support for external file objects in bz2 compressed
197 - Patch #721464: pdb.Pdb instances can now be given explicit stdin and
198 stdout arguments, making it possible to redirect input and output
199 for remote debugging.
201 - Patch #1484695: Update the tarfile module to version 0.8. This fixes
202 a couple of issues, notably handling of long file names using the
203 GNU LONGNAME extension.
205 - Patch #1478292. ``doctest.register_optionflag(name)`` shouldn't create a
206 new flag when ``name`` is already the name of an option flag.
208 - Bug #1385040: don't allow "def foo(a=1, b): pass" in the compiler
211 - Patch #1472854: make the rlcompleter.Completer class usable on non-
214 - Patch #1470846: fix urllib2 ProxyBasicAuthHandler.
216 - Bug #1472827: correctly escape newlines and tabs in attribute values in
217 the saxutils.XMLGenerator class.
223 - Bug #1502728: Correctly link against librt library on HP-UX.
225 - OpenBSD 3.9 is supported now.
227 - Patch #1492356: Port to Windows CE.
229 - Bug/Patch #1481770: Use .so extension for shared libraries on HP-UX for ia64.
231 - Patch #1471883: Add --enable-universalsdk.
247 What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 2?
248 =================================
250 *Release date: 27-APR-2006*
255 - Bug #1465834: 'bdist_wininst preinstall script support' was fixed
256 by converting these apis from macros into exported functions again:
258 PyParser_SimpleParseFile PyParser_SimpleParseString PyRun_AnyFile
259 PyRun_AnyFileEx PyRun_AnyFileFlags PyRun_File PyRun_FileEx
260 PyRun_FileFlags PyRun_InteractiveLoop PyRun_InteractiveOne
261 PyRun_SimpleFile PyRun_SimpleFileEx PyRun_SimpleString
262 PyRun_String Py_CompileString
264 - Under COUNT_ALLOCS, types are not necessarily immortal anymore.
266 - All uses of PyStructSequence_InitType have been changed to initialize
267 the type objects only once, even if the interpreter is initialized
270 - Bug #1454485, array.array('u') could crash the interpreter. This was
271 due to PyArgs_ParseTuple(args, 'u#', ...) trying to convert buffers (strings)
272 to unicode when it didn't make sense. 'u#' now requires a unicode string.
274 - Py_UNICODE is unsigned. It was always documented as unsigned, but
275 due to a bug had a signed value in previous versions.
277 - Patch #837242: ``id()`` of any Python object always gives a positive
278 number now, which might be a long integer. ``PyLong_FromVoidPtr`` and
279 ``PyLong_AsVoidPtr`` have been changed accordingly. Note that it has
280 never been correct to implement a ``__hash()__`` method that returns the
281 ``id()`` of an object:
284 return id(self) # WRONG
286 because a hash result must be a (short) Python int but it was always
287 possible for ``id()`` to return a Python long. However, because ``id()``
288 could return negative values before, on a 32-bit box an ``id()`` result
289 was always usable as a hash value before this patch. That's no longer
292 - Python on OS X 10.3 and above now uses dlopen() (via dynload_shlib.c)
293 to load extension modules and now provides the dl module. As a result,
294 sys.setdlopenflags() now works correctly on these systems. (SF patch
297 - Patch #1463867: enhanced garbage collection to allow cleanup of cycles
298 involving generators that have paused outside of any ``try`` or ``with``
299 blocks. (In 2.5a1, a paused generator that was part of a reference
300 cycle could not be garbage collected, regardless of whether it was
301 paused in a ``try`` or ``with`` block.)
306 - Patch #1191065: Fix preprocessor problems on systems where recvfrom
309 - Bug #1467952: os.listdir() now correctly raises an error if readdir()
310 fails with an error condition.
312 - Fixed bsddb.db.DBError derived exceptions so they can be unpickled.
314 - Bug #1117761: bsddb.*open() no longer raises an exception when using
315 the cachesize parameter.
317 - Bug #1149413: bsddb.*open() no longer raises an exception when using
318 a temporary db (file=None) with the 'n' flag to truncate on open.
320 - Bug #1332852: bsddb module minimum BerkeleyDB version raised to 3.3
321 as older versions cause excessive test failures.
323 - Patch #1062014: AF_UNIX sockets under Linux have a special
324 abstract namespace that is now fully supported.
329 - Patch #1475231: ``doctest`` has a new ``SKIP`` option, which causes
330 a doctest to be skipped (the code is not run, and the expected output
331 or exception is ignored).
333 - Fixed contextlib.nested to cope with exceptions being raised and
334 caught inside exit handlers.
336 - Updated optparse module to Optik 1.5.1 (allow numeric constants in
337 hex, octal, or binary; add ``append_const`` action; keep going if
338 gettext cannot be imported; added ``OptionParser.destroy()`` method;
339 added ``epilog`` for better help generation).
341 - Bug #1473760: ``tempfile.TemporaryFile()`` could hang on Windows, when
342 called from a thread spawned as a side effect of importing a module.
344 - The pydoc module now supports documenting packages contained in
347 - The pkgutil module now has several new utility functions, such
348 as ``walk_packages()`` to support working with packages that are either
349 in the filesystem or zip files.
351 - The mailbox module can now modify and delete messages from
352 mailboxes, in addition to simply reading them. Thanks to Gregory
353 K. Johnson for writing the code, and to the 2005 Google Summer of
354 Code for funding his work.
356 - The ``__del__`` method of class ``local`` in module ``_threading_local``
357 returned before accomplishing any of its intended cleanup.
359 - Patch #790710: Add breakpoint command lists in pdb.
361 - Patch #1063914: Add Tkinter.Misc.clipboard_get().
363 - Patch #1191700: Adjust column alignment in bdb breakpoint lists.
365 - SimpleXMLRPCServer relied on the fcntl module, which is unavailable on
366 Windows. Bug #1469163.
368 - The warnings, linecache, inspect, traceback, site, and doctest modules
369 were updated to work correctly with modules imported from zipfiles or
370 via other PEP 302 __loader__ objects.
372 - Patch #1467770: Reduce usage of subprocess._active to processes which
373 the application hasn't waited on.
375 - Patch #1462222: Fix Tix.Grid.
377 - Fix exception when doing glob.glob('anything*/')
379 - The pstats.Stats class accepts an optional stream keyword argument to
380 direct output to an alternate file-like object.
385 - The Makefile now has a reindent target, which runs reindent.py on
388 - Patch #1470875: Building Python with MS Free Compiler
390 - Patch #1161914: Add a python-config script.
392 - Patch #1324762:Remove ccpython.cc; replace --with-cxx with
393 --with-cxx-main. Link with C++ compiler only if --with-cxx-main was
394 specified. (Can be overridden by explicitly setting LINKCC.) Decouple
395 CXX from --with-cxx-main, see description in README.
397 - Patch #1429775: Link extension modules with the shared libpython.
399 - Fixed a libffi build problem on MIPS systems.
401 - ``PyString_FromFormat``, ``PyErr_Format``, and ``PyString_FromFormatV``
402 now accept formats "%u" for unsigned ints, "%lu" for unsigned longs,
403 and "%zu" for unsigned integers of type ``size_t``.
408 - test_contextlib now checks contextlib.nested can cope with exceptions
409 being raised and caught inside exit handlers.
411 - test_cmd_line now checks operation of the -m and -c command switches
413 - The test_contextlib test in 2.5a1 wasn't actually run unless you ran
414 it separately and by hand. It also wasn't cleaning up its changes to
415 the current Decimal context.
417 - regrtest.py now has a -M option to run tests that test the new limits of
418 containers, on 64-bit architectures. Running these tests is only sensible
419 on 64-bit machines with more than two gigabytes of memory. The argument
420 passed is the maximum amount of memory for the tests to use.
425 - Added the Python benchmark suite pybench to the Tools/ directory;
426 contributed by Marc-Andre Lemburg.
431 - Patch #1473132: Improve docs for ``tp_clear`` and ``tp_traverse``.
433 - PEP 343: Added Context Types section to the library reference
434 and attempted to bring other PEP 343 related documentation into
435 line with the implementation and/or python-dev discussions.
437 - Bug #1337990: clarified that ``doctest`` does not support examples
438 requiring both expected output and an exception.
441 What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
442 =================================
444 *Release date: 05-APR-2006*
449 - PEP 338: -m command line switch now delegates to runpy.run_module
450 allowing it to support modules in packages and zipfiles
452 - On Windows, .DLL is not an accepted file name extension for
453 extension modules anymore; extensions are only found if they
456 - Bug #1421664: sys.stderr.encoding is now set to the same value as
459 - __import__ accepts keyword arguments.
461 - Patch #1460496: round() now accepts keyword arguments.
463 - Fixed bug #1459029 - unicode reprs were double-escaped.
465 - Patch #1396919: The system scope threads are reenabled on FreeBSD
466 5.4 and later versions.
468 - Bug #1115379: Compiling a Unicode string with an encoding declaration
469 now gives a SyntaxError.
471 - Previously, Python code had no easy way to access the contents of a
472 cell object. Now, a ``cell_contents`` attribute has been added
473 (closes patch #1170323).
475 - Patch #1123430: Python's small-object allocator now returns an arena to
476 the system ``free()`` when all memory within an arena becomes unused
477 again. Prior to Python 2.5, arenas (256KB chunks of memory) were never
478 freed. Some applications will see a drop in virtual memory size now,
479 especially long-running applications that, from time to time, temporarily
480 use a large number of small objects. Note that when Python returns an
481 arena to the platform C's ``free()``, there's no guarantee that the
482 platform C library will in turn return that memory to the operating system.
483 The effect of the patch is to stop making that impossible, and in tests it
484 appears to be effective at least on Microsoft C and gcc-based systems.
485 Thanks to Evan Jones for hard work and patience.
487 - Patch #1434038: property() now uses the getter's docstring if there is
488 no "doc" argument given. This makes it possible to legitimately use
489 property() as a decorator to produce a read-only property.
491 - PEP 357, patch 1436368: add an __index__ method to int/long and a matching
492 nb_index slot to the PyNumberMethods struct. The slot is consulted instead
493 of requiring an int or long in slicing and a few other contexts, enabling
494 other objects (e.g. Numeric Python's integers) to be used as slice indices.
496 - Fixed various bugs reported by Coverity's Prevent tool.
498 - PEP 352, patch #1104669: Make exceptions new-style objects. Introduced the
499 new exception base class, BaseException, which has a new message attribute.
500 KeyboardInterrupt and SystemExit to directly inherit from BaseException now.
501 Raising a string exception now raises a DeprecationWarning.
503 - Patch #1438387, PEP 328: relative and absolute imports. Imports can now be
504 explicitly relative, using 'from .module import name' to mean 'from the same
505 package as this module is in. Imports without dots still default to the
506 old relative-then-absolute, unless 'from __future__ import
507 absolute_import' is used.
509 - Properly check if 'warnings' raises an exception (usually when a filter set
510 to "error" is triggered) when raising a warning for raising string
513 - CO_GENERATOR_ALLOWED is no longer defined. This behavior is the default.
514 The name was removed from Include/code.h.
516 - PEP 308: conditional expressions were added: (x if cond else y).
519 - The copy module now "copies" function objects (as atomic objects).
520 - dict.__getitem__ now looks for a __missing__ hook before raising
523 - PEP 343: with statement implemented. Needs ``from __future__ import
524 with_statement``. Use of 'with' as a variable will generate a warning.
525 Use of 'as' as a variable will also generate a warning (unless it's
526 part of an import statement).
527 The following objects have __context__ methods:
528 - The built-in file type.
529 - The thread.LockType type.
530 - The following types defined by the threading module:
531 Lock, RLock, Condition, Semaphore, BoundedSemaphore.
532 - The decimal.Context class.
534 - Fix the encodings package codec search function to only search
535 inside its own package. Fixes problem reported in patch #1433198.
537 Note: Codec packages should implement and register their own
538 codec search function. PEP 100 has the details.
540 - PEP 353: Using ``Py_ssize_t`` as the index type.
542 - ``PYMALLOC_DEBUG`` builds now add ``4*sizeof(size_t)`` bytes of debugging
543 info to each allocated block, since the ``Py_ssize_t`` changes (PEP 353)
544 now allow Python to make use of memory blocks exceeding 2**32 bytes for
545 some purposes on 64-bit boxes. A ``PYMALLOC_DEBUG`` build was limited
546 to 4-byte allocations before.
548 - Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
549 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
550 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
552 - Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
553 configure would break checking curses.h.
555 - Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
556 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
558 - Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
560 - Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
562 - Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
564 - Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
565 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
567 - Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
568 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.subversion. Build number
569 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
571 - Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
572 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
573 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
575 - Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
576 now encodes backslash correctly.
578 - Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
580 - Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correctly even with unsigned longs
583 - SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
584 It was possible for dlerror() to return a NULL pointer, so
585 it will now use a default error message in this case.
587 - Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
588 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
589 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
590 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
591 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
593 - Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
595 - Sped up some Unicode operations.
597 - A new AST parser implementation was completed. The abstract
598 syntax tree is available for read-only (non-compile) access
599 to Python code; an _ast module was added.
601 - SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being produced for generator expressions.
602 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
604 - SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
606 - SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
607 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
609 - Fix segfault with invalid coding.
611 - SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
613 - All iterators now have a Boolean value of True. Formerly, some iterators
614 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
617 - On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
618 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
620 - test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
623 - SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
626 - Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
627 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
628 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
630 - Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
631 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
633 - Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
634 (fixes bug #1119418).
636 - Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
638 - SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
639 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
641 - The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
642 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
643 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
645 - SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
647 - SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
648 reference counts in some error exit cases.
650 - SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
651 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
652 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
653 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so there's no
654 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
655 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
656 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
659 - SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
660 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
662 - SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
663 like their int counterparts.
665 - SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
666 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
667 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
668 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
669 for a longer write-up of the problem).
671 - SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
674 - SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
675 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
676 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
678 - bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
681 - patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
682 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
683 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
684 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
685 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
687 Thanks Walter D�rwald.
689 - Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
690 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
691 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
692 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
694 - It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
695 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
696 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
697 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
698 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
700 - Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
701 disabled caused a crash.
703 - Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
704 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
706 - Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
707 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
709 - Added two new builtins, any() and all().
711 - Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
712 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
713 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
714 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
716 - Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
718 - Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
721 - Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
722 ('\') with a specific error message.
724 - Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
726 - Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
727 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
729 - Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
732 - min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
735 - The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
738 - set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
740 - Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
741 in calls to os.read().
743 - The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
744 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
745 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
747 - Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
748 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
749 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
751 - Patch #1413181: changed ``PyThreadState_Delete()`` to forget about the
752 current thread state when the auto-GIL-state machinery knows about
753 it (since the thread state is being deleted, continuing to remember it
754 can't help, but can hurt if another thread happens to get created with
760 - Patch #1380952: fix SSL objects timing out on consecutive read()s
762 - Patch #1309579: wait3 and wait4 were added to the posix module.
764 - Patch #1231053: The audioop module now supports encoding/decoding of alaw.
765 In addition, the existing ulaw code was updated.
767 - RFE #567972: Socket objects' family, type and proto properties are
768 now exposed via new attributes.
770 - Everything under lib-old was removed. This includes the following modules:
771 Para, addpack, cmp, cmpcache, codehack, dircmp, dump, find, fmt, grep,
772 lockfile, newdir, ni, packmail, poly, rand, statcache, tb, tzparse,
773 util, whatsound, whrandom, zmod
775 - The following modules were removed: regsub, reconvert, regex, regex_syntax.
777 - re and sre were swapped, so help(re) provides full help. importing sre
778 is deprecated. The undocumented re.engine variable no longer exists.
780 - Bug #1448490: Fixed a bug that ISO-2022 codecs could not handle
781 SS2 (single-shift 2) escape sequences correctly.
783 - The unicodedata module was updated to the 4.1 version of the Unicode
784 database. The 3.2 version is still available as unicodedata.db_3_2_0
785 for applications that require this specific version (such as IDNA).
787 - The timing module is no longer built by default. It was deprecated
788 in PEP 4 in Python 2.0 or earlier.
790 - Patch 1433928: Added a new type, defaultdict, to the collections module.
791 This uses the new __missing__ hook behavior added to dict (see above).
793 - Bug #854823: socketmodule now builds on Sun platforms even when
794 INET_ADDRSTRLEN is not defined.
796 - Patch #1393157: os.startfile() now has an optional argument to specify
797 a "command verb" to invoke on the file.
799 - Bug #876637, prevent stack corruption when socket descriptor
800 is larger than FD_SETSIZE.
802 - Patch #1407135, bug #1424041: harmonize mmap behavior of anonymous memory.
803 mmap.mmap(-1, size) now returns anonymous memory in both Unix and Windows.
804 mmap.mmap(0, size) should not be used on Windows for anonymous memory.
806 - Patch #1422385: The nis module now supports access to domains other
807 than the system default domain.
809 - Use Win32 API to implement os.stat/fstat. As a result, subsecond timestamps
810 are reported, the limit on path name lengths is removed, and stat reports
811 WindowsError now (instead of OSError).
813 - Add bsddb.db.DBEnv.set_tx_timestamp allowing time based database recovery.
815 - Bug #1413192, fix seg fault in bsddb if a transaction was deleted
818 - Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
820 - Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
822 - Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
823 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
824 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
826 - Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
827 without prior setting of the userptr.
829 - Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
831 - Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
833 - Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
836 - Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
838 - Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
840 - Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
842 - Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
843 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
845 - Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using
846 BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1.
848 - Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4
850 - Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2
852 - Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
853 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
855 - Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
857 - Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
858 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
860 - Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
861 returns in cStringIO.c.
863 - Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
864 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
866 - Fix memory leak in posix.access().
868 - Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
870 - Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
871 the file system encoding.
873 - Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
874 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
876 - Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
878 - Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
879 line without newlines.
881 - Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
884 - Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
885 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
887 - Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
888 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
889 for large or negative values.
891 - Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
892 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
894 - Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
896 - Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
897 if available on the platform.
899 - Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
900 available on the platform.
902 - Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
903 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
905 - collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
907 - operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
908 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
909 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
911 - os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
913 - Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
914 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
916 - Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
919 - Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
921 - Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
922 {remove_history,replace_history}
924 - The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
927 - stat_float_times is now True.
929 - array.array objects are now picklable.
931 - the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
932 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
934 - itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
935 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
936 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
938 - datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
939 create datetime object using a string and format.
941 - Patch #1117961: Replace the MD5 implementation from RSA Data Security Inc
942 with the implementation from http://sourceforge.net/projects/libmd5-rfc/.
947 - PEP 338: new module runpy defines a run_module function to support
948 executing modules which provide access to source code or a code object
949 via the PEP 302 import mechanisms.
951 - The email module's parsedate_tz function now sets the daylight savings
952 flag to -1 (unknown) since it can't tell from the date whether it should
955 - Patch #624325: urlparse.urlparse() and urlparse.urlsplit() results
956 now sport attributes that provide access to the parts of the result.
958 - Patch #1462498: sgmllib now handles entity and character references
961 - Added the sqlite3 package. This is based on pysqlite2.1.3, and provides
962 a DB-API interface in the standard library. You'll need sqlite 3.0.8 or
963 later to build this - if you have an earlier version, the C extension
964 module will not be built.
966 - Bug #1460340: ``random.sample(dict)`` failed in various ways. Dicts
967 aren't officially supported here, and trying to use them will probably
968 raise an exception some day. But dicts have been allowed, and "mostly
969 worked", so support for them won't go away without warning.
971 - Bug #1445068: getpass.getpass() can now be given an explicit stream
972 argument to specify where to write the prompt.
974 - Patch #1462313, bug #1443328: the pickle modules now can handle classes
975 that have __private names in their __slots__.
977 - Bug #1250170: mimetools now handles socket.gethostname() failures gracefully.
979 - patch #1457316: "setup.py upload" now supports --identity to select the
980 key to be used for signing the uploaded code.
982 - Queue.Queue objects now support .task_done() and .join() methods
983 to make it easier to monitor when daemon threads have completed
984 processing all enqueued tasks. Patch #1455676.
986 - popen2.Popen objects now preserve the command in a .cmd attribute.
988 - Added the ctypes ffi package.
990 - email 4.0 package now integrated. This is largely the same as the email 3.0
991 package that was included in Python 2.3, except that PEP 8 module names are
992 now used (e.g. mail.message instead of email.Message). The MIME classes
993 have been moved to a subpackage (e.g. email.mime.text instead of
994 email.MIMEText). The old names are still supported for now. Several
995 deprecated Message methods have been removed and lots of bugs have been
996 fixed. More details can be found in the email package documentation.
998 - Patches #1436130/#1443155: codecs.lookup() now returns a CodecInfo object
999 (a subclass of tuple) that provides incremental decoders and encoders
1000 (a way to use stateful codecs without the stream API). Python functions
1001 codecs.getincrementaldecoder() and codecs.getincrementalencoder() as well
1002 as C functions PyCodec_IncrementalEncoder() and PyCodec_IncrementalDecoder()
1005 - Patch #1359365: Calling next() on a closed StringIO.String object raises
1006 a ValueError instead of a StopIteration now (like file and cString.String do).
1007 cStringIO.StringIO.isatty() will raise a ValueError now if close() has been
1008 called before (like file and StringIO.StringIO do).
1010 - A regrtest option -w was added to re-run failed tests in verbose mode.
1012 - Patch #1446372: quit and exit can now be called from the interactive
1013 interpreter to exit.
1015 - The function get_count() has been added to the gc module, and gc.collect()
1016 grew an optional 'generation' argument.
1018 - A library msilib to generate Windows Installer files, and a distutils
1019 command bdist_msi have been added.
1021 - PEP 343: new module contextlib.py defines decorator @contextmanager
1022 and helpful context managers nested() and closing().
1024 - The compiler package now supports future imports after the module docstring.
1026 - Bug #1413790: zipfile now sanitizes absolute archive names that are
1027 not allowed by the specs.
1029 - Patch #1215184: FileInput now can be given an opening hook which can
1030 be used to control how files are opened.
1032 - Patch #1212287: fileinput.input() now has a mode parameter for
1033 specifying the file mode input files should be opened with.
1035 - Patch #1215184: fileinput now has a fileno() function for getting the
1036 current file number.
1038 - Patch #1349274: gettext.install() now optionally installs additional
1039 translation functions other than _() in the builtin namespace.
1041 - Patch #1337756: fileinput now accepts Unicode filenames.
1043 - Patch #1373643: The chunk module can now read chunks larger than
1046 - Patch #1417555: SimpleHTTPServer now returns Last-Modified headers.
1048 - Bug #1430298: It is now possible to send a mail with an empty
1049 return address using smtplib.
1051 - Bug #1432260: The names of lambda functions are now properly displayed
1054 - Patch #1412872: zipfile now sets the creator system to 3 (Unix)
1055 unless the system is Win32.
1057 - Patch #1349118: urllib now supports user:pass@ style proxy
1058 specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols
1059 are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections.
1061 - Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications.
1063 - Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.
1065 - Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
1067 - Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
1070 - Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
1071 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
1073 - Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
1075 - Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
1077 - Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
1078 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
1079 LoadError subclasses IOError.
1081 - Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
1082 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
1083 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
1084 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
1085 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
1087 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
1088 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
1089 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
1090 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
1091 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
1093 - Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
1094 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
1095 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
1097 - Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
1099 - Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
1101 - Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
1102 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
1105 - Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
1106 is an error in the format string.
1108 - Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
1110 - Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
1113 - Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
1116 - Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
1117 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
1119 - Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
1120 to get the correct encoding.
1122 - Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
1125 - Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
1127 - Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
1129 - Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
1131 - Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
1134 - Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
1136 - Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
1137 separator and do not output trailing semicolon.
1139 - Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
1140 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
1141 match the Content-Length header.
1143 - Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
1145 - Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
1146 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
1147 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
1149 - Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
1151 - Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
1153 - Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
1154 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
1156 - Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
1157 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
1160 - Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
1161 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
1163 - Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
1164 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
1166 - textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
1167 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
1169 - urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
1170 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
1172 - Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
1173 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
1175 - Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module;
1176 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
1178 - Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
1180 - Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
1183 - Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
1185 - The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
1188 - The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
1189 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python source code. In addition,
1190 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
1191 terminates by raising StopIteration.
1193 - Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
1195 - Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
1196 component of the path.
1198 - Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
1199 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
1200 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
1203 - distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
1206 - distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
1209 - decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
1210 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
1211 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
1214 - Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
1215 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
1217 - Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
1218 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
1220 - Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
1222 - Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
1225 - Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
1226 symbolic links on Windows.
1228 - Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
1229 profile.py if available.
1231 - Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
1233 - Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
1236 - Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
1238 - Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
1240 - Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
1242 - Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
1244 - Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
1246 - Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
1248 - Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
1250 - Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
1252 - Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
1253 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
1254 be exploited in various ways.
1256 - Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
1257 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
1259 - Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
1260 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
1262 - Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
1263 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
1265 - Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
1267 - Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
1269 - os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
1271 - Enhancements to the csv module:
1273 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
1274 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
1276 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
1278 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
1280 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
1281 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
1282 types, rather than any object that can be represented as a numeric.
1283 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
1285 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
1287 + writer doublequote handling improved.
1288 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
1289 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
1290 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
1291 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
1292 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
1293 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
1294 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
1295 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
1296 without first creating a dialect class.
1297 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
1298 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
1299 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
1300 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
1301 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
1303 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
1304 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
1305 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
1307 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
1308 This has been fixed.
1310 - _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
1311 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
1312 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
1313 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
1315 - The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
1317 - StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
1320 - locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
1321 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
1322 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
1323 encoding alias table.
1325 - moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
1327 - the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
1328 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
1330 - optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
1332 - the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
1334 - the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
1336 - the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
1338 - the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
1340 - unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
1341 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
1342 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
1344 - heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
1345 the same meaning as in list.sort().
1347 - Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
1348 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
1349 tokenizer with very long source lines.
1351 - Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
1352 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
1353 ``.decompress()`` calls.
1355 - The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
1356 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
1358 - ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
1359 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
1361 - Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
1364 - Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
1365 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
1366 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
1367 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
1370 - Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
1371 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
1374 - Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
1375 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
1376 encoding instead of a unicode string.
1378 - Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
1379 considering it exactly like a '*'.
1381 - Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
1382 ``encodings.aliases``.
1384 - ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
1386 - Patch #1413711: Certain patterns of differences were making difflib
1387 touch the recursion limit.
1389 - Bug #947906: An object oriented interface has been added to the calendar
1390 module. It's possible to generate HTML calendar now and the module can be
1391 called as a script (e.g. via ``python -mcalendar``). Localized month and
1392 weekday names can be ouput (even if an exotic encoding is used) using
1393 special classes that use unicode.
1398 - Fix test_float, test_long, and test_struct failures on Tru64 with gcc
1399 by using -mieee gcc option.
1401 - Patch #1432345: Make python compile on DragonFly.
1403 - Build support for Win64-AMD64 was added.
1405 - Patch #1428494: Prefer linking against ncursesw over ncurses library.
1407 - Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
1409 - The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
1410 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
1412 - Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
1414 - Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
1415 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
1417 - Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
1418 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
1420 - EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
1421 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
1422 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
1423 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
1425 - SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
1426 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
1427 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
1429 - Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
1431 - spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
1432 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
1434 - setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
1435 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
1436 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
1437 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
1438 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
1439 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
1440 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
1441 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
1443 - Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
1444 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
1445 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
1446 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
1451 - ``PyMem_{Del, DEL}`` and ``PyMem_{Free, FREE}`` no longer map to
1452 ``PyObject_{Free, FREE}``. They map to the system ``free()`` now. If memory
1453 is obtained via the ``PyObject_`` family, it must be released via the
1454 ``PyObject_`` family, and likewise for the ``PyMem_`` family. This has
1455 always been officially true, but when Python's small-object allocator was
1456 introduced, an attempt was made to cater to a few extension modules
1457 discovered at the time that obtained memory via ``PyObject_New`` but
1458 released it via ``PyMem_DEL``. It's years later, and if such code still
1459 exists it will fail now (probably with segfaults, but calling wrong
1460 low-level memory management functions can yield many symptoms).
1462 - Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
1464 - Removed PyRange_New().
1466 - Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
1467 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
1468 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
1475 - In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
1477 - Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
1478 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
1484 - Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.
1486 - Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
1487 values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
1489 - Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
1491 - Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
1493 - Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
1495 - Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
1497 - Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
1499 - Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
1501 - Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
1503 - Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
1505 - Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
1507 - Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
1508 Closes bug #1166582.
1510 - Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
1511 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
1512 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
1521 - FreeBSD 7 support is added.
1527 - Created Misc/Vim/vim_syntax.py to auto-generate a python.vim file in that
1528 directory for syntax highlighting in Vim. Vim directory was added and placed
1529 vimrc to it (was previous up a level).
1531 - Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
1532 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
1533 source files that need an encoding declaration.
1534 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
1536 - Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
1538 - Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
1540 - Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
1541 wiggle over by a pixel.
1545 **(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**