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Python News

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(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)

What's New in Python 2.5.1?

=============================

*Release date: 18-APR-2007*

Core and builtins

-----------------

- Revert SF #1615701: dict.update() does *not* call __getitem__() or keys()

if subclassed. This is to remain consistent with 2.5.

Also revert revision 53667 with made a similar change to set.update().

What's New in Python 2.5.1c1?

=============================

*Release date: 05-APR-2007*

Core and builtins

-----------------

- Patch #1682205: a TypeError while unpacking an iterable is no longer

masked by a generic one with the message "unpack non-sequence".

- Patch #1642547: Fix an error/crash when encountering syntax errors in

complex if statements.

- Patch #1462488: Python no longer segfaults when ``object.__reduce_ex__()``

is called with an object that is faking its type.

- Patch #1680015: Don't modify __slots__ tuple if it contains an unicode

name.

- Patch #922167: Python no longer segfaults when faced with infinitely

self-recursive reload() calls (as reported by bug #742342).

- Patch #1675981: remove unreachable code from ``type.__new__()`` method.

- Patch #1638879: don't accept strings with embedded NUL bytes in long().

- Bug #1674503: close the file opened by execfile() in an error condition.

- Patch #1674228: when assigning a slice (old-style), check for the

sq_ass_slice instead of the sq_slice slot.

- Bug #1669182: prevent crash when trying to print an unraisable error

from a string exception.

- The peephole optimizer left None as a global in functions with a docstring

and an explicit return value.

- Bug #1653736: Properly discard third argument to slot_nb_inplace_power.

- SF #151204: enumerate() now raises an Overflow error at sys.maxint items.

- Bug #1377858: Fix the segfaulting of the interpreter when an object created

a weakref on itself during a __del__ call for new-style classes (classic

classes still have the bug).

- Bug #1648179: set.update() did not recognize an overridden __iter__

method in subclasses of dict.

- Bug #1579370: Make PyTraceBack_Here use the current thread, not the

frame's thread state.

- patch #1630975: Fix crash when replacing sys.stdout in sitecustomize.py

- Bug #1637022: Prefix AST symbols with _Py_.

- Prevent seg fault on shutdown which could occur if an object

raised a warning.

- Bug #1566280: Explicitly invoke threading._shutdown from Py_Main,

to avoid relying on atexit.

- Bug #1590891: random.randrange don't return correct value for big number

- Bug #1456209: In some obscure cases it was possible for a class with a

custom ``__eq__()`` method to confuse set internals when class instances

were used as a set's elements and the ``__eq__()`` method mutated the set.

- The repr for self-referential sets and fronzensets now shows "..." instead

of falling into infinite recursion.

- Eliminated unnecessary repeated calls to hash() by set.intersection() and

set.symmetric_difference_update().

- Bug #1591996: Correctly forward exception in instance_contains().

- Bug #1588287: fix invalid assertion for `1,2` in debug builds.

- Bug #1576657: when setting a KeyError for a tuple key, make sure that

the tuple isn't used as the "exception arguments tuple". Applied to

both sets and dictionaries.

- Bug #1565514, SystemError not raised on too many nested blocks.

- Bug #1576174: WindowsError now displays the windows error code

again, no longer the posix error code.

- Patch #1549049: Support long values in structmember.

- Bug #1542016: make sys.callstats() match its docstring and return an

11-tuple (only relevant when Python is compiled with -DCALL_PROFILE).

- Bug #1545497: when given an explicit base, int() did ignore NULs

embedded in the string to convert.

- Bug #1569998: break inside a try statement (outside a loop) is now

recognized and rejected.

- Patch #1542451: disallow continue anywhere under a finally.

- list.pop(x) accepts any object x following the __index__ protocol.

- Fix some leftovers from the conversion from int to Py_ssize_t

(relevant to strings and sequences of more than 2**31 items).

- A number of places, including integer negation and absolute value,

were fixed to not rely on undefined behaviour of the C compiler

anymore.

- Bug #1566800: make sure that EnvironmentError can be called with any

number of arguments, as was the case in Python 2.4.

- Patch #1567691: super() and new.instancemethod() now don't accept

keyword arguments any more (previously they accepted them, but didn't

use them).

- Fix a bug in the parser's future statement handling that led to "with"

not being recognized as a keyword after, e.g., this statement:

from __future__ import division, with_statement

- Bug #1557232: fix seg fault with def f((((x)))) and def f(((x),)).

- Fix %zd string formatting on Mac OS X so it prints negative numbers.

- Allow exception instances to be directly sliced again.

Extension Modules

-----------------

- Bug #1563759: struct.unpack doens't support buffer protocol objects

- Bug #1686475: Support stat'ing open files on Windows again.

- Bug #1647541: Array module's buffer interface can now handle empty arrays.

- Bug #1693079: The array module can now successfully pickle empty arrays.

- Bug #1688393: Prevent crash in socket.recvfrom if length is negative.

- Bug #1622896: fix a rare corner case where the bz2 module raised an

error in spite of a succesful compression.

- Patch #1654417: make operator.{get,set,del}slice use the full range

of Py_ssize_t.

- Patch #1646728: datetime.fromtimestamp fails with negative

fractional times. With unittest.

- Patch #1494140: Add documentation for the new struct.Struct object.

- Patch #1657276: Make NETLINK_DNRTMSG conditional.

- Bug #1653736: Fix signature of time_isoformat.

- operator.count() now raises an OverflowError when the count reaches sys.maxint.

- Bug #1575169: operator.isSequenceType() now returns False for subclasses of dict.

- collections.defaultdict() now verifies that the factory function is callable.

- Bug #1486663: don't reject keyword arguments for subclasses of builtin

types.

- The version number of the ctypes package was changed to "1.0.2".

- Bug #1664966: Fix crash in exec if Unicode filename can't be decoded.

- Patch #1544279: Improve thread-safety of the socket module by moving

the sock_addr_t storage out of the socket object.

- Patch #1615868: make bz2.BZFile.seek() work for offsets >2GiB.

- Bug #1563807: _ctypes built on AIX fails with ld ffi error.

- Bug #1598620: A ctypes Structure cannot contain itself.

- Bug #1588217: don't parse "= " as a soft line break in binascii's

a2b_qp() function, instead leave it in the string as quopri.decode()

does.

- Patch #838546: Make terminal become controlling in pty.fork()

- Patch #1560695: Add .note.GNU-stack to ctypes' sysv.S so that

ctypes isn't considered as requiring executable stacks.

- Bug #1567666: Emulate GetFileAttributesExA for Win95.

- Bug #1548891: The cStringIO.StringIO() constructor now encodes unicode

arguments with the system default encoding just like the write()

method does, instead of converting it to a raw buffer.

- Bug #1565150: Fix subsecond processing for os.utime on Windows.

- Patch #1572724: fix typo ('=' instead of '==') in _msi.c.

- Bug #1572832: fix a bug in ISO-2022 codecs which may cause segfault

when encoding non-BMP unicode characters.

- Bug #1556784: allow format strings longer than 127 characters in

datetime's strftime function.

- Fix itertools.count(n) to work with negative numbers again.

- Make regex engine raise MemoryError if allocating memory fails.

- fixed a bug with bsddb.DB.stat: the flags and txn keyword arguments

were transposed.

- Added support for linking the bsddb module against BerkeleyDB 4.5.x.

- Modifying an empty deque during iteration now raises RuntimeError

instead of StopIteration.

- Bug #1552726: fix polling at the interpreter prompt when certain

versions of the readline library are in use.

- Bug #1633621: if curses.resizeterm() or curses.resize_term() is called,

update _curses.LINES, _curses.COLS, curses.LINES and curses.COLS.

- Fix an off-by-one bug in locale.strxfrm().

Library

-------

- Patch #1685563: remove (don't add) duplicate paths in distutils.MSVCCompiler.

- Bug #978833: Revert r50844, as it broke _socketobject.dup.

- Bug #1675967: re patterns pickled with Python 2.4 and earlier can

now be unpickled with Python 2.5.

- Bug #1684254: webbrowser now uses shlex to split any command lines

given to get(). It also detects when you use '&' as the last argument

and creates a BackgroundBrowser then.

- Patch #1681153: the wave module now closes a file object it opened if

initialization failed.

- Bug #767111: fix long-standing bug in urllib which caused an

AttributeError instead of an IOError when the server's response didn't

contain a valid HTTP status line.

- Bug #1629369: Correctly parse multiline comment in address field.

- Bug #1582282: Fix email.header.decode_header() to properly treat encoded

words with no delimiting whitespace as a single word.

- Patch #1449244: Support Unicode strings in

email.message.Message.{set_charset,get_content_charset}.

- Patch #1542681: add entries for "with", "as" and "CONTEXTMANAGERS" to

pydoc's help keywords.

- Patch #1192590: Fix pdb's "ignore" and "condition" commands so they trap

the IndexError caused by passing in an invalid breakpoint number.

- Bug #1531963: Make SocketServer.TCPServer's server_address always

be equal to calling getsockname() on the server's socket. Fixed by patch

#1545011.

- Bug #1651235: When a tuple was passed to a ctypes function call,

Python would crash instead of raising an error.

- Fix bug #1646630: ctypes.string_at(buf, 0) and ctypes.wstring_at(buf, 0)

returned string up to the first NUL character.

- Bug #1637850: make_table in difflib did not work with unicode

- Bugs #1676321: the empty() function in sched.py returned the wrong result

- unittest now verifies more of its assumptions. In particular, TestCase

and TestSuite subclasses (not instances) are no longer accepted in

TestSuite.addTest(). This should cause no incompatibility since it

never made sense with ordinary subclasses -- the failure just occurred

later, with a more cumbersome exception.

- Patch #685268: Consider a package's __path__ in imputil.

- Patch 1463026: Support default namespace in XMLGenerator.

- Patch 1571379: Make trace's --ignore-dir facility work in the face of

relative directory names.

- Bug #1600860: Search for shared python library in LIBDIR, not lib/python/config,

on "linux" and "gnu" systems.

- Bug #1124861: Automatically create pipes if GetStdHandle fails in

subprocess.

- Patch #783050: the pty.fork() function now closes the slave fd

correctly.

- Patch #1638243: the compiler package is now able to correctly compile

a with statement; previously, executing code containing a with statement

compiled by the compiler package crashed the interpreter.

- Bug #1643943: Fix %U handling for time.strptime.

- Bug #1598181: Avoid O(N**2) bottleneck in subprocess communicate().

- Patch #1627441: close sockets properly in urllib2.

- Bug #1610795: ctypes.util.find_library works now on BSD systems.

- Fix sort stability in heapq.nlargest() and nsmallest().

- Patch #1504073: Fix tarfile.open() for mode "r" with a fileobj argument.

- Patch #1262036: Prevent TarFiles from being added to themselves under

certain conditions.

- Patch #1230446: tarfile.py: fix ExFileObject so that read() and tell()

work correctly together with readline().

- Bug #737202: Make CGIHTTPServer work for scripts in subdirectories.

Fix by Titus Brown.

- Patch #827559: Make SimpleHTTPServer redirect when a directory URL

is missing the trailing slash, so that relative links work correctly.

Patch by Chris Gonnerman.

- Patch #1608267: fix a race condition in os.makedirs() is the directory

to be created is already there.

- Patch #1610437: fix a tarfile bug with long filename headers.

- Patch #1472877: Fix Tix subwidget name resolution.

- Patch #1594554: Always close a tkSimpleDialog on ok(), even

if an exception occurs.

- Patch #1538878: Don't make tkSimpleDialog dialogs transient if

the parent window is withdrawn.

- Patch #1360200: Use unmangled_version RPM spec field to deal with

file name mangling.

- Patch #1359217: Process 2xx response in an ftplib transfer

that precedes an 1xx response.

- Patch #1060577: Extract list of RPM files from spec file in

bdist_rpm

- Bug #1586613: fix zlib and bz2 codecs' incremental en/decoders.

- Patch #1583880: fix tarfile's problems with long names and posix/

GNU modes.

- Fix codecs.EncodedFile which did not use file_encoding in 2.5.0, and

fix all codecs file wrappers to work correctly with the "with"

statement (bug #1586513).

- ctypes callback functions only support 'fundamental' data types as

result type. Raise an error when something else is used. This is a

partial fix for Bug #1574584.

- Bug #813342: Start the IDLE subprocess with -Qnew if the parent

is started with that option.

- Bug #1446043: correctly raise a LookupError if an encoding name given

to encodings.search_function() contains a dot.

- Bug #1545341: The 'classifier' keyword argument to the Distutils setup()

function now accepts tuples as well as lists.

- Bug #1560617: in pyclbr, return full module name not only for classes,

but also for functions.

- Bug #1566602: correct failure of posixpath unittest when $HOME ends

with a slash.

- Bug #1565661: in webbrowser, split() the command for the default

GNOME browser in case it is a command with args.

- Bug #1569790: mailbox.py: Maildir.get_folder() and MH.get_folder()

weren't passing the message factory on to newly created Maildir/MH

objects.

- Bug #1575506: mailbox.py: Single-file mailboxes didn't re-lock

properly in their flush() method.

- Patch #1514543: mailbox.py: In the Maildir class, report errors if there's

a filename clash instead of possibly losing a message. (Patch by David

Watson.)

- Patch #1514544: mailbox.py: Try to ensure that messages/indexes have

been physically written to disk after calling .flush() or

.close(). (Patch by David Watson.)

- mailbox.py: Change MH.pack() to not lock individual message files; this

wasn't consistent with existing implementations of message packing, and

was buggy on some platforms.

- Bug #1633678: change old mailbox.UnixMailbox class to parse

'From' lines less strictly.

- Bug #1576241: fix functools.wraps() to work on built-in functions.

- Patch #1574068: fix urllib/urllib2 to not insert line breaks when

HTTP authentication data was very long.

- Patch #1617413: fix urllib's support for HTTP Basic authentication via HTTPS

(patch by Dug Song).

- Fix a bug in traceback.format_exception_only() that led to an error

being raised when print_exc() was called without an exception set.

In version 2.4, this printed "None", restored that behavior.

- Make webbrowser.BackgroundBrowser usable in Windows (it wasn't because

the close_fds arg to subprocess.Popen is not supported).

Tools/Demos

-----------

- Patch #1552024: add decorator support to unparse.py demo script.

- idle: Honor the "Cancel" action in the save dialog (Debian bug #299092).

Tests

-----

- Cause test.test_socket_ssl:test_basic to raise

test.test_support.ResourceDenied when an HTTPS connection times out.

- Remove passwd.adjunct.byname from list of maps

for test_nis.

Build

-----

- Bug #1655392: don't add -L/usr/lib/pythonX.Y/config to the LDFLAGS

returned by python-config if Python was built with --enable-shared

because that prevented the shared library from being used.

- Patch #1569798: fix a bug in distutils when building Python from a

directory within sys.exec_prefix.

- Bug #1675511: Use -Kpic instead of -xcode=pic32 on Solaris/x86.

- Disable _XOPEN_SOURCE on NetBSD 1.x.

- Bug #1578513: Cross compilation was broken by a change to configure.

Repair so that it's back to how it was in 2.4.3.

- Patch #1576954: Update VC6 build directory; remove redundant

files in VC7.

- Fix build failure on kfreebsd and on the hurd.

- Fix the build of the library reference in info format.

Windows

-------

- Conditionalize definition of _CRT_SECURE_NO_DEPRECATE

and _CRT_NONSTDC_NO_DEPRECATE.

Documentation

-------------

- Patch #1489771: the syntax rules in Python Reference Manual were

updated to reflect the current Python syntax.

- Patch #1686451: Fix return type for

PySequence_{Count,Index,Fast_GET_SIZE}.

What's New in Python 2.5 (final)

================================

*Release date: 19-SEP-2006*

No changes since release candidate 2.

What's New in Python 2.5 release candidate 2?

=============================================

*Release date: 12-SEP-2006*

Core and builtins

-----------------

- Make _PyGILState_NoteThreadState() static, it was not used anywhere

outside of pystate.c and should not be necessary.

- Bug #1551432: Exceptions do not define an explicit __unicode__ method. This

allows calling unicode() on exceptions classes directly to succeed.

- Bug #1542051: Exceptions now correctly call PyObject_GC_UnTrack.

Also make sure that every exception class has __module__ set to

'exceptions'.

- Bug #1550983: emit better error messages for erroneous relative

imports (if not in package and if beyond toplevel package).

- Overflow checking code in integer division ran afoul of new gcc

optimizations. Changed to be more standard-conforming.

- Patch #1541585: fix buffer overrun when performing repr() on

a unicode string in a build with wide unicode (UCS-4) support.

- Patch #1546288: fix seg fault in dict_equal due to ref counting bug.

- The return tuple from str.rpartition(sep) is (tail, sep, head) where

head is the original string if sep was not found.

- Bug #1520864: unpacking singleton tuples in list comprehensions and

generator expressions (x for x, in ... ) works again. Fixing this problem

required changing the .pyc magic number. This means that .pyc files

generated before 2.5c2 will be regenerated.

Library

-------

- Reverted patch #1504333 because it introduced an infinite loop.

- Patch #1553314: Fix the inspect.py slowdown that was hurting IPython & SAGE

by adding smarter caching in inspect.getmodule().

- Fix missing import of the types module in logging.config.

- Patch #1550886: Fix decimal module context management implementation

to match the localcontext() example from PEP 343.

- Bug #1541863: uuid.uuid1 failed to generate unique identifiers

on systems with low clock resolution.

- Bug #1543303, patch #1543897: remove NUL padding from tarfiles.

- Bug #1531862: Do not close standard file descriptors in subprocess.

Extension Modules

-----------------

- Bug #1599782: fix segfault on bsddb.db.DB().type().

- Fix bugs in ctypes:

- anonymous structure fields that have a bit-width specified did not work

- cast function did not accept c_char_p or c_wchar_p instances as first arg

- Bug #1551427: fix a wrong NULL pointer check in the win32 version

of os.urandom().

- Bug #1548092: fix curses.tparm seg fault on invalid input.

- Bug #1550714: fix SystemError from itertools.tee on negative value for n.

- Fixed a few bugs on cjkcodecs:

- gbk and gb18030 codec now handle U+30FB KATAKANA MIDDLE DOT correctly.

- iso2022_jp_2 codec now encodes into G0 for KS X 1001, GB2312

codepoints to conform the standard.

- iso2022_jp_3 and iso2022_jp_2004 codec can encode JIS X 0213:2

codepoints now.

Tests

-----

- Patch #1559413: Fix test_cmd_line if sys.executable contains a space.

- Fix bsddb test_basics.test06_Transactions to check the version

number properly.

Documentation

-------------

- Patch #1679379: add documentation for fnmatch.translate().

- Patch #1671450: add a section about subclassing builtin types to the

"extending and embedding" tutorial.

- Bug #1629125: fix wrong data type (int -> Py_ssize_t) in PyDict_Next

docs.

- Bug #1565919: document set types in the Language Reference.

- Bug #1546052: clarify that PyString_FromString(AndSize) copies the

string pointed to by its parameter.

- Bug #1566663: remove obsolete example from datetime docs.

- Bug #1541682: Fix example in the "Refcount details" API docs.

Additionally, remove a faulty example showing PySequence_SetItem applied

to a newly created list object and add notes that this isn't a good idea.

Tools

-----

- Bug #1546372: Fixed small bugglet in pybench that caused a missing

file not to get reported properly.

Build

-----

- Bug #1568842: Fix test for uintptr_t.

- Patch #1540470, for OpenBSD 4.0.

- Patch #1545507: Exclude ctypes package in Win64 MSI file.

- Fix OpenSSL debug build process.

C API

-----

- Bug #1542693: remove semi-colon at end of PyImport_ImportModuleEx macro

so it can be used as an expression.

What's New in Python 2.5 release candidate 1?

=============================================

*Release date: 17-AUG-2006*

Core and builtins

-----------------

- Fix infinite recursion when subclassing long and overriding __hash__.

- Fix concatenation (+=) of long strings.

- Unicode objects will no longer raise an exception when being

compared equal or unequal to a string and a UnicodeDecodeError

exception occurs, e.g. as result of a decoding failure.

Instead, the equal (==) and unequal (!=) comparison operators will

now issue a UnicodeWarning and interpret the two objects as

unequal. The UnicodeWarning can be filtered as desired using

the warning framework, e.g. silenced completely, turned into an

exception, logged, etc.

Note that compare operators other than equal and unequal will still

raise UnicodeDecodeError exceptions as they've always done.

- Fix segfault when doing string formatting on subclasses of long.

- Fix bug related to __len__ functions using values > 2**32 on 64-bit machines

with new-style classes.

- Fix bug related to __len__ functions returning negative values with

classic classes.

- Patch #1538606, Fix __index__() clipping. There were some problems

discovered with the API and how integers that didn't fit into Py_ssize_t

were handled. This patch attempts to provide enough alternatives

to effectively use __index__.

- Bug #1536021: __hash__ may now return long int; the final hash

value is obtained by invoking hash on the long int.

- Bug #1536786: buffer comparison could emit a RuntimeWarning.

- Bug #1535165: fixed a segfault in input() and raw_input() when

sys.stdin is closed.

- On Windows, the PyErr_Warn function is now exported from

the Python dll again.

- Bug #1191458: tracing over for loops now produces a line event

on each iteration. Fixing this problem required changing the .pyc

magic number. This means that .pyc files generated before 2.5c1

will be regenerated.

- Bug #1333982: string/number constants were inappropriately stored

in the byte code and co_consts even if they were not used, ie

immediately popped off the stack.

- Fixed a reference-counting problem in property().

Library

-------

- Fix a bug in the ``compiler`` package that caused invalid code to be

generated for generator expressions.

- The distutils version has been changed to 2.5.0. The change to

keep it programmatically in sync with the Python version running

the code (introduced in 2.5b3) has been reverted. It will continue

to be maintained manually as static string literal.

- If the Python part of a ctypes callback function returns None,

and this cannot be converted to the required C type, an exception is

printed with PyErr_WriteUnraisable. Before this change, the C

callback returned arbitrary values to the calling code.

- The __repr__ method of a NULL ctypes.py_object() no longer raises

an exception.

- uuid.UUID now has a bytes_le attribute. This returns the UUID in

little-endian byte order for Windows. In addition, uuid.py gained some

workarounds for clocks with low resolution, to stop the code yielding

duplicate UUIDs.

- Patch #1540892: site.py Quitter() class attempts to close sys.stdin

before raising SystemExit, allowing IDLE to honor quit() and exit().

- Bug #1224621: make tabnanny recognize IndentationErrors raised by tokenize.

- Patch #1536071: trace.py should now find the full module name of a

file correctly even on Windows.

- logging's atexit hook now runs even if the rest of the module has

already been cleaned up.

- Bug #1112549, fix DoS attack on cgi.FieldStorage.

- Bug #1531405, format_exception no longer raises an exception if

str(exception) raised an exception.

- Fix a bug in the ``compiler`` package that caused invalid code to be

generated for nested functions.

Extension Modules

-----------------

- Ignore data that arrives before the opening start tag in C etree.

- Patch #1511317: don't crash on invalid hostname (alias) info.

- Patch #1535500: fix segfault in BZ2File.writelines and make sure it

raises the correct exceptions.

- Patch # 1536908: enable building ctypes on OpenBSD/AMD64. The

'-no-stack-protector' compiler flag for OpenBSD has been removed.

- Patch #1532975 was applied, which fixes Bug #1533481: ctypes now

uses the _as_parameter_ attribute when objects are passed to foreign

function calls. The ctypes version number was changed to 1.0.1.

- Bug #1530559, struct.pack raises TypeError where it used to convert.

Passing float arguments to struct.pack when integers are expected

now triggers a DeprecationWarning.

Tests

-----

- test_socketserver should now work on cygwin and not fail sporadically

on other platforms.

- test_mailbox should now work on cygwin versions 2006-08-10 and later.

- Bug #1535182: really test the xreadlines() method of bz2 objects.

- test_threading now skips testing alternate thread stack sizes on

platforms that don't support changing thread stack size.

Documentation

-------------

- Patch #1534922: unittest docs were corrected and enhanced.

Build

-----

- Bug #1535502, build _hashlib on Windows, and use masm assembler

code in OpenSSL.

- Bug #1534738, win32 debug version of _msi should be _msi_d.pyd.

- Bug #1530448, ctypes build failure on Solaris 10 was fixed.

C API

-----

- New API for Unicode rich comparisons: PyUnicode_RichCompare()

- Bug #1069160. Internal correctness changes were made to

``PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc()``. A test case was added, and

the documentation was changed to state that the return value

is always 1 (normal) or 0 (if the specified thread wasn't found).

What's New in Python 2.5 beta 3?

================================

*Release date: 03-AUG-2006*

Core and builtins

-----------------

- _PyWeakref_GetWeakrefCount() now returns a Py_ssize_t; it previously

returned a long (see PEP 353).

- Bug #1515471: string.replace() accepts character buffers again.

- Add PyErr_WarnEx() so C code can pass the stacklevel to warnings.warn().

This provides the proper warning for struct.pack().

PyErr_Warn() is now deprecated in favor of PyErr_WarnEx().

- Patch #1531113: Fix augmented assignment with yield expressions.

Also fix a SystemError when trying to assign to yield expressions.

- Bug #1529871: The speed enhancement patch #921466 broke Python's compliance

with PEP 302. This was fixed by adding an ``imp.NullImporter`` type that is

used in ``sys.path_importer_cache`` to cache non-directory paths and avoid

excessive filesystem operations during imports.

- Bug #1521947: When checking for overflow, ``PyOS_strtol()`` used some

operations on signed longs that are formally undefined by C.

Unfortunately, at least one compiler now cares about that, so complicated

the code to make that compiler happy again.

- Bug #1524310: Properly report errors from FindNextFile in os.listdir.

- Patch #1232023: Stop including current directory in search

path on Windows.

- Fix some potential crashes found with failmalloc.

- Fix warnings reported by Klocwork's static analysis tool.

- Bug #1512814, Fix incorrect lineno's when code within a function

had more than 255 blank lines.

- Patch #1521179: Python now accepts the standard options ``--help`` and

``--version`` as well as ``/?`` on Windows.

- Bug #1520864: unpacking singleton tuples in a 'for' loop (for x, in) works

again. Fixing this problem required changing the .pyc magic number.

This means that .pyc files generated before 2.5b3 will be regenerated.

- Bug #1524317: Compiling Python ``--without-threads`` failed.

The Python core compiles again, and, in a build without threads, the

new ``sys._current_frames()`` returns a dictionary with one entry,

mapping the faux "thread id" 0 to the current frame.

- Bug #1525447: build on MacOS X on a case-sensitive filesystem.

Library

-------

- Correction of patch #1455898: In the mbcs decoder, set final=False

for stream decoder, but final=True for the decode function.

- os.urandom no longer masks unrelated exceptions like SystemExit or

KeyboardInterrupt.

- Bug #1525866: Don't copy directory stat times in

shutil.copytree on Windows

- Bug #1002398: The documentation for os.path.sameopenfile now correctly

refers to file descriptors, not file objects.

- The renaming of the xml package to xmlcore, and the import hackery done

to make it appear at both names, has been removed. Bug #1511497,

#1513611, and probably others.

- Bug #1441397: The compiler module now recognizes module and function

docstrings correctly as it did in Python 2.4.

- Bug #1529297: The rewrite of doctest for Python 2.4 unintentionally

lost that tests are sorted by name before being run. This rarely

matters for well-written tests, but can create baffling symptoms if

side effects from one test to the next affect outcomes. ``DocTestFinder``

has been changed to sort the list of tests it returns.

- The distutils version has been changed to 2.5.0, and is now kept

in sync with sys.version_info[:3].

- Bug #978833: Really close underlying socket in _socketobject.close.

- Bug #1459963: urllib and urllib2 now normalize HTTP header names with

title().

- Patch #1525766: In pkgutil.walk_packages, correctly pass the onerror callback

to recursive calls and call it with the failing package name.

- Bug #1525817: Don't truncate short lines in IDLE's tool tips.

- Patch #1515343: Fix printing of deprecated string exceptions with a

value in the traceback module.

- Resync optparse with Optik 1.5.3: minor tweaks for/to tests.

- Patch #1524429: Use repr() instead of backticks in Tkinter again.

- Bug #1520914: Change time.strftime() to accept a zero for any position in its

argument tuple. For arguments where zero is illegal, the value is forced to

the minimum value that is correct. This is to support an undocumented but

common way people used to fill in inconsequential information in the time

tuple pre-2.4.

- Patch #1220874: Update the binhex module for Mach-O.

- The email package has improved RFC 2231 support, specifically for

recognizing the difference between encoded (name*0*=<blah>) and non-encoded

(name*0=<blah>) parameter continuations. This may change the types of

values returned from email.message.Message.get_param() and friends.

Specifically in some cases where non-encoded continuations were used,

get_param() used to return a 3-tuple of (None, None, string) whereas now it

will just return the string (since non-encoded continuations don't have

charset and language parts).

Also, whereas % values were decoded in all parameter continuations, they are

now only decoded in encoded parameter parts.

- Bug #1517990: IDLE keybindings on MacOS X now work correctly

- Bug #1517996: IDLE now longer shows the default Tk menu when a

path browser, class browser or debugger is the frontmost window on MacOS X

- Patch #1520294: Support for getset and member descriptors in types.py,

inspect.py, and pydoc.py. Specifically, this allows for querying the type

of an object against these built-in types and more importantly, for getting

their docstrings printed in the interactive interpreter's help() function.

Extension Modules

-----------------

- Patch #1519025 and bug #926423: If a KeyboardInterrupt occurs during

a socket operation on a socket with a timeout, the exception will be

caught correctly. Previously, the exception was not caught.

- Patch #1529514: The _ctypes extension is now compiled on more

openbsd target platforms.

- The ``__reduce__()`` method of the new ``collections.defaultdict`` had

a memory leak, affecting pickles and deep copies.

- Bug #1471938: Fix curses module build problem on Solaris 8; patch by

Paul Eggert.

- Patch #1448199: Release interpreter lock in _winreg.ConnectRegistry.

- Patch #1521817: Index range checking on ctypes arrays containing

exactly one element enabled again. This allows iterating over these

arrays, without the need to check the array size before.

- Bug #1521375: When the code in ctypes.util.find_library was

run with root privileges, it could overwrite or delete

/dev/null in certain cases; this is now fixed.

- Bug #1467450: On Mac OS X 10.3, RTLD_GLOBAL is now used as the

default mode for loading shared libraries in ctypes.

- Because of a misspelled preprocessor symbol, ctypes was always

compiled without thread support; this is now fixed.

- pybsddb Bug #1527939: bsddb module DBEnv dbremove and dbrename

methods now allow their database parameter to be None as the

sleepycat API allows.

- Bug #1526460: Fix socketmodule compile on NetBSD as it has a different

bluetooth API compared with Linux and FreeBSD.

Tests

-----

- Bug #1501330: Change test_ossaudiodev to be much more tolerant in terms of

how long the test file should take to play. Now accepts taking 2.93 secs

(exact time) +/- 10% instead of the hard-coded 3.1 sec.

- Patch #1529686: The standard tests ``test_defaultdict``, ``test_iterlen``,

``test_uuid`` and ``test_email_codecs`` didn't actually run any tests when

run via ``regrtest.py``. Now they do.

Build

-----

- Bug #1439538: Drop usage of test -e in configure as it is not portable.