+++++++++++

Python News

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

What's New in Python 2.6.4 final?

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

*Release date: 25-Oct-2009*

Core and Builtins

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

Library

-------

What's New in Python 2.6.4rc2?

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

*Release date: 18-Oct-2009*

Core and Builtins

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

Library

-------

- Issue #7115: Fixed the extension module builds that is failing when using

paths in the extension name instead of dotted names.

- Issue #7120: logging: Removed import of multiprocessing which is causing

crash in GAE.

- Issue #7149: fix exception in urllib when detecting proxy settings on OSX.

What's New in Python 2.6.4rc1?

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

*Release date: 07-Oct-2009*

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #7019: Raise ValueError when unmarshalling bad long data, instead

of producing internally inconsistent Python longs.

Library

-------

- Issue #7068: Fixed the partial renaming that occured in r72594.

- Issue #7064: Fixed the incompatibility with Setuptools in distutils

when running the build_ext command.

- Issue #7052: Removed nonexisting NullHandler from logging.__all__.

- Issue #7039: Fixed distutils.tests.test_sysconfig when running on

installation with no build.

Tests

-----

- Issue #7042: Fix test_signal (test_itimer_virtual) failure on OS X 10.6.

What's New in Python 2.6.3

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

*Release date: 02-Oct-2009*

What's New in Python 2.6.3rc1

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

*Release date: 29-Sep-2009*

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #5329: Fix os.popen* regression from 2.5 with commands as a

sequence running through the shell. Patch by Jean-Paul Calderone

and Jani Hakala.

- Issue #6990: Fix threading.local subclasses leaving old state around

after a reference cycle GC which could be recycled by new locals.

- Issue #6922: Fix an infinite loop when trying to decode an invalid

UTF-32 stream with a non-raising error handler like "replace" or "ignore".

- Issue #1590864: Fix potential deadlock when mixing threads and fork().

- Issue #6844: Do not emit DeprecationWarnings when accessing a "message"

attribute on exceptions that was set explicitly.

- Issue #6846: Fix bug where bytearray.pop() returns negative integers.

- Issue #6707: dir() on an uninitialized module caused a crash.

- Issue #6540: Fixed crash for bytearray.translate() with invalid parameters.

- Issue #6573: set.union() stopped processing inputs if an instance of self

occurred in the argument chain.

- Issue #6070: On posix platforms import no longer copies the execute bit

from the .py file to the .pyc file if it is set.

- Issue #4547: When debugging a very large function, it was not always

possible to update the lineno attribute of the current frame.

- Issue #4618: When unicode arguments are passed to print(), the default

separator and end should be unicode also.

- Issue #6119: Fixed a incorrect Py3k warning about order comparisons of

builtin functions and methods.

- Issue #5330: C functions called with keyword arguments were not reported by

the various profiling modules (profile, cProfile). Patch by Hagen Fürstenau.

- Issue #6089: str.format can raise SystemError with certain invalid

field specifiers.

- Issue #5994: the marshal module now has docstrings.

- Issue #5981: Fix two minor inf/nan issues in float.fromhex: (1) inf

and nan strings with trailing whitespace were incorrectly rejected

and (2) the interpretation of fromhex('-nan') didn't match that of

float('-nan').

- Issue #5890: in subclasses of 'property' the __doc__ attribute was

shadowed by classtype's, even if it was None. property now

inserts the __doc__ into the subclass instance __dict__.

- Issue #5724: (See also issue #4575.) Fix Py_IS_INFINITY macro to

work correctly on x87 FPUs: it now forces its argument to double

before testing for infinity.

- Issue #4971: Fix titlecase for characters that are their own

titlecase, but not their own uppercase.

- Issue #5829: complex('1e-500') no longer raises an exception

- Issue #5787: object.__getattribute__(some_type, "__bases__") segfaulted on

some builtin types.

- Issue #5283: Setting __class__ in __del__ caused a segfault.

- Issue #5759: float() didn't call __float__ on str subclasses.

- Issue #5108: Handle %s like %S and %R in PyUnicode_FromFormatV(): Call

PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8() once, remember the result and output it in a second

step. This avoids problems with counting UTF-8 bytes that ignores the effect

of using the replace error handler in PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8().

Library

-------

- Issue #6894: Fixed the issue urllib2 doesn't respect "no_proxy" environment

- Issue #6790: Make it possible again to pass an `array.array` to

`httplib.HTTPConnection.send`. Patch by Kirk McDonald.

- Issue #6236, #6348: Fix various failures in the `io` module under AIX

and other platforms, when using a non-gcc compiler. Patch by egreen.

- Issue #6851: Fix urllib.urlopen crash on secondairy threads on OSX 10.6

- Issue #6947: Fix distutils test on windows. Patch by Hirokazu Yamamoto.

- Issue #4606: Passing 'None' if ctypes argtype is set to POINTER(...)

does now always result in NULL.

- Issue #5042: ctypes Structure sub-subclass does now initialize

correctly with base class positional arguments.

- Issue #6938: Fix a TypeError in string formatting of a multiprocessing

debug message.

- Issue #6635: Fix profiler printing usage message.

- Issue #6795: int(Decimal('nan')) now raises ValueError instead of

returning NaN or raising InvalidContext. Also, fix infinite recursion

in long(Decimal('nan')).

- Issue #6850: Fix bug in Decimal._parse_format_specifier for formats

with no type specifier.

- Issue #4937: plat-mac/bundlebuilder revers to non-existing version.plist

- Issue #6838: Use a list to accumulate the value instead of

repeatedly concatenating strings in httplib's

HTTPResponse._read_chunked providing a significant speed increase

when downloading large files servend with a Transfer-Encoding of 'chunked'.

- Issue #6794: Fix Decimal.compare_total and Decimal.compare_total_mag: NaN

payloads are now ordered by integer value rather than lexicographically.

- Issue #6117: Fix O(n**2) performance degradation when outputting lots of

small data on a buffered socket.socket.makefile() object.

- Issue #6637: defaultdict.copy() did not work when the default factory

was left unspecified. Also, the eval/repr round-trip would fail when

the default_factory was None.

- Issue #1424152: Fix for httplib, urllib2 to support SSL while working through

proxy. Original patch by Christopher Li, changes made by Senthil Kumaran.

- Issues #5155, 5313, 5331: multiprocessing.Process._bootstrap was

unconditionally calling "os.close(sys.stdin.fileno())" resulting in file

descriptor errors

- Issue #6415: Fixed warnings.warn sagfault on bad formatted string.

- Issue #6344: Fixed a crash of mmap.read() when passed a negative argument.

- Issue #5230: pydoc would report no documentation found if a module generated

a 'not found' import error when loaded; it now reports the import errors.

Thanks to Lucas Prado Melo for initial fix and collaboration on the tests.

- Issue #6274: Fixed possible file descriptors leak in subprocess.py

- Issue #6271: mmap tried to close invalid file handle (-1) when annonymous.

(On Unix)

- Issue #6258: Support AMD64 in bdist_msi.

- Issue #5262: Fixed bug in next rollover time computation in

TimedRotatingFileHandler.

- Issue #6121: pydoc now ignores leading and trailing spaces in the

argument to the 'help' function.

- Issue #6050: Don't fail extracting a directory from a zipfile if

the directory already exists.

- collections.namedtuple() was not working with the following field

names: cls, self, tuple, itemgetter, and property.

- Issue #1309352: fcntl now converts its third arguments to a C `long` rather

than an int, which makes some operations possible under 64-bit Linux (e.g.

DN_MULTISHOT with F_NOTIFY).

- Issue #1983: Fix functions taking or returning a process identifier to use

the dedicated C type ``pid_t`` instead of a C ``int``. Some platforms have

a process identifier type wider than the standard C integer type.

- Issue #4066: smtplib.SMTP_SSL._get_socket now correctly returns the socket.

Patch by Farhan Ahmad, test by Marcin Bachry.

- Issue #1655: Make imaplib IPv6-capable. Patch by Derek Morr.

- Issue #1664: Make nntplib IPv6-capable. Patch by Derek Morr.

- Issue #5971: StreamHandler.handleError now swallows IOErrors which occur when

trying to print a traceback.

- Issue 5955: aifc's close method did not close the file it wrapped,

now it does. This also means getfp method now returns the real fp.

- Issue #4875: On win32, ctypes.util.find_library does no longer

return directories.

- Issue #5692: In :class:`zipfile.Zipfile`, fix wrong path calculation when

extracting a file to the root directory.

- Issue #2245: aifc now skips chunk types it doesn't recognize, per spec.

- Issue #4305: ctypes should now build again on mipsel-linux-gnu

- Issue #5853: calling a function of the mimetypes module from several threads

at once could hit the recursion limit if the mimetypes database hadn't been

initialized before.

- Issue #5041: ctypes does now allow pickling wide character.

- Issue #5768: Fixed bug in Unicode output logic and test case for same.

- Issue #1161031: fix readwrite select flag handling: POLLPRI now

results in a handle_expt_event call, not handle_read_event, and POLLERR

and POLLNVAL now call handle_close, not handle_expt_event. Also,

dispatcher now has an 'ignore_log_types' attribute for suppressing

log messages, which is set to 'warning' by default.

- Issue #5828 (Invalid behavior of unicode.lower): Fixed bogus logic in

makeunicodedata.py and regenerated the Unicode database (This fixes

u'\u1d79'.lower() == '\x00').

- Issue #1202: zipfile module would cause a DeprecationWarning when storing

files with a CRC32 > 2**31-1.

- Issue #6163: Fixed HP-UX runtime library dir options in

distutils.unixcompiler. Initial patch by Sridhar Ratnakumar and

Michael Haubenwallner.

- Issue #4660: If a multiprocessing.JoinableQueue.put() was preempted, it was

possible to get a spurious 'task_done() called too many times' error.

- Issue #6595: The Decimal constructor now allows arbitrary Unicode

decimal digits in input, as recommended by the standard. Previously

it was restricted to accepting [0-9].

- Issue #6553: Fixed a crash in cPickle.load(), when given a file-like object

containing incomplete data.

- Issue #2622: Fixed an ImportError when importing email.messsage from a

standalone application built with py2exe or py2app.

- Issue #6455: Fixed test_build_ext under win32.

- Issue #6403: Fixed package path usage in build_ext.

- Issue #6287: Added the license field in Distutils documentation.

- Issue #6263: Fixed syntax error in distutils.cygwincompiler.

- Issue #5201: distutils.sysconfig.parse_makefile() now understands `$$`

in Makefiles. This prevents compile errors when using syntax like:

`LDFLAGS='-rpath=\$$LIB:/some/other/path'`. Patch by Floris Bruynooghe.

- Issue #6062: In distutils, fixed the package option of build_ext. Feedback

and tests on pywin32 by Tim Golden.

- Issue #1309567: Fix linecache behavior of stripping subdirectories when

looking for files given by a relative filename.

- Issue #6046: Fixed the library extension when distutils build_ext is used

inplace. Initial patch by Roumen Petrov.

- Issue #6022: a test file was created in the current working directory by

test_get_outputs in Distutils.

- Issue #5977: distutils build_ext.get_outputs was not taking into account the

inplace option. Initial patch by kxroberto.

- Issue #5984: distutils.command.build_ext.check_extensions_list checks were

broken for old-style extensions.

- Issue #5854: Updated __all__ to include some missing names and remove some

names which should not be exported.

- Issue #5810: Fixed Distutils test_build_scripts so it uses

sysconfig.get_config_vars.

- Issue #6865: Fix reference counting issue in the initialization of the pwd

module.

Extension Modules

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

- Issue #6944: Fix a SystemError when socket.getnameinfo() was called

with something other than a tuple as first argument.

- Issue #6848: Fix curses module build failure on OS X 10.6.

- Fix expat to not segfault with specially crafted input.

- Issue #4873: Fix resource leaks in error cases of pwd and grp.

Build

-----

- Issue #6980: Fix ctypes build failure on armel-linux-gnueabi with

-mfloat-abi=softfp.

- Issue #6802: Fix build issues on MacOSX 10.6

- Issue 5390: Add uninstall icon independent of whether file

extensions are installed.

- Issue #6094: Build correctly with Subversion 1.7.

- Issue #5726: Make Modules/ld_so_aix return the actual exit code of the

linker, rather than always exit successfully. Patch by Floris Bruynooghe.

- Issue 5809: Specifying both --enable-framework and --enable-shared is

an error. Configure now explicity tells you about this.

Documentation

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

- Issue #6556: Fixed the Distutils configuration files location explanation

for Windows.

- Issue #6801 : symmetric_difference_update also accepts |.

Thanks to Carl Chenet.

Tests

-----

- Issue #5837: Certain sequences of calls to set() and unset() for

support.EnvironmentVarGuard objects restored the environment variables

incorrectly on __exit__.

What's New in Python 2.6.2

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

*Release date: 14-Apr-2009*

What's New in Python 2.6.2 rc 1

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

*Release date: 06-Apr-2009*

Core and Builtins

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

- xrange() is now registered as a Sequence.

- Fix a problem in PyErr_NormalizeException that leads to "undetected errors"

when hitting the recursion limit under certain circumstances.

- Issue #1665206: Remove the last eager import in _warnings.c and make it lazy.

- Issue #4034: Fix weird attribute error messages of the traceback object. (As

a result traceback.__members__ no longer exists.)

- Issue #5247: Improve error message when unknown format codes are

used when using str.format() with str, unicode, long, int, and

float arguments.

- Running Python with the -3 option now also warns about classic division

for ints and longs.

- Issue #5013: Fixed a bug in FileHandler which occurred when the delay

parameter was set.

- Issue 1242657: the __len__() and __length_hint__() calls in several tools

were suppressing all exceptions. These include list(), filter(), map(),

zip(), and bytearray().

- Issue #4935: The overflow checking code in the expandtabs() method common

to str, bytes and bytearray could be optimized away by the compiler, letting

the interpreter segfault instead of raising an error.

- Issue #4915: Port sysmodule to Windows CE.

- Issue #1180193: When importing a module from a .pyc (or .pyo) file with

an existing .py counterpart, override the co_filename attributes of all

code objects if the original filename is obsolete (which can happen if the

file has been renamed, moved, or if it is accessed through different paths).

Patch by Ziga Seilnacht and Jean-Paul Calderone.

- Issue #4075: Use OutputDebugStringW in Py_FatalError.

- Issue #4797: IOError.filename was not set when _fileio.FileIO failed to open

file with `str' filename on Windows.

- Issue #3680: Reference cycles created through a dict, set or deque iterator

did not get collected.

- Issue #4701: PyObject_Hash now implicitly calls PyType_Ready on types

where the tp_hash and tp_dict slots are both NULL.

- Issue #4764: With io.open, IOError.filename is set when trying to open a

directory on POSIX systems.

- Issue #4764: IOError.filename is set when trying to open a directory on POSIX

systems.

- Issue #4759: None is now allowed as the first argument of

bytearray.translate(). It was always allowed for bytes.translate().

- Issue #4759: fix a segfault for bytearray.translate(x, None).

- Added test case to ensure attempts to read from a file opened for writing

fail.

- Issue #4597: Fixed several opcodes that weren't always propagating

exceptions.

- Issue #2467: gc.DEBUG_STATS reported invalid elapsed times. Also, always

print elapsed times, not only when some objects are uncollectable /

unreachable. Original patch by Neil Schemenauer.

- Issue #4589: Fixed exception handling when the __exit__ function of a

context manager returns a value that cannot be converted to a bool.

- Issue #4233: Changed semantic of ``_fileio.FileIO``'s ``close()``

method on file objects with closefd=False. The file descriptor is still

kept open but the file object behaves like a closed file. The ``FileIO``

object also got a new readonly attribute ``closefd``.

- Issue #3689: The list reversed iterator now supports __length_hint__

instead of __len__. Behavior now matches other reversed iterators.

- Issue #4509: Various issues surrounding resize of bytearray objects to

which there are buffer exports.

- Issue #3845: In PyRun_SimpleFileExFlags avoid invalid memory access with

short file names.

- Issue #5705: os.setuid() would not accept values > 2**31-1 but pwd.getpwnam()

returned them on 64bit platforms.

Library

-------

- Issue #5741: don't disallow "%%" (which is an escape for "%") when setting

a value in SafeConfigParser.

- Issue #5731: Distutils bdist_wininst no longer worked on non-Windows

platforms. Initial patch by Paul Moore.

- Issue #1491431: Fixed distutils.filelist.glob_to_re for edge cases.

Initial fix by Wayne Davison.

- Issue 5471: Fix os.path.expanduser() for $HOME set to '/'.

- Issue 1726172: fix IndexError in the case of and empty response in ftplib.

- In Pdb, prevent the reassignment of __builtin__._ by sys.displayhook on

printing out values.

- Issue #4572: added SEEK_* symbolic constants to io module.

- Issue #1665206 (partially): Move imports in cgitb to the top of the module

instead of performing them in functions. Helps prevent import deadlocking in

threads.

- Issue #5647: MutableSet.__iand__() no longer mutates self during iteration.

- Actually make the SimpleXMLRPCServer CGI handler work.

- Issue 2625: added missing iteritems() call to the for loop in

mailbox.MH.get_message().

- Issue #5647: MutableSet.__iand__() no longer mutates self during iteration.

- Issue #5619: Multiprocessing children disobey the debug flag and causes

popups on windows buildbots. Patch applied to work around this issue.

- Issue #5632: Thread.ident was None for the main thread and threads not

created with the threading module.

- Issue #5400: Added patch for multiprocessing on netbsd compilation/support

- Fix and properly document the multiprocessing module's logging

support, expose the internal levels and provide proper usage

examples.

- Issue #5387: Fixed mmap.move crash by integer overflow.

- Issue #5261: Patch multiprocessing's semaphore.c to support context

manager use: "with multiprocessing.Lock()" works now.

- Issue #5177: Multiprocessing's SocketListener class now uses

socket.SO_REUSEADDR on all connections so that the user no longer needs

to wait 120 seconds for the socket to expire.

- Adjusted _tkinter to compile without warnings when WITH_THREAD is not

defined (part of issue #5035).

- Issue #5561: Removed the sys.version_info shortcuts from platform's

python_version() and python_version_tuple() since they produced different

output compared to previous Python versions.

- Issue #5068: Fixed the tarfile._BZ2Proxy.read() method that would loop

forever on incomplete input. That caused tarfile.open() to hang when used

with mode 'r' or 'r:bz2' and a fileobj argument that contained no data or

partial bzip2 compressed data.

- Issue #5536: urllib.urlretrieve makes sure to close the file it's writing to

even if an exception occurs.

- Fix Decimal.__format__ bug that swapped the meanings of the '<' and

'>' alignment characters.

- Issue #1222: locale.format() bug when the thousands separator is a space

character.

- Issue #4792: Prevent a segfault in _tkinter by using the

guaranteed to be safe interp argument given to the PythonCmd in place of

the Tcl interpreter taken from a PythonCmd_ClientData.

- Issue #5193: Guarantee that Tkinter.Text.search returns a string.

- Issue #5385: Fixed mmap crash after resize failure on windows.

- Issue #5179: Fixed subprocess handle leak on failure on windows.

- Issue #4308: httplib.IncompleteRead's repr doesn't include all of the data

all ready received.

- Issue #5401: Fixed a performance problem in mimetypes when ``from mimetypes

import guess_extension`` was used.

- Issue #1733986: Fixed mmap crash in accessing elements of second map object

with same tagname but larger size than first map. (Windows)

- Issue #5386: mmap.write_byte didn't check map size, so it could cause buffer

overrun.

- Issue #5292: Fixed mmap crash on its boundary access m[len(m)].

- Issue #5282: Fixed mmap resize on 32bit windows and unix. When offset > 0,

The file was resized to wrong size.

- Issue #5287: Add exception handling around findCaller() call in logging to

help out IronPython.

- Issue #4524: distutils build_script command failed with --with-suffix=3.

Initial patch by Amaury Forgeot d'Arc.

- Issue #4998: The memory saving effect of __slots__ had been lost on Fractions

which inherited from numbers.py which did not have __slots__ defined. The

numbers hierarchy now has its own __slots__ declarations.

- Issue #5203: Fixed ctypes segfaults when passing a unicode string to a

function without argtypes (only occurs if HAVE_USABLE_WCHAR_T is false).

- Issue #3321: _multiprocessing.Connection() doesn't check handle; added checks

for *nix machines for negative handles and large int handles. Without this

check it is possible to segfault the interpreter.

- Issue #4449: AssertionError in mp_benchmarks.py, caused by an underlying

issue in sharedctypes.py.

- Issue #3386: distutils.sysconfig.get_python_lib prefix argument was ignored

under NT and OS2. Patch by Philip Jenvey.

- Issue #4890: Handle empty text search pattern in Tkinter.Text.search.

- Issue #5170: Fixed Unicode output bug in logging and added test case.

This is a regression which did not occur in 2.5.

- Partial fix to issue #1731706: memory leak in Tkapp_Call when calling

from a thread different than the one that created the Tcl interpreter.

Patch by Robert Hancock.

- Issue #5132: Fixed trouble building extensions under Solaris with

--enabled-shared activated. Initial patch by Dave Peterson.

- Issue #1581476: Always use the Tcl global namespace when calling into Tcl.

- Issue #2047: shutil.move() could believe that its destination path was

inside its source path if it began with the same letters (e.g. "src" vs.

"src.new").

- Issue 4920: Fixed .next() vs .__next__() issues in the ABCs for

Iterator and MutableSet.

- Issue 5021: doctest.testfile() did not create __name__ and

collections.namedtuple() relied on __name__ being defined.

- Issue #3881: Help Tcl to load even when started through the

unreadable local symlink to "Program Files" on Vista.

- Issue #4710: Extract directories properly in the zipfile module;

allow adding directories to a zipfile.

- Issue #5008: When a file is opened in append mode with the new IO library,

do an explicit seek to the end of file (so that e.g. tell() returns the

file size rather than 0). This is consistent with the behaviour of the

traditional 2.x file object.

- Issue #3997: zipfiles generated with more than 65536 files could not be

opened with other applications.

- Issue 4816: itertools.combinations() and itertools.product were raising

a ValueError for values of *r* larger than the input iterable. They now

correctly return an empty iterator.

- Fractions.from_float() no longer loses precision for integers too big to

cast as floats.

- Issue 4790: The nsmallest() and nlargest() functions in the heapq module

did unnecessary work in the common case where no key function was specified.

- Issue #3767: Convert Tk object to string in tkColorChooser.

- Issue #3248: Allow placing ScrolledText in a PanedWindow.

- Issue #3954: Fix a potential SystemError in _hotshot.logreader error

handling.

- Issue #4574: fix a crash in io.IncrementalNewlineDecoder when a carriage

return encodes to more than one byte in the source encoding (e.g. UTF-16)

and gets split on a chunk boundary.

- Issue #4223: inspect.getsource() will now correctly display source code

for packages loaded via zipimport (or any other conformant PEP 302

loader). Original patch by Alexander Belopolsky.

- Issue #4201: pdb can now access and display source code loaded via

zipimport (or any other conformant PEP 302 loader). Original patch by

Alexander Belopolsky.

- Issue #4197: doctests in modules loaded via zipimport (or any other PEP

302 conformant loader) will now work correctly in most cases (they

are still subject to the constraints that exist for all code running

from inside a module loaded via a PEP 302 loader and attempting to

perform IO operations based on __file__). Original patch by

Alexander Belopolsky.

- Issues #4082 and #4512: Add runpy support to zipimport in a manner that

allows backporting to maintenance branches. Original patch by

Alexander Belopolsky.

- Issue #4616: TarFile.utime(): Restore directory times on Windows.

- Issue #4483: _dbm module now builds on systems with gdbm & gdbm_compat

libs.

- FileIO's mode attribute now always includes ``"b"``.

- Issue #4861: ctypes.util.find_library(): Robustify. Fix library detection on

biarch systems. Try to rely on ldconfig only, without using objdump and gcc.

- Issue #2703: SimpleXMLRPCDispatcher.__init__: Provide default values for

new arguments introduced in 2.5.

- Issue #1885: distutils. When running sdist with --formats=tar,gztar

the tar file was overriden by the gztar one.

- Registered Decimal as a numbers.Number so that isinstance(d, Number) works.

- Issue #1672332: fix unpickling of subnormal floats, which was

producing a ValueError on some platforms.

- Restore Python 2.3 compatibility for decimal.py.

- Issue #1702551: distutils sdist was not excluding VCS directories under

Windows. Inital solution by Guy Dalberto.

- Issue #4812: add missing underscore prefix to some internal-use-only

constants in the decimal module. (Dec_0 becomes _Dec_0, etc.)

- Issue #4795: inspect.isgeneratorfunction() returns False instead of None when

the function is not a generator.

- Issue #4702: Throwing a DistutilsPlatformError instead of IOError in case

no MSVC compiler is found under Windows. Original patch by Philip Jenvey.

- Issue #4739: Add pydoc help topics for symbols, so that e.g. help('@')

works as expected in the interactive environment.

- Issue #4756: zipfile.is_zipfile() now supports file-like objects. Patch by

Gabriel Genellina.

- Issue #4646: distutils was choking on empty options arg in the setup

function. Original patch by Thomas Heller.

- Issue #4400: .pypirc default generated file was broken in distutils.

- Issue #4736: io.BufferedRWPair's closed property now functions properly.

- Issue #3954: Fix a potential SystemError in _hotshot.logreader error

handling.

- Issue #4163: Use unicode-friendly word splitting in the textwrap functions

when given an unicode string.

- Issue #4616: TarFile.utime(): Restore directory times on Windows.

- Issue #4084: Fix max, min, max_mag and min_mag Decimal methods to

give correct results in the case where one argument is a quiet NaN

and the other is a finite number that requires rounding.

- Issue #1030250: Distutils created directories even when run with the

--dry-run option.

- Issue #4483: _dbm module now builds on systems with gdbm & gdbm_compat

libs.

- Issue #4529: fix the parser module's validation of try-except-finally

statements.

- Issue #4458: getopt.gnu_getopt() now recognizes a single "-" as an argument,

not a malformed option.

- Added the subprocess.check_output() convenience function to get output

from a subprocess on success or raise an exception on error.

- Issue #1055234: cgi.parse_header(): Fixed parsing of header parameters to

support unusual filenames (such as those containing semi-colons) in

Content-Disposition headers.

- Issue #4730: Fixed the cPickle module to handle correctly astral characters

when protocol 0 is used.

- Issue #16278952: plat-mac/videoreader.py now correctly imports MediaDescr

- Issue #1737832 : plat-mac/EasyDialog.py no longer uses the broken aepack

module.

- Issue #1149804: macostools.mkdirs now even works when another process

creates one of the needed subdirectories.

Tools/Demos

-----------

- Issue #4677: add two list comprehension tests to pybench.

Extension Modules

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

- Issue #4301: Patch the logging module to add processName support, remove

_check_logger_class from multiprocessing.

- Issue #1040026: Fix os.times result on systems where HZ is incorrect.

- Issue #4397: Fix occasional test_socket failure on OS X.

- Issue #4279: Fix build of parsermodule under Cygwin.

- Issue #4051: Prevent conflict of UNICODE macros in cPickle.

- Issue #4228: Pack negative values the same way as 2.4 in struct's L format.

- Issue #1040026: Fix os.times result on systems where HZ is incorrect.

- Issues #3167, #3682: Fix test_math failures for log, log10 on Solaris,

OpenBSD.

Build

-----

- Link the shared python library with $(MODLIBS).

- Issue #5134: Silence compiler warnings when compiling sqlite with VC++.

- Issue #4494: Fix build with Py_NO_ENABLE_SHARED on Windows.

- Issue #4895: Use _strdup on Windows CE.

- Issue #4472: "configure --enable-shared" now works on OSX

- Issues #4728 and #4060: WORDS_BIGEDIAN is now correct in Universal builds.

C-API

-----

- Issue #4720: The format for PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords can begin with '|'.

- Issue #3632: from the gdb debugger, the 'pyo' macro can now be called when

the GIL is released, or owned by another thread.

Tests

-----

- Issue #5635: Fix running test_sys with tracing enabled.

- regrtest no longer treats ImportError as equivalent to SkipTest. Imports

that should cause a test to be skipped are now done using import_module

from test support, which does the conversion.

- Issue #5083: New 'gui' resource for regrtest.

What's New in Python 2.6.1

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

*Release date: 04-Dec-2008*

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #3996: On Windows, the PyOS_CheckStack function would cause the

interpreter to abort ("Fatal Python error: Could not reset the stack!")

instead of throwing a MemoryError.

- Issue #4367: Python would segfault during compiling when the unicodedata

module couldn't be imported and \N escapes were present.

- Issue #4348: Some bytearray methods returned that didn't cause any change to

the bytearray, returned the same bytearray instead of a copy.

- Issue #4317: Fixed a crash in the imageop.rgb2rgb8() function.

- Issue #4230: If ``__getattr__`` is a descriptor, it now functions correctly.

- Issue #4048: The parser module now correctly validates relative imports.

- Issue #4225: ``from __future__ import unicode_literals`` didn't work in an

exec statement.

- Issue #4176: Fixed a crash when pickling an object which ``__reduce__``

method does not return iterators for the 4th and 5th items.

- Issue #4209: Enabling unicode_literals and the print_function in the same

__future__ import didn't work.

- On windows, os.chdir given unicode was not working if GetCurrentDirectoryW

returned a path longer than MAX_PATH. (But It's doubtful this code path is

really executed because I cannot move to such directory on win2k)

- Issue #4069: When set.remove(element) is used with a set element, the element

is temporarily replaced with an equivalent frozenset. But the eventual

KeyError would always report the empty frozenset([]) as the missing key. Now

it correctly refers to the initial element.

- Fixed C99 style comments in several files. Python is now C89 compatible

again.

Library

-------

- Issue #3741: DISTUTILS_USE_SDK set causes msvc9compiler.py to raise an

exception.

- Issue #4363: The uuid.uuid1() and uuid.uuid4() functions now work even if

the ctypes module is not present.

- Issue #4116: Resolve member name conflict in ScrolledCanvas.__init__.

- Issue #3774: Fixed an error when create a Tkinter menu item without command

and then remove it.

- Fixed a modulefinder crash on certain relative imports.

- Issue #4150: Pdb's "up" command now works for generator frames in post-mortem

debugging.

- Issue #4092: Return ArgInfo as promised in the documentation from

inspect.getargvalues.

- Issue #3935: Properly support list subclasses in bisect's C implementation.

- Issue #4014: Don't claim that Python has an Alpha release status, in addition

to claiming it is Mature.

Build

-----

- Issue #4389: Add icon to the uninstall entry in "add-and-remove-programs".

- Issue #4289: Remove Cancel button from AdvancedDlg.

- Issue #1656675: Register a drop handler for .py* files on Windows.

- Issue #4120: Exclude manifest from extension modules in VS2008.

- Issue #4091: Install pythonxy.dll in system32 again.

- Issue #4018: Disable "for me" installations on Vista.

- Issue #3758: Add ``patchcheck`` build target to .PHONY.

- Issue #4204: Fixed module build errors on FreeBSD 4.

C-API

-----

- Issue #4122: On Windows, fix a compilation error when using the

Py_UNICODE_ISSPACE macro in an extension module.

Extension Modules

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

- Issue #4365: Add crtassem.h constants to the msvcrt module.

- Issue #4396: The parser module now correctly validates the with statement.

What's New in Python 2.6 final

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

*Release date: 01-Oct-2008*

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #3967: Fixed a crash in the count() and find() methods of string-like

objects, when the "start" parameter is a huge value.

- Issue #3965: Fixed a crash on Windows when open() is given an invalid

filename or mode, and the filename is a unicode string.

- Bug #3951: Py_USING_MEMORY_DEBUGGER should not be enabled by default.

Library

-------

- Issue #3965: Allow repeated calls to turtle.Screen, by making it a

true singleton object.

- Issue #3895: It was possible to crash the interpreter when an external timer

was used with cProfile that returned an object that could not be converted

into a float.

- Issue #3950: Made turtle respect scale factors.

- Issue #3547: Fixed ctypes structures bitfields of varying integer

sizes.

- Issue #3879: A regression in urllib.getproxies_enviroment was fixed.

- Issue #3863: Disabled a unit test of fork being called from a thread

when running on platforms known to exhibit OS bugs when attempting that.

Build

-----

- Bug #3989: Package the 2to3 script (as 2to3.py) in the Windows

installer.

- Bug #3887: Package x64 version of CRT for AMD64 Windows binaries.