+++++++++++

Python News

+++++++++++

What's New in Python 2.6.8?

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

*Release date: 2012-04-10*

No changes since 2.6.8rc2.

What's New in Python 2.6.8 rc 2?

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

*Release date: 2012-03-17*

Library

-------

- Issue #14234: CVE-2012-0876: Randomize hashes of xml attributes in the hash

table internal to the pyexpat module's copy of the expat library to avoid a

denial of service due to hash collisions. Patch by David Malcolm with some

modifications by the expat project.

What's New in Python 2.6.8 rc 1?

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

*Release date: 2012-02-23*

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #13703: oCERT-2011-003 CVE-2012-1150: add -R command-line

option and PYTHONHASHSEED environment variable, to provide an opt-in

way to protect against denial of service attacks due to hash

collisions within the dict and set types. Patch by David Malcolm,

based on work by Victor Stinner.

Library

-------

- Issue #14001: CVE-2012-0845: xmlrpc: Fix an endless loop in

SimpleXMLRPCServer upon malformed POST request.

- Issue #13885: CVE-2011-3389: the _ssl module would always disable the CBC

IV attack countermeasure.

What's New in Python 2.6.7?

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

*Release date: 2011-06-03*

*NOTE: Python 2.6 is in security-fix-only mode. No non-security bug fixes are

allowed. Python 2.6.7 and beyond will be source only releases.*

* No changes since 2.6.7rc2.

What's New in Python 2.6.7 rc 2?

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

*Release date: 2011-05-20*

*NOTE: Python 2.6 is in security-fix-only mode. No non-security bug fixes are

allowed. Python 2.6.7 and beyond will be source only releases.*

Library

-------

- Issue #11662: Make urllib and urllib2 ignore redirections if the

scheme is not HTTP, HTTPS or FTP (CVE-2011-1521).

- Issue #11442: Add a charset parameter to the Content-type in SimpleHTTPServer

to avoid XSS attacks.

What's New in Python 2.6.7 rc 1?

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

*Release date: 2011-05-06*

Library

-------

- Issue #9129: smtpd.py is vulnerable to DoS attacks deriving from missing

error handling when accepting a new connection.

What's New in Python 2.6.6?

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

*Release date: 2010-08-24*

* No changes since 2.6.6rc2.

What's New in Python 2.6.6 rc 2?

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

*Release date: 2010-08-16*

Library

-------

- Issue #9600: Don't use relative import for _multiprocessing on Windows.

- Issue #8688: Revert regression introduced in 2.6.6rc1 (making Distutils

recalculate MANIFEST every time).

- Issue #5798: Handle select.poll flag oddities properly on OS X.

This fixes test_asynchat and test_smtplib failures on OS X.

- Issue #9543: Fix regression in socket.py introduced in Python 2.6.6 rc 1

in r83624.

Extension Modules

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

- Issue #7567: Don't call `setupterm' twice.

Tests

-----

- Issue #9568: Fix test_urllib2_localnet on OS X 10.3.

- Issue #9145: Fix test_coercion failure in refleak runs.

- Issue #8433: Fix test_curses failure caused by newer versions of

ncurses returning ERR from getmouse() when there are no mouse

events available.

What's New in Python 2.6.6 rc 1?

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

*Release date: 2010-08-03*

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #6213: Implement getstate() and setstate() methods of utf-8-sig and

utf-16 incremental encoders.

- Issue #8271: during the decoding of an invalid UTF-8 byte sequence, only the

start byte and the continuation byte(s) are now considered invalid, instead

of the number of bytes specified by the start byte.

E.g.: '\xf1\x80AB'.decode('utf-8', 'replace') now returns u'\ufffdAB' and

replaces with U+FFFD only the start byte ('\xf1') and the continuation byte

('\x80') even if '\xf1' is the start byte of a 4-bytes sequence.

Previous versions returned a single u'\ufffd'.

- Issue #9058: Remove assertions about INT_MAX in UnicodeDecodeError.

- Issue #8941: decoding big endian UTF-32 data in UCS-2 builds could crash

the interpreter with characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane

(higher than 0x10000).

- Issue #8627: Remove bogus "Overriding __cmp__ blocks inheritance of

__hash__ in 3.x" warning. Also fix "XXX undetected error" that

arises from the "Overriding __eq__ blocks inheritance ..." warning

when turned into an exception: in this case the exception simply

gets ignored.

- Issue #4108: In urllib.robotparser, if there are multiple 'User-agent: *'

entries, consider the first one.

- Issue #9354: Provide getsockopt() in asyncore's file_wrapper.

- In the unicode/str.format(), raise a ValueError when indexes to arguments are

too large.

- Issue #3798: Write sys.exit() message to sys.stderr to use stderr encoding

and error handler, instead of writing to the C stderr file in utf-8

- Issue #7902: When using explicit relative import syntax, don't try

implicit relative import semantics.

- Issue #7079: Fix a possible crash when closing a file object while using

it from another thread. Patch by Daniel Stutzbach.

- Issue #1533: fix inconsistency in range function argument

processing: any non-float non-integer argument is now converted to

an integer (if possible) using its __int__ method. Previously, only

small arguments were treated this way; larger arguments (those whose

__int__ was outside the range of a C long) would produce a TypeError.

- Issue #8417: Raise an OverflowError when an integer larger than sys.maxsize

is passed to bytearray.

- Issue #8329: Don't return the same lists from select.select when no fds are

changed.

- Raise a TypeError when trying to delete a T_STRING_INPLACE struct member.

- Issue #1583863: An unicode subclass can now override the __unicode__ method.

- Issue #7507: Quote "!" in pipes.quote(); it is special to some shells.

- Issue #7544: Preallocate thread memory before creating the thread to avoid

a fatal error in low memory condition.

- Issue #7820: The parser tokenizer restores all bytes in the right if

the BOM check fails.

- Issue #7072: isspace(0xa0) is true on Mac OS X

C-API

-----

- Issue #5753: A new C API function, :cfunc:`PySys_SetArgvEx`, allows

embedders of the interpreter to set sys.argv without also modifying

sys.path. This helps fix `CVE-2008-5983

<http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2008-5983>`_.

Library

-------

- Issue #8447: Make distutils.sysconfig follow symlinks in the path to

the interpreter executable. This fixes a failure of test_httpservers

on OS X.

- Issue #7092: Fix the DeprecationWarnings emitted by the standard library

when using the -3 flag. Patch by Florent Xicluna.

- Issue #7395: Fix tracebacks in pstats interactive browser.

- Issue #1713: Fix os.path.ismount(), which returned true for symbolic links

across devices.

- Issue #8826: Properly load old-style "expires" attribute in http.cookies.

- Issue #1690103: Fix initial namespace for code run with trace.main().

- Issue #5294: Fix the behavior of pdb's "continue" command when called

in the top-level debugged frame.

- Issue #5727: Restore the ability to use readline when calling into pdb

in doctests.

- Issue #6719: In pdb, do not stop somewhere in the encodings machinery

if the source file to be debugged is in a non-builtin encoding.

- Issue #8048: Prevent doctests from failing when sys.displayhook has

been reassigned.

- Issue #8015: In pdb, do not crash when an empty line is entered as

a breakpoint command.

- Issue #7909: Do not touch paths with the special prefixes ``\\.\``

or ``\\?\`` in ntpath.normpath().

- Issue #5146: Handle UID THREAD command correctly in imaplib.

- Issue #5147: Fix the header generated for cookie files written by

http.cookiejar.MozillaCookieJar.

- Issue #8198: In pydoc, output all help text to the correct stream

when sys.stdout is reassigned.

- Issue #1019882: Fix IndexError when loading certain hotshot stats.

- Issue #8471: In doctest, properly reset the output stream to an empty

string when Unicode was previously output.

- Issue #8397: Raise an error when attempting to mix iteration and regular

reads on a BZ2File object, rather than returning incorrect results.

- Issue #8620: when a Cmd is fed input that reaches EOF without a final

newline, it no longer truncates the last character of the last command line.

- Issue #7066: archive_util.make_archive now restores the cwd if an error is

raised. Initial patch by Ezio Melotti.

- Issue #5006: Better handling of unicode byte-order marks (BOM) in the io

library. This means, for example, that opening an UTF-16 text file in append

mode doesn't add a BOM at the end of the file if the file isn't empty.

- Issue #3704: cookielib was not properly handling URLs with a / in the

parameters.

- Issue #4629: getopt raises an error if an argument ends with = whereas getopt

doesn't except a value (eg. --help= is rejected if getopt uses ['help='] long

options).

- Issue #7895: platform.mac_ver() no longer crashes after calling os.fork()

- Issue #5395: array.fromfile() would raise a spurious EOFError when an

I/O error occurred. Now an IOError is raised instead. Patch by chuck

(Jan Hosang).

- Issue #1555570: email no longer inserts extra blank lines when a \r\n

combo crosses an 8192 byte boundary.

- Issue #9164: Ensure sysconfig handles dupblice archs while building on OSX

- Issue #7646: The fnmatch pattern cache no longer grows without bound.

- Issue #9136: Fix 'dictionary changed size during iteration'

RuntimeError produced when profiling the decimal module. This was

due to a dangerous iteration over 'locals()' in Context.__init__.

- Fix extreme speed issue in Decimal.pow when the base is an exact

power of 10 and the exponent is tiny (for example,

Decimal(10) ** Decimal('1e-999999999')).

- Issue #9130: Fix validation of relative imports in parser module.

- Issue #9128: Fix validation of class decorators in parser module.

- Issue #7673: Fix security vulnerability (CVE-2010-2089) in the audioop

module, ensure that the input string length is a multiple of the frame size

- Issue #6589: cleanup asyncore.socket_map in case smtpd.SMTPServer constructor

raises an exception.

- Issue #9125: Add recognition of 'except ... as ...' syntax to parser module.

- Issue #9085: email package version number bumped to its correct

value of 4.0.2 (same as it was in 2.5).

- Issue #9075: In the ssl module, remove the setting of a ``debug`` flag

on an OpenSSL structure.

- Issue #5610: feedparser no longer eats extra characters at the end of

a body part if the body part ends with a \r\n.

- Issue #8924: logging: Improved error handling for Unicode in exception text.

- Fix codecs.escape_encode to return the correct consumed size.

- Issue #6470: Drop UNC prefix in FixTk.

- Issue #8833: tarfile created hard link entries with a size field != 0 by

mistake.

- Issue #1368247: set_charset (and therefore MIMEText) now automatically

encodes a unicode _payload to the output_charset.

- Issue #7150: Raise OverflowError if the result of adding or subtracting

timedelta from date or datetime falls outside of the MINYEAR:MAXYEAR range.

- Issue #6662: Fix parsing of malformatted charref (&#bad;), patch written by

Fredrik Håård

- Issue #1628205: Socket file objects returned by socket.socket.makefile() now

properly handles EINTR within the read, readline, write & flush methods.

The socket.sendall() method now properly handles interrupted system calls.

- Issue #3924: Ignore cookies with invalid "version" field in cookielib.

- Issue #6268: Fix seek() method of codecs.open(), don't read or write the BOM

twice after seek(0). Fix also reset() method of codecs, UTF-16, UTF-32 and

StreamWriter classes.

- Issue #5640: Fix Shift-JIS incremental encoder for error handlers different

than strict

- Issue #8782: Add a trailing newline in linecache.updatecache to the last line

of files without one.

- Issue #8729: Return NotImplemented from collections.Mapping.__eq__ when

comparing to a non-mapping.

- Issue #5918: Fix a crash in the parser module.

- Issue #8688: Distutils now recalculates MANIFEST everytime.

- Issue #7640: In the new `io` module, fix relative seek() for buffered

readable streams when the internal buffer isn't empty. Patch by Pascal

Chambon.

- Issue #5099: subprocess.Popen.__del__ no longer references global objects,

leading to issues during interpreter shutdown.

- Issue #8681: Make the zlib module's error messages more informative when

the zlib itself doesn't give any detailed explanation.

- Issue #8674: Fixed a number of incorrect or undefined-behaviour-inducing

overflow checks in the audioop module.

- Issue #8571: Fix an internal error when compressing or decompressing a

chunk larger than 1GB with the zlib module's compressor and decompressor

objects.

- Issue #8573: asyncore _strerror() function might throw ValueError.

- Issue #8483: asyncore.dispatcher's __getattr__ method produced confusing

error messages when accessing undefined class attributes because of the cheap

inheritance with the underlying socket object.

- Issue #4265: shutil.copyfile() was leaking file descriptors when disk fills.

Patch by Tres Seaver.

- Issue #8621: uuid.uuid4() returned the same sequence of values in the

parent and any children created using ``os.fork`` on MacOS X 10.6.

- Issue #8313: traceback.format_exception_only() encodes unicode message to

ASCII with backslashreplace error handler if str(value) failed

- Issue #8567: Fix precedence of signals in Decimal module: when a

Decimal operation raises multiple signals and more than one of those

signals is trapped, the specification determines the order in which

the signals should be handled. In many cases this order wasn't

being followed, leading to the wrong Python exception being raised.

- Issue #7865: The close() method of :mod:`io` objects should not swallow

exceptions raised by the implicit flush(). Also ensure that calling

close() several times is supported. Initial patch by Pascal Chambon.

- Issue #8581: logging: removed errors raised when closing handlers twice.

- Issue #4687: Fix accuracy of garbage collection runtimes displayed with

gc.DEBUG_STATS.

- Issue #8354: The siginterrupt setting is now preserved for all signals,

not just SIGCHLD.

- Issue #8577: distutils.sysconfig.get_python_inc() now makes a difference

between the build dir and the source dir when looking for "python.h" or

"Include".

- Issue #8464: tarfile no longer creates files with execute permissions set

when mode="w|" is used.

- Issue #7834: Fix connect() of Bluetooth L2CAP sockets with recent versions

of the Linux kernel. Patch by Yaniv Aknin.

- Issue #6312: Fixed http HEAD request when the transfer encoding is chunked.

It should correctly return an empty response now.

- Issue #8086: In :func:`ssl.DER_cert_to_PEM_cert()`, fix missing newline

before the certificate footer. Patch by Kyle VanderBeek.

- Issue #8549: Fix compiling the _ssl extension under AIX. Patch by

Sridhar Ratnakumar.

- Issue #2302: Fix a race condition in SocketServer.BaseServer.shutdown,

where the method could block indefinitely if called just before the

event loop started running. This also fixes the occasional freezes

witnessed in test_httpservers.

- Issue #5103: SSL handshake would ignore the socket timeout and block

indefinitely if the other end didn't respond.

- The do_handshake() method of SSL objects now adjusts the blocking mode of

the SSL structure if necessary (as other methods already do).

- Issue #5238: Calling makefile() on an SSL object would prevent the

underlying socket from being closed until all objects get truely destroyed.

- Issue #7943: Fix circular reference created when instantiating an SSL

socket. Initial patch by Péter Szabó.

- Issue #8108: Fix the unwrap() method of SSL objects when the socket has

a non-infinite timeout. Also make that method friendlier with applications

wanting to continue using the socket in clear-text mode, by disabling

OpenSSL's internal readahead. Thanks to Darryl Miles for guidance.

- Issue #8484: Load all ciphers and digest algorithms when initializing

the _ssl extension, such that verification of some SSL certificates

doesn't fail because of an "unknown algorithm".

- Issue #4814: timeout parameter is now applied also for connections resulting

from PORT/EPRT commands.

- Issue #3817: ftplib.FTP.abort() method now considers 225 a valid response

code as stated in RFC-959 at chapter 5.4.

- Issue #5277: Fix quote counting when parsing RFC 2231 encoded parameters.

- Issue #8179: Fix macpath.realpath() on a non-existing path.

- Issue #8310: Allow dis to examine new style classes.

- Issue #7667: Fix doctest failures with non-ASCII paths.

- Issue #7624: Fix isinstance(foo(), collections.Callable) for old-style

classes.

- Issue #7512: shutil.copystat() could raise an OSError when the filesystem

didn't support chflags() (for example ZFS under FreeBSD). The error is

now silenced.

- Issue #3890, #8222: Fix recv() and recv_into() on non-blocking SSL sockets.

Also, enable the SSL_MODE_AUTO_RETRY flag on SSL sockets, so that blocking

reads and writes are always retried by OpenSSL itself.

- Issue #6544: fix a reference leak in the kqueue implementation's error

handling.

- Issue #7774: Set sys.executable to an empty string if argv[0] has been

set to an non existent program name and Python is unable to retrieve the real

program name

- Issue #6906: Tk should not set Unicode environment variables on Windows.

- Issue #1054943: Fix unicodedata.normalize('NFC', text) for the Public Review

Issue #29

- Issue #7494: fix a crash in _lsprof (cProfile) after clearing the profiler,

reset also the pointer to the current pointer context.

- Issue #4961: Inconsistent/wrong result of askyesno function in tkMessageBox

with Tcl/Tk-8.5.

- Issue #7356: ctypes.util: Make parsing of ldconfig output independent of

the locale.

Extension Modules

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

- Fix memory leak in ssl._ssl._test_decode_cert.

- Issue #9422: Fix memory leak when re-initializing a struct.Struct object.

- Issue #7900: The getgroups(2) system call on MacOSX behaves rather oddly

compared to other unix systems. In particular, os.getgroups() does

not reflect any changes made using os.setgroups() but basicly always

returns the same information as the id command.

os.getgroups() can now return more than 16 groups on MacOSX.

- Issue #9277: Fix bug in struct.pack for bools in standard mode

(e.g., struct.pack('>?')): if conversion to bool raised an exception

then that exception wasn't properly propagated on machines where

char is unsigned.

- Issue #7384: If the system readline library is linked against

ncurses, do not link the readline module against ncursesw. The

additional restriction of linking the readline and curses modules

against the same curses library is currently not enabled.

- Issue #2810: Fix cases where the Windows registry API returns

ERROR_MORE_DATA, requiring a re-try in order to get the complete result.

Build

-----

- Issue #8854: Fix finding Visual Studio 2008 on Windows x64.

- Issue #3928: os.mknod() now available in Solaris, also.

- Issue #8175: --with-universal-archs=all works correctly on OSX 10.5

- Issue #6716: Quote -x arguments of compileall in MSI installer.

- Issue #1628484: The Makefile doesn't ignore the CFLAGS environment

variable anymore. It also forwards the LDFLAGS settings to the linker

when building a shared library.

Tests

-----

- Issue #7849: Now the utility ``check_warnings`` verifies if the warnings are

effectively raised. A new private utility ``_check_py3k_warnings`` has been

backported to help silencing py3k warnings.

- Issue #8672: Add a zlib test ensuring that an incomplete stream can be

handled by a decompressor object without errors (it returns incomplete

uncompressed data).

- Issue #8629: Disable some test_ssl tests, since they give different

results with OpenSSL 1.0.0 and higher.

- Issue #8576: Remove use of find_unused_port() in test_smtplib and

test_multiprocessing. Patch by Paul Moore.

- Issue #7027: regrtest.py keeps a reference to the encodings.ascii module as a

workaround to #7140 bug

- Issue #3864: Skip three test_signal tests on freebsd6 because they fail

if any thread was previously started, most likely due to a platform bug.

- Issue #8193: Fix test_zlib failure with zlib 1.2.4.

Documentation

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

- Issue #9255: Document that the 'test' package is for internal Python use

only.

- Issue #8909: Added the size of the bitmap used in the installer created by

distutils' bdist_wininst. Patch by Anatoly Techtonik.

What's New in Python 2.6.5?

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

*Release date: 2010-03-18*

What's New in Python 2.6.5 rc 2?

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

*Release date: 2010-03-09*

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #8089: a OS X framework build with --with-universal-archs=3-way|intel

had no way to select a 32-bit executable.

- Issue #8084: fixes build issues on OSX 10.6 when targetting OSX 10.4.

Library

-------

- Reverting the changes made in r78432. Discussed in the tracker issue #7540.

- Issue #8107: Fixed test_distutils so it doesn't crash when the source

directory cannot be found.

Extension Modules

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

- Issue #7670: sqlite3: Fixed crashes when operating on closed connections.

- Issue #8053: logic was inverted on which platforms to run a test on.

caused test_thread to fail on Windows.

What's New in Python 2.6.5 rc 1?

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

*Release date: 2010-03-01*

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #7309: Fix unchecked attribute access when converting

UnicodeEncodeError, UnicodeDecodeError, and UnicodeTranslateError to

strings.

- Issue #7649: "u'%c' % char" now behaves like "u'%s' % char" and raises a

UnicodeDecodeError if 'char' is a byte string that can't be decoded using

the default encoding.

- Issue #5677: Explicitly forbid write operations on read-only file objects,

and read operations on write-only file objects. On Windows, the system C

library would return a bogus result; on Solaris, it was possible to crash

the interpreter. Patch by Stefan Krah.

- Issue #4978: Passing keyword arguments as unicode strings is now allowed.

- Issue #7819: Check sys.call_tracing() arguments types.

- Issue #7788: Fix an interpreter crash produced by deleting a list

slice with very large step value.

- Issue #7561: Operations on empty bytearrays (such as `int(bytearray())`)

could crash in many places because of the PyByteArray_AS_STRING() macro

returning NULL. The macro now returns a statically allocated empty

string instead.

- Issue #7604: Deleting an unset slotted attribute did not raise an

AttributeError.

- Issue #7413: Passing '\0' as the separator to datetime.datetime.isoformat()

used to drop the time part of the result.

- Issue #6108: unicode(exception) and str(exception) should return the same

message when only __str__ (and not __unicode__) is overridden in the

subclass.

- Issue #7491: Metaclass's __cmp__ method was ignored.

- Add Py3k warnings for parameter names in parenthesis.

- Issue #7362: Give a proper error message for def f((x)=3): pass.

- Issue #7085: Fix crash when importing some extensions in a thread

on MacOSX 10.6.

- Issue #7070: Fix round bug for large odd integer arguments.

- Issue #7078: Set struct.__doc__ from _struct.__doc__.

- Issue #1722344: threading._shutdown() is now called in Py_Finalize(), which

fixes the problem of some exceptions being thrown at shutdown when the

interpreter is killed. Patch by Adam Olsen.

- Issue #7084: Fix a (very unlikely) crash when printing a list from one

thread, and mutating it from another one. Patch by Scott Dial.

- Issue #1747858: Fix lchown & fchown to work with large uid's and gid's on

64-bit platforms.

Library

-------

- Issue #7250: Fix info leak of os.environ across multi-run uses of

wsgiref.handlers.CGIHandler.

- Issue #1729305: Fix doctest to handle encode error with "backslashreplace".

- Issue #691291: codecs.open() should not convert end of lines on reading and

writing.

- Issue #7975: correct regression in dict methods supported by bsddb.dbshelve.

- Issue #7959: ctypes callback functions are now registered correctly

with the cycle garbage collector.

- Issue #6243: curses.getkey() can segfault when used with ungetch.

Fix by Trundle and Jerry Chen.

- Issue #7597: curses.use_env() can now be called before initscr().

Noted by Kan-Ru Chen.

- Issue #7970: email.Generator.flatten now correctly flattens message/rfc822

messages parsed by email.Parser.HeaderParser.

- Issue #3426: ``os.path.abspath`` now returns unicode when its arg is unicode.

- Issue #7835: shelve should no longer produce mysterious warnings during

interpreter shutdown.

- Issue #4772: Raise a ValueError when an unknown Bluetooth protocol is

specified, rather than fall through to AF_PACKET (in the `socket` module).

Also, raise ValueError rather than TypeError when an unknown TIPC address

type is specified. Patch by Brian Curtin.

- Issue #6939: Fix file I/O objects in the `io` module to keep the original

file position when calling `truncate()`. It would previously change the

file position to the given argument, which goes against the tradition of

ftruncate() and other truncation APIs. Patch by Pascal Chambon.

- Issue #7773: Fix an UnboundLocalError in platform.linux_distribution() when

the release file is empty.

- Issue #7748: Since unicode values are supported for some metadata options

in Distutils, the DistributionMetadata get_* methods will now return an utf-8

encoded string for them. This ensure that the upload and register commands

send the right values to PyPI without any error.

- Issue #1670765: Prevent email.generator.Generator from re-wrapping

headers in multipart/signed MIME parts, which fixes one of the sources of

invalid modifications to such parts by Generator.

- Issue #7701: Fix crash in binascii.b2a_uu() in debug mode when given a

1-byte argument. Patch by Victor Stinner.

- Issue #3299: Fix possible crash in the _sre module when given bad

argument values in debug mode. Patch by Victor Stinner.

- Issue #5827: Make sure that normpath preserves unicode. Initial patch

by Matt Giuca.

- Issue #5372: Drop the reuse of .o files in Distutils' ccompiler (since

Extension extra options may change the output without changing the .c

file). Initial patch by Collin Winter.

- Issue #7617: Make sure distutils.unixccompiler.UnixCCompiler recognizes

gcc when it has a fully qualified configuration prefix. Initial patch

by Arfrever.

- Issue #7071: byte-compilation in Distutils is now done with respect to

sys.dont_write_bytecode.

- Issue #7092: Remove py3k warning when importing cPickle. 2to3 handles

renaming of `cPickle` to `pickle`. The warning was annoying since there's

no alternative to cPickle if you care about performance. Patch by Florent

Xicluna.

- Issue #7455: Fix possible crash in cPickle on invalid input. Patch by

Victor Stinner.

- Issue #6511: ZipFile now raises BadZipfile (instead of an IOError) when

opening an empty or very small file.

- Issue #7552: Removed line feed in the base64 Authorization header in

the Distutils upload command to avoid an error when PyPI reads it.

This occurs on long passwords. Initial patch by JP St. Pierre.

- Issue #7231: urllib2 cannot handle https with proxy requiring auth. Patch by

Tatsuhiro Tsujikawa.

- Issue #7348: StringIO.StringIO.readline(-1) now acts as if it got no argument

like other file objects.

- Issue #5949: fixed IMAP4_SSL hang when the IMAP server response is

missing proper end-of-line termination.

- Fix variations of extending deques: d.extend(d) d.extendleft(d) d+=d

- Issue #1923: Fixed the removal of meaningful spaces when PKG-INFO is

generated in Distutils. Patch by Stephen Emslie.

- Issue #4120: Drop reference to CRT from manifest when building extensions

with msvc9compiler.

- Issue #7410: deepcopy of itertools.count() erroneously reset the count.

- Issue #7403: logging: Fixed possible race condition in lock creation.

- Issue #7341: Close the internal file object in the TarFile constructor in

case of an error.

- Issue #7328: pydoc no longer corrupts sys.path when run with the '-m' switch

- Issue #7318: multiprocessing now uses a timeout when it fails to establish

a connection with another process, rather than looping endlessly. The

default timeout is 20 seconds, which should be amply sufficient for

local connections.

- Issue #7282: Fix a memory leak when an RLock was used in a thread other

than those started through `threading.Thread` (for example, using

`thread.start_new_thread()`.

- Issue #7264: Fix a possible deadlock when deallocating thread-local objects

which are part of a reference cycle.

- Issue #7249: Methods of io.BytesIO now allow `long` as well as `int`

arguments.

- Issue #6665: Fix fnmatch to properly match filenames with newlines in them.

- Issue #1008086: Fixed socket.inet_aton() to always return 4 bytes even on

LP64 platforms (most 64-bit Linux, bsd, unix systems).

- Issue #7246 & Issue #7208: getpass now properly flushes input before

reading from stdin so that existing input does not confuse it and

lead to incorrect entry or an IOError. It also properly flushes it

afterwards to avoid the terminal echoing the input afterwards on

OSes such as Solaris.

- Issue #7244: itertools.izip_longest() no longer ignores exceptions

raised during the formation of an output tuple.

- Issue #7233: Fix a number of two-argument Decimal methods to make

sure that they accept an int or long as the second argument. Also

fix buggy handling of large arguments (those with coefficient longer

than the current precision) in shift and rotate.

- Issue #7082: When falling back to the MIME 'name' parameter, the

correct place to look for it is the Content-Type header.

- Issue #7099: Decimal.is_normal now returns True for numbers with exponent

larger than emax.

- Issue #7205: Fix a possible deadlock when using a BZ2File object from

several threads at once.

- Issue #7048: Force Decimal.logb to round its result when that result

is too large to fit in the current precision.

- Issue #1488943: difflib.Differ() doesn't always add hints for tab characters

- Issue #5037: Proxy the __unicode__ special method to __unicode__ instead of

__str__.

- Issue #7481: When a threading.Thread failed to start it would leave the

instance stuck in initial state and present in threading.enumerate().

- Issue #1068268: The subprocess module now handles EINTR in internal

os.waitpid and os.read system calls where appropriate.

Extension Modules

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

- Issue #7808: Fix reference leaks in _bsddb and related tests.

- Stop providing crtassem.h symbols when compiling with Visual Studio 2010, as

msvcr100.dll is not a platform assembly anymore.

- Issue #6877: Make it possible to link the readline extension to libedit

on OSX.

- Expat: Fix DoS via XML document with malformed UTF-8 sequences

(CVE_2009_3560).

- Issue #7242: On Solaris 9 and earlier calling os.fork() from within a

thread could raise an incorrect RuntimeError about not holding the import

lock. The import lock is now reinitialized after fork.

- Issue #7999: os.setreuid() and os.setregid() would refuse to accept a -1

parameter on some platforms such as OS X.

Build

-----

- Issue #3920, #7903: Define _BSD_SOURCE on OpenBSD 4.4 through 4.9.

- Issue #7661: Allow ctypes to be built from a non-ASCII directory path.

Patch by Florent Xicluna.

- Issue #7589: Only build the nis module when the correct header files are

found.

- Switch to OpenSSL 0.9.8l on Windows.

- Issue #6603: Change READ_TIMESTAMP macro in ceval.c so that it

compiles correctly under gcc on x86-64. This fixes a reported

problem with the --with-tsc build on x86-64.

- Ensure that it possible to build extensions for the default

binary distribution on OSX 10.6 even when the user does not

have the 10.4u SDK installed.

- Issue #7541: when using ``python-config`` with a framework install the

compiler might use the wrong library.

Documentation

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

- Updating `Using Python` documentation to include description of CPython's

-J, -U and -X options.

- Update python manual page (options -B, -O0, -s, environment variables

PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE, PYTHONNOUSERSITE).

Tests

-----

- issue #7728: test_timeout was changed to use test_support.bind_port

instead of a hard coded port.

- Issue #7498: test_multiprocessing now uses test_support.find_unused_port

instead of a hardcoded port number in test_rapid_restart.

- Issue #7431: use TESTFN in test_linecache instead of trying to create a

file in the Lib/test directory, which might be read-only for the

user running the tests.

- Issue #7324: add a sanity check to regrtest argument parsing to

catch the case of an option with no handler.

- Issue #7295: Do not use a hardcoded file name in test_tarfile.

- Issue #7270: Add some dedicated unit tests for multi-thread synchronization

primitives such as Lock, RLock, Condition, Event and Semaphore.

- Issue #7055: test___all__ now greedily detects all modules which have an

__all__ attribute, rather than using a hardcoded and incomplete list.

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

-----