+++++++++++

Python News

+++++++++++

What's New in Python 2.7.1?

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

*Release date: 2010-11-27*

Library

-------

- Issue #10092: Properly reset locale in calendar.Locale*Calendar classes.

- Issue #10459: Update CJK character names to Unicode 5.2.

- Issue #6098: Don't claim DOM level 3 conformance in minidom.

- Issue #5762: Fix AttributeError raised by ``xml.dom.minidom`` when an empty

XML namespace attribute is encountered.

- Issue #1710703: Write structures for an empty ZIP archive when a ZipFile is

created in modes 'a' or 'w' and then closed without adding any files. Raise

BadZipfile (rather than IOError) when opening small non-ZIP files.

- Issue #4493: urllib2 adds '/' in front of path components which does not

start with '/. Common behavior exhibited by browsers and other clients.

- Issue #6378: idle.bat now runs with the appropriate Python version rather than

the system default. Patch by Sridhar Ratnakumar.

- Issue #10407: Fix one NameError in distutils.

- Issue #10198: fix duplicate header written to wave files when writeframes()

is called without data.

- Issue #10467: Fix BytesIO.readinto() after seeking into a position after the

end of the file.

- Issue #5111: IPv6 Host in the Header is wrapped inside [ ]. Patch by Chandru.

Build

-----

- Backport r83399 to allow test_distutils to pass on installed versions.

- Issue #1303434: Generate ZIP file containing all PDBs.

Tests

-----

- Issue #9424: Replace deprecated assert* methods in the Python test suite.

Documentation

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

- Issue #10299: List the built-in functions in a table in functions.rst.

What's New in Python 2.7.1 release candidate 1?

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

*Release date: 2010-11-13*

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #10221: dict.pop(k) now has a key error message that includes the

missing key (same message d[k] returns for missing keys).

- Issue #10125: Don't segfault when the iterator passed to

``file.writelines()`` closes the file.

- Issue #10186: Fix the SyntaxError caret when the offset is equal to the

length of the offending line.

- Issue #9997: Don't let the name "top" have special significance in scope

resolution.

- Issue #9862: Compensate for broken PIPE_BUF in AIX by hard coding

its value as the default 512 when compiling on AIX.

- Issue #9675: CObject use is marked as a Py3k warning, not a deprecation

warning.

- Issue #10068: Global objects which have reference cycles with their module's

dict are now cleared again. This causes issue #7140 to appear again.

- Issue #9869: Make long() and PyNumber_Long return something of type

long for a class whose __long__ method returns a plain int. This

fixes an interpreter crash when initializing an instance of a long

subclass from an object whose __long__ method returns a plain int.

- Issue #10006: type.__abstractmethods__ now raises an AttributeError.

- Issue #9797: pystate.c wrongly assumed that zero couldn't be a valid

thread-local storage key.

- Issue #4947: The write() method of sys.stdout and sys.stderr uses their

encoding and errors attributes instead of using utf-8 in strict mode, to get

the same behaviour than the print statement.

- Issue #9737: Fix a crash when trying to delete a slice or an item from

a memoryview object.

- Restore GIL in nis_cat in case of error.

- Issue #9688: __basicsize__ and __itemsize__ must be accessed as Py_ssize_t.

- Issue #8530: Prevent stringlib fastsearch from reading beyond the front

of an array.

- Issue #83755: Implicit set-to-frozenset conversion was not thread-safe.

- Issue #9416: Fix some issues with complex formatting where the

output with no type specifier failed to match the str output:

- format(complex(-0.0, 2.0), '-') omitted the real part from the output,

- format(complex(0.0, 2.0), '-') included a sign and parentheses.

- Issue #7616: Fix copying of overlapping memoryview slices with the Intel

compiler.

Library

-------

- Issue 9926: Wrapped TestSuite subclass does not get __call__ executed

- Issue #4471: Properly shutdown socket in IMAP.shutdown(). Patch by

Lorenzo M. Catucci.

- Issue #10126: Fix distutils' test_build when Python was built with

--enable-shared.

- Fix typo in one sdist option (medata-check).

- Issue #9199: Fix incorrect use of distutils.cmd.Command.announce.

- Issue #1718574: Fix options that were supposed to accept arguments but did

not in build_clib.

- Issue #9281: Prevent race condition with mkdir in distutils. Patch by

Arfrever.

- Issue #10229: Fix caching error in gettext.

- Issue #10252: Close file objects in a timely manner in distutils code and

tests. Patch by Brian Brazil, completed by Éric Araujo.

- Issue #10311: The signal module now restores errno before returning from

its low-level signal handler. Patch by Hallvard B Furuseth.

- Issue #10038: json.loads() on str should always return unicode (regression

from Python 2.6). Patch by Walter Dörwald.

- Issue #120176: Wrapped TestSuite subclass does not get __call__ executed.

- Issue #6706: asyncore accept() method no longer raises

EWOULDBLOCK/ECONNABORTED on incomplete connection attempt but returns None

instead.

- Issue #10266: uu.decode didn't close in_file explicitly when it was given

as a filename. Patch by Brian Brazil.

- Issue #10246: uu.encode didn't close file objects explicitly when filenames

were given to it. Patch by Brian Brazil.

- Issue #10253: FileIO leaks a file descriptor when trying to open a file

for append that isn't seekable. Patch by Brian Brazil.

- Issue #6105: json.dumps now respects OrderedDict's iteration order.

- Issue #9295: Fix a crash under Windows when calling close() on a file

object with custom buffering from two threads at once.

- Issue #5027: The standard ``xml`` namespace is now understood by

xml.sax.saxutils.XMLGenerator as being bound to

http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace. Patch by Troy J. Farrell.

- Issue #10163: Skip unreadable registry keys during mimetypes

initialization.

- Issue #5117: Fixed root directory related issue on posixpath.relpath() and

ntpath.relpath().

- Issue 9409: Fix the regex to match all kind of filenames, for interactive

debugging in doctests.

- Issue #6612: Fix site and sysconfig to catch os.getcwd() error, eg. if the

current directory was deleted. Patch written by W. Trevor King.

- Issue #10045: Improved performance when writing after seeking past the

end of the "file" in cStringIO.

- Issue #9948: Fixed problem of losing filename case information.

- Issue #9437: Fix building C extensions with non-default LDFLAGS.

- Issue #9759: GzipFile now raises ValueError when an operation is attempted

after the file is closed. Patch by Jeffrey Finkelstein.

- Issue #9042: Fix interaction of custom translation classes and caching in

gettext.

- Issue #9065: tarfile no longer uses "root" as the default for the uname and

gname field.

- Issue #1050268: parseaddr now correctly quotes double quote and backslash

characters that appear inside quoted strings in email addresses.

- Issue #10004: quoprimime no longer generates a traceback when confronted

with invalid characters after '=' in a Q-encoded word.

- Issue #9950: Fix socket.sendall() crash or misbehaviour when a signal is

received. Now sendall() properly calls signal handlers if necessary,

and retries sending if these returned successfully, including on sockets

with a timeout.

- Issue #9947: logging: Fixed locking bug in stopListening.

- Issue #9945: logging: Fixed locking bugs in addHandler/removeHandler.

- Issue #9936: Fixed executable lines' search in the trace module.

- Issue #9928: Properly initialize the types exported by the bz2 module.

- Issue #9854: The default read() implementation in io.RawIOBase now

handles non-blocking readinto() returning None correctly.

- Issue #9729: Fix the signature of SSLSocket.recvfrom() and

SSLSocket.sendto() to match the corresponding socket methods. Also,

fix various SSLSocket methods to raise socket.error rather than an

unhelpful TypeError when called on an unconnected socket. Original patch

by Andrew Bennetts.

- Issue #9826: OrderedDict.__repr__ can now handle self-referential

values: d['x'] = d.

- Issue #767645: Set os.path.supports_unicode_filenames to True on Mac OS X.

- Issue #9837: The read() method of ZipExtFile objects (as returned by

ZipFile.open()) could return more bytes than requested.

- Issue #9825: removed __del__ from the definition of collections.OrderedDict.

This prevents user-created self-referencing ordered dictionaries from

becoming permanently uncollectable GC garbage. The downside is that

removing __del__ means that the internal doubly-linked list has to wait for

GC collection rather than freeing memory immediately when the refcnt drops

to zero.

- Issue #9816: random.Random.jumpahead(n) did not produce a sufficiently

different internal state for small values of n. Fixed by salting the

value.

- Issue #9792: In case of connection failure, socket.create_connection()

would swallow the exception and raise a new one, making it impossible

to fetch the original errno, or to filter timeout errors. Now the

original error is re-raised.

- Issue #9758: When fcntl.ioctl() was called with mutable_flag set to True,

and the passed buffer was exactly 1024 bytes long, the buffer wouldn't

be updated back after the system call. Original patch by Brian Brazil.

- Issue #1100562: Fix deep-copying of objects derived from the list and

dict types. Patch by Michele Orrù and Björn Lindqvist.

- Issue #7005: Fixed output of None values for RawConfigParser.write and

ConfigParser.write.

- Issue #808164: Fixed socket.close to avoid references to globals, to

avoid issues when socket.close is called from a __del__ method.

- Issue #2986: difflib.SequenceMatcher gets a new parameter, autojunk, which

can be set to False to turn off the previously undocumented 'popularity'

heuristic. Patch by Terry Reedy and Eli Bendersky

- Issue #8797: urllib2 does a retry for Basic Authentication failure instead of

falling into recursion.

- Issue #1194222: email.utils.parsedate now returns RFC2822 compliant four

character years even if the message contains RFC822 two character years.

- Issue #8750: Fixed MutableSet's methods to correctly handle

reflexive operations, namely x -= x and x ^= x.

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

error handling when accepting a new connection.

- Issue #658749: asyncore's connect() method now correctly interprets winsock

errors.

- Issue #9501: Fixed logging regressions in cleanup code.

- Issue #9214: Set operations on KeysView or ItemsView in the collections

module now correctly return a set. (Patch by Eli Bendersky.)

- Issue #9617: Signals received during a low-level write operation aren't

ignored by the buffered IO layer anymore.

- Issue #2521: Use weakrefs on for caching in the abc module, so that classes

are not held onto after they are deleted elsewhere.

- Issue #9626: the view methods for collections.OrderedDict() were returning

the unordered versions inherited from dict. Those methods are now

overridden to provide ordered views.

- Issue #8688: MANIFEST files created by distutils now include a magic

comment indicating they are generated. Manually maintained MANIFESTs

without this marker will not be overwritten or removed.

- Issue #7467: when reading a file from a ZIP archive, its CRC is checked

and a BadZipfile error is raised if it doesn't match (as used to be the

case in Python 2.5 and earlier).

- Issue #9550: a BufferedReader could issue an additional read when the

original read request had been satisfied, which could block indefinitely

when the underlying raw IO channel was e.g. a socket. Report and original

patch by Jason V. Miller.

- Issue #9551: Don't raise TypeError when setting the value to None for

SafeConfigParser instances constructed with allow_no_value == True.

- Issue #6915: Under Windows, os.listdir() didn't release the Global

Interpreter Lock around all system calls. Original patch by Ryan Kelly.

- Issue #3757: thread-local objects now support cyclic garbage collection.

Thread-local objects involved in reference cycles will be deallocated

timely by the cyclic GC, even if the underlying thread is still running.

- Issue #6231: Fix xml.etree.ElementInclude to include the tail of the

current node.

- Issue #6869: Fix a refcount problem in the _ctypes extension.

- Issue5504 - ctypes should now work with systems where mmap can't be

PROT_WRITE and PROT_EXEC.

- Fix Issue8280 - urllib2's Request method will remove fragements in the url.

This is how it is supposed to work, wget and curl do the same. Previous

behavior was wrong.

- Issue #2944: asyncore doesn't handle connection refused correctly.

- Issue #3196: email header decoding is now forgiving if an RFC2047

encoded word encoded in base64 is lacking padding.

- Issue #9444: Argparse now uses the first element of prefix_chars as

the option character for the added 'h/help' option if prefix_chars

does not contain a '-', instead of raising an error.

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

- Issue #9428: Fix running scripts with the profile/cProfile modules from

the command line.

- Issue #7781: Fix restricting stats by entry counts in the pstats

interactive browser.

- Issue #9209: Do not crash in the pstats interactive browser on invalid

regular expressions.

- Issue #7372: Fix pstats regression when stripping paths from profile

data generated with the profile module.

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

entries, consider the first one.

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

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

- 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 #9448: Fix a leak of OS resources (mutexes or semaphores) when

re-initializing a buffered IO object by calling its ``__init__`` method.

- 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 #7395: Fix tracebacks in pstats interactive browser.

- Issue #8230: Fix Lib/test/sortperf.py.

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

string when Unicode was previously output.

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

utf-16 incremental encoders.

- Issue #7113: Speed up loading in ConfigParser. Patch by Łukasz Langa.

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

parameters.

- Issue #9032: XML-RPC client retries the request on EPIPE error. The EPIPE

error occurs when the server closes the socket and the client sends a big

XML-RPC request.

- Issue #5542: Remove special logic that closes HTTPConnection socket on EPIPE.

- 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 #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 #9161: Fix regression in optparse's acceptance of unicode

strings in add_option calls.

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

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

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

- Issue #9315: Fix for the trace module to record correct class name

for tracing methods.

Extension Modules

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

- Issue #9054: Fix a crash occurring when using the pyexpat module

with expat version 2.0.1.

- Issue #10003: Allow handling of SIGBREAK on Windows. Fixes a regression

introduced by issue #9324.

- Issue #8734: Avoid crash in msvcrt.get_osfhandle() when an invalid file

descriptor is provided. Patch by Pascal Chambon.

- Issue #7736: Release the GIL around calls to opendir() and closedir()

in the posix module. Patch by Marcin Bachry.

- As a result of issue #2521, the _weakref module is now compiled into the

interpreter by default.

- Issue #9324: Add parameter validation to signal.signal on Windows in order

to prevent crashes.

- Issue #9526: Remove some outdated (int) casts that were preventing

the array module from working correctly with arrays of more than

2**31 elements.

- Fix memory leak in ssl._ssl._test_decode_cert.

- Issue #8065: Fix memory leak in readline module (from failure to

free the result of history_get_history_state()).

- Issue #9450: Fix memory leak in readline.replace_history_item and

readline.remove_history_item for readline version >= 5.0.

- Issue #8105: Validate file descriptor passed to mmap.mmap on Windows.

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

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

Tools/Demos

-----------

- Issue #7287: Demo/imputil/knee.py was removed.

- Issue #9188: The gdb extension now handles correctly narrow (UCS2) as well

as wide (UCS4) unicode builds for both the host interpreter (embedded

inside gdb) and the interpreter under test.

Build

-----

- Issue #8852: Allow the socket module to build on OpenSolaris.

- Issue #10054: Some platforms provide uintptr_t in inttypes.h. Patch by

Akira Kitada.

- Issue #10055: Make json C89-compliant in UCS4 mode.

- Issue #1633863: Don't ignore $CC under AIX.

- Issue #9810: Compile bzip2 source files in python's project file

directly. It used to be built with bzip2's makefile.

- Issue #941346: Improve the build process under AIX and allow Python to

be built as a shared library. Patch by Sébastien Sablé.

- Issue #4026: Make the fcntl extension build under AIX. Patch by Sébastien

Sablé.

- Issue #3101: Helper functions _add_one_to_index_C() and

_add_one_to_index_F() become _Py_add_one_to_index_C() and

_Py_add_one_to_index_F(), respectively.

- Issue #9700: define HAVE_BROKEN_POSIX_SEMAPHORES under AIX 6.x. Patch by

Sébastien Sablé.

- Issue #9280: Make sharedinstall depend on sharedmods.

- Issue #9275: The OSX installer once again installs links to binaries in

``/usr/local/bin``.

- Issue #9392: A framework build on OSX will once again use a versioned name

of the ``2to3`` tool, that is you can use ``2to3-2.7`` to select the Python

2.7 edition of 2to3.

- Issue #9701: The MacOSX installer can patch the shell profile to ensure that

the "bin" directory inside the framework is on the shell's search path. This

feature now also supports the ZSH shell.

- Issue #7473: avoid link errors when building a framework with a different

set of architectures than the one that is currently installed.

Tests

-----

- Issue #9978: Wait until subprocess completes initialization. (Win32KillTests

in test_os)

- Issue #9894: Do not hardcode ENOENT in test_subprocess.

- Issue #9323: Make test.regrtest.__file__ absolute, this was not always the

case when running profile or trace, for example.

- Issue #9315: Added tests for the trace module. Patch by Eli Bendersky.

- Strengthen test_unicode with explicit type checking for assertEqual tests.

- Issue #8857: Provide a test case for socket.getaddrinfo.

- Issue #7564: Skip test_ioctl if another process is attached to /dev/tty.

- Issue #8433: Fix test_curses failure with newer versions of ncurses.

- Issue #9496: Provide a test suite for the rlcompleter module. Patch by

Michele Orrù.

- Issue #8605: Skip test_gdb if Python is compiled with optimizations.

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

Documentation

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

- Issue #9817: Add expat COPYING file; add expat, libffi and expat licenses

to Doc/license.rst.

- Issue #9524: Document that two CTRL* signals are meant for use only

with os.kill.

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

only.

- Issue #7829: Document in dis that bytecode is an implementation detail.

What's New in Python 2.7?

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

*Release date: 2010-07-03*

Core and Builtins

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

- Prevent assignment to set literals.

Library

-------

- Issue #1868: Eliminate subtle timing issues in thread-local objects by

getting rid of the cached copy of thread-local attribute dictionary.

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

Extension Modules

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

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

on an OpenSSL structure.

What's New in Python 2.7 release candidate 2?

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

*Release date: 2010-06-20*

Core and Builtins

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

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

- Issue #8202: Previous change to ``sys.argv[0]`` handling for -m command line

option reverted due to unintended side effects on handling of ``sys.path``.

See tracker issue for details.

- 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).

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

too large.

Build

-----

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

Library

-------

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

raises an exception.

- Issue #8959: fix regression caused by using unmodified libffi

library on Windows. ctypes does now again check the stack before

and after calling foreign functions.

- Issue #8720: fix regression caused by fix for #4050 by making getsourcefile

smart enough to find source files in the linecache.

- Issue #8986: math.erfc was incorrectly raising OverflowError for

values between -27.3 and -30.0 on some platforms.

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

- Issue #8948: cleanup functions and class / module setups and teardowns are

now honored in unittest debug methods.

Documentation

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

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

distutils' bdist_wininst. Patch by Anatoly Techtonik.

Misc

----

- Issue #8362: Add maintainers.rst: list of module maintainers

What's New in Python 2.7 Release Candidate 1?

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

*Release date: 2010-06-05*

Core and Builtins

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

- 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 #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 #8748: Fix two issues with comparisons between complex and integer

objects. (1) The comparison could incorrectly return True in some cases

(2**53+1 == complex(2**53) == 2**53), breaking transivity of equality.

(2) The comparison raised an OverflowError for large integers, leading

to unpredictable exceptions when combining integers and complex objects

in sets or dicts.

- Issue #5211: Implicit coercion for the complex type is now completely

removed. (Coercion for arithmetic operations was already removed in 2.7

alpha 4, but coercion for rich comparisons was accidentally left in.)

- 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 #8868: Fix that ensures that python scripts have access to the

Window Server again in a framework build on MacOSX 10.5 or earlier.

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 #8302: SkipTest in unittest.TestCase.setUpClass or setUpModule is now

reported as a skip rather than an error.

- Issue #8351: Excessively large diffs due to

unittest.TestCase.assertSequenceEqual are no longer included in failure

reports.

- Issue #8899: time.struct_time now has class and atribute docstrings.

- Issue #4487: email now accepts as charset aliases all codec aliases

accepted by the codecs module.

- Issue #6470: Drop UNC prefix in FixTk.

- 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 #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 #8016: Add the CP858 codec.

- 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 #8759: Fix user paths in sysconfig for posix and os2 schemes.

- Issue #1285086: Speed up ``urllib.quote()`` and urllib.unquote for simple

cases.

- Issue #8688: Distutils now recalculates MANIFEST everytime.

- Issue #5099: The ``__del__()`` method of ``subprocess.Popen`` (and the methods

it calls) referenced global objects, causing errors to pop up during

interpreter shutdown.

Extension Modules

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

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

the curses module must be linked against ncurses as well. Otherwise it

is not safe to load both the readline and curses modules in an application.

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

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

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

overflow checks in the ``audioop`` module.

Tests

-----

- Issue #8889: test_support.transient_internet rewritten so that the new

checks also work on FreeBSD, which lacks EAI_NODATA.

- Issue #8835: test_support.transient_internet() catches gaierror(EAI_NONAME)

and gaierror(EAI_NODATA)

- Issue #7449: Skip test_socketserver if threading support is disabled

- On darwin, ``test_site`` assumed that a framework build was being used,

leading to a failure where four directories were expected for site-packages

instead of two in a non-framework build.

Build

-----

- Display installer warning that Windows 2000 won't be supported in future

releases.

- Issues #1759169, #8864: Drop _XOPEN_SOURCE on Solaris, define it for

multiprocessing only.

Tools/Demos

-----------

- Issue #5464: Implement plural forms in msgfmt.py.

What's New in Python 2.7 beta 2?

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

*Release date: 2010-05-08*

Core and Builtins

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

- Run Clang 2.7's static analyzer for ``Objects/`` and ``Python/``.

- 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 #8202: ``sys.argv[0]`` is now set to '-m' instead of '-c' when searching

for the module file to be executed with the -m command line option.

- Issue #7319: When -Q is used, do not silence DeprecationWarning.

- Issue #7332: Remove the 16KB stack-based buffer in

``PyMarshal_ReadLastObjectFromFile``, which doesn't bring any noticeable

benefit compared to the dynamic memory allocation fallback. Patch by

Charles-François Natali.

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

passed to bytearray.

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

- Issue #8404: Fix set operations on dictionary views.

- Issue #8084: PEP 370 now conforms to system conventions for framework builds

on MacOS X. That is, ``python setup.py install --user`` will install into

``~/Library/Python/2.7`` instead of ``~/.local``.

Library

-------

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

zlib itself doesn't give any detailed explanation.

- 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. The cheap inheritance has been

deprecated.

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

fills. Patch by Tres Seaver.

- Issue #7755: Use an unencumbered audio file for tests.

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

parent and any children created using ``os.fork`` on Mac OS 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. Patch by Pascal Chambon.

- Issue #8576: logging updated to remove usage of find_unused_port().

- 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 #7192: ``webbrowser.get("firefox")`` now works on Mac OS X, as does

``webbrowser.get("safari")``.

- 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: Fix http HEAD request when the transfer encoding is chunked. It

should correctly return an empty response now.

- Issue #7490: To facilitate sharing of doctests between 2.x and 3.x test

suites, the ``IGNORE_EXCEPTION_DETAIL`` directive now also ignores the module

location of the raised exception. Based on initial patch by Lennart Regebro.

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

the certificate footer. Patch by Kyle VanderBeek.

- Issue #8546: Reject None given as the buffering argument to ``_pyio.open()``.

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

Ratnakumar.

- Issue #6656: Fix locale.format_string to handle escaped percents and mappings.

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

- 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 #8451: Syslog module now uses basename(sys.argv[0]) instead of the

string "python" as the *ident*. openlog() arguments are all optional and

keywords.

- 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 #8437: Fix test_gdb failures, patch written by Dave Malcolm