+++++++++++

Python News

+++++++++++

What's New in Python 3.2?

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

*Release date: 20-Feb-2011*

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #11249: Fix potential crashes when using the limited API.

Build

-----

- Issue #11222: Fix non-framework shared library build on Mac OS X.

- Issue #11184: Fix large-file support on AIX.

- Issue #941346: Fix broken shared library build on AIX.

Documentation

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

- Issue #10709: Add updated AIX notes in Misc/README.AIX.

What's New in Python 3.2 Release Candidate 3?

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

*Release date: 13-Feb-2011*

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #11134: Add missing fields to typeslots.h.

- Issue #11135: Remove redundant doc field from PyType_Spec.

- Issue #11067: Add PyType_GetFlags, to support PyUnicode_Check in the limited

ABI.

- Issue #11118: Fix bogus export of None in python3.dll.

Library

-------

- Issue #11116: any error during addition of a message to a mailbox now causes a

rollback, instead of leaving the mailbox partially modified.

- Issue #11132: Fix passing of "optimize" parameter when recursing in

compileall.compile_dir().

- Issue #11110: Fix a potential decref of a NULL in sqlite3.

- Issue #8275: Fix passing of callback arguments with ctypes under Win64. Patch

by Stan Mihai.

Build

-----

- Issue #11079: The /Applications/Python x.x folder created by the Mac OS X

installers now includes a link to the installed documentation and no longer

includes an Extras directory. The Tools directory is now installed in the

framework under share/doc.

- Issue #11121: Fix building with --enable-shared.

Tests

-----

- Issue #10971: test_zipimport_support is once again compatible with the refleak

hunter feature of test.regrtest.

What's New in Python 3.2 Release Candidate 2?

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

*Release date: 30-Jan-2011*

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #10451: memoryview objects could allow to mutate a readable buffer.

Initial patch by Ross Lagerwall.

Library

-------

- Issue #9124: mailbox now accepts binary input and reads and writes mailbox

files in binary mode, using the email package's binary support to parse

arbitrary email messages. StringIO and text file input is deprecated,

and string input fails early if non-ASCII characters are used, where

previously it would fail when the email was processed in a later step.

- Issue #10845: Mitigate the incompatibility between the multiprocessing

module on Windows and the use of package, zipfile or directory execution

by special casing main modules that actually *are* called __main__.py.

- Issue #11045: Protect logging call against None argument.

- Issue #11052: Correct IDLE menu accelerators on Mac OS X for Save

commands.

- Issue #11053: Fix IDLE "Syntax Error" windows to behave as in 2.x,

preventing a confusing hung appearance on OS X with the windows

obscured.

- Issue #10940: Workaround an IDLE hang on Mac OS X 10.6 when using the

menu accelerators for Open Module, Go to Line, and New Indent Width.

The accelerators still work but no longer appear in the menu items.

- Issue #10989: Fix a crash on SSLContext.load_verify_locations(None, True).

- Issue #11020: Command-line pyclbr was broken because of missing 2-to-3

conversion.

- Issue #11019: Fixed BytesGenerator so that it correctly handles a Message

with a None body.

- Issue #11014: Make 'filter' argument in tarfile.Tarfile.add() into a

keyword-only argument. The preceding positional argument was deprecated,

so it made no sense to add filter as a positional argument.

- Issue #11004: Repaired edge case in deque.count().

- Issue #10974: IDLE no longer crashes if its recent files list includes files

with non-ASCII characters in their path names.

- Have hashlib.algorithms_available and hashlib.algorithms_guaranteed both

return sets instead of one returning a tuple and the other a frozenset.

- Issue #10987: Fix the recursion limit handling in the _pickle module.

- Issue #10983: Fix several bugs making tunnel requests in http.client.

- Issue #10955: zipimport uses ASCII encoding instead of cp437 to decode

filenames, at bootstrap, if the codec registry is not ready yet. It is still

possible to have non-ASCII filenames using the Unicode flag (UTF-8 encoding)

for all file entries in the ZIP file.

- Issue #10949: Improved robustness of rotating file handlers.

- Issue #10955: Fix a potential crash when trying to mmap() a file past its

length. Initial patch by Ross Lagerwall.

- Issue #10898: Allow compiling the posix module when the C library defines

a symbol named FSTAT.

- Issue #10980: the HTTP server now encodes headers with iso-8859-1 (latin1)

encoding. This is the preferred encoding of PEP 3333 and the base encoding

of HTTP 1.1.

- To match the behaviour of HTTP server, the HTTP client library now also

encodes headers with iso-8859-1 (latin1) encoding. It was already doing

that for incoming headers which makes this behaviour now consistent in

both incoming and outgoing direction.

- Issue #9509: argparse now properly handles IOErrors raised by

argparse.FileType.

- Issue #10961: The new pydoc server now better handles exceptions raised

during request handling.

- Issue #10680: Fix mutually exclusive arguments for argument groups in

argparse.

Build

-----

- Issue #11054: Allow Mac OS X installer builds to again work on 10.5 with

the system-provided Python.

What's New in Python 3.2 Release Candidate 1

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

*Release date: 16-Jan-2011*

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #10889: range indexing and slicing now works correctly on ranges with

a length that exceeds sys.maxsize.

- Issue #10892: Don't segfault when trying to delete __abstractmethods__ from a

class.

- Issue #8020: Avoid a crash where the small objects allocator would read

non-Python managed memory while it is being modified by another thread. Patch

by Matt Bandy.

- Issue #10841: On Windows, set the binary mode on stdin, stdout, stderr and all

io.FileIO objects (to not translate newlines, \r\n <=> \n). The Python parser

translates newlines (\r\n => \n).

- Remove buffer API from stable ABI for now, see #10181.

- Issue #8651: PyArg_Parse*() functions raise an OverflowError if the file

doesn't have PY_SSIZE_T_CLEAN define and the size doesn't fit in an int

(length bigger than 2^31-1 bytes).

- Issue #9015, #9611: FileIO.readinto(), FileIO.write(), os.write() and

stdprinter.write() clamp the length to 2^31-1 on Windows.

- Issue #8278: On Windows and with a NTFS filesystem, os.stat() and os.utime()

can now handle dates after 2038.

- Issue #10780: PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and

PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename() decode the filename from the

filesystem encoding instead of UTF-8.

- Issue #10779: PyErr_WarnExplicit() decodes the filename from the filesystem

encoding instead of UTF-8.

- Add sys.flags attribute for the new -q command-line option.

Library

-------

- Issue #10916: mmap should not segfault when a file is mapped using 0 as length

and a non-zero offset, and an attempt to read past the end of file is made

(IndexError is raised instead). Patch by Ross Lagerwall.

- Issue #10907: Warn OS X 10.6 IDLE users to use ActiveState Tcl/Tk 8.5, rather

than the currently problematic Apple-supplied one, when running with the

64-/32-bit installer variant.

- Issue #4953: cgi.FieldStorage and cgi.parse() parse the request as bytes, not

as unicode, and accept binary files. Add encoding and errors attributes to

cgi.FieldStorage. Patch written by Pierre Quentel (with many inputs by Glenn

Linderman).

- Add encoding and errors arguments to urllib.parse_qs() and urllib.parse_qsl().

- Issue #10899: No function type annotations in the standard library. Removed

function type annotations from _pyio.py.

- Issue #10875: Update Regular Expression HOWTO; patch by 'SilentGhost'.

- Issue #10872: The repr() of TextIOWrapper objects now includes the mode

if available.

- Issue #10869: Fixed bug where ast.increment_lineno modified the root node

twice.

- Issue #5871: email.header.Header.encode now raises an error if any

continuation line in the formatted value has no leading white space and looks

like a header. Since Generator uses Header to format all headers, this check

is made for all headers in any serialized message at serialization time. This

provides protection against header injection attacks.

- Issue #10859: Make ``contextlib.GeneratorContextManager`` officially

private by renaming it to ``_GeneratorContextManager``.

- Issue #10042: Fixed the total_ordering decorator to handle cross-type

comparisons that could lead to infinite recursion.

- Issue #10686: the email package now :rfc:`2047`\ -encodes headers with

non-ASCII bytes (parsed by a Bytes Parser) when doing conversion to 7bit-clean

presentation, instead of replacing them with ?s.

- email.header.Header was incorrectly encoding folding white space when

rfc2047-encoding header values with embedded newlines, leaving them without

folding whitespace. It now uses the continuation_ws, as it does for

continuation lines that it creates itself.

- Issue #1777412, #10827: Changed the rules for 2-digit years. The

time.asctime(), time.ctime() and time.strftime() functions will now format

any year when ``time.accept2dyear`` is False and will accept years >= 1000

otherwise. ``time.mktime`` and ``time.strftime`` now accept full range

supported by the OS. With Visual Studio or on Solaris, the year is limited to

the range [1; 9999]. Conversion of 2-digit years to 4-digit is deprecated.

- Issue #7858: Raise an error properly when os.utime() fails under Windows

on an existing file.

- Issue #3839: wsgiref should not override a Content-Length header set by

the application. Initial patch by Clovis Fabricio.

- Issue #10492: bdb.Bdb.run() only traces the execution of the code, not the

compilation (if the input is a string).

- Issue #7995: When calling accept() on a socket with a timeout, the returned

socket is now always blocking, regardless of the operating system.

- Issue #10756: atexit normalizes the exception before displaying it. Patch by

Andreas Stührk.

- Issue #10790: email.header.Header.append's charset logic now works correctly

for charsets whose output codec is different from its input codec.

- Issue #10819: SocketIO.name property returns -1 when its closed, instead of

raising a ValueError, to fix repr().

- Issue #8650: zlib.compress() and zlib.decompress() raise an OverflowError if

the input buffer length doesn't fit into an unsigned int (length bigger than

2^32-1 bytes).

- Issue #6643: Reinitialize locks held within the threading module after fork to

avoid a potential rare deadlock or crash on some platforms.

- Issue #10806, issue #9905: Fix subprocess pipes when some of the standard file

descriptors (0, 1, 2) are closed in the parent process. Initial patch by Ross

Lagerwall.

- `unittest.TestCase` can be instantiated without a method name; for simpler

exploration from the interactive interpreter.

- Issue #10798: Reject supporting concurrent.futures if the system has too

few POSIX semaphores.

- Issue #10807: Remove base64, bz2, hex, quopri, rot13, uu and zlib codecs from

the codec aliases. They are still accessible via codecs.lookup().

- Issue #10801: In zipfile, support different encodings for the header and the

filenames.

- Issue #6285: IDLE no longer crashes on missing help file; patch by Scott

David Daniels.

- Fix collections.OrderedDict.setdefault() so that it works in subclasses that

define __missing__().

- Issue #10786: unittest.TextTestRunner default stream no longer bound at import

time. `sys.stderr` now looked up at instantiation time. Fix contributed by

Mark Roddy.

- Issue #10753: Characters ';','=' and ',' in the PATH_INFO environment variable

won't be quoted when the URI is constructed by the wsgiref.util 's request_uri

method. According to RFC 3986, these characters can be a part of params in

PATH component of URI and need not be quoted.

- Issue #10738: Fix webbrowser.Opera.raise_opts.

- Issue #9824: SimpleCookie now encodes , and ; in values to cater to how

browsers actually parse cookies.

- Issue #9333: os.symlink now available regardless of user privileges. The

function now raises OSError on Windows >=6.0 when the user is unable to create

symbolic links. XP and 2003 still raise NotImplementedError.

- Issue #10783: struct.pack() no longer implicitly encodes unicode to UTF-8.

- Issue #10730: Add SVG mime types to mimetypes module.

- Issue #10768: Make the Tkinter ScrolledText widget work again.

- Issue #10777: Fix "dictionary changed size during iteration" bug in

ElementTree register_namespace().

- Issue #10626: test_logging now preserves logger disabled states.

- Issue #10774: test_logging now removes temp files created during tests.

- Issue #5258/#10642: if site.py encounters a .pth file that generates an error,

it now prints the filename, line number, and traceback to stderr and skips

the rest of that individual file, instead of stopping processing entirely.

- Issue #10763: subprocess.communicate() closes stdout and stderr if both are

pipes (bug specific to Windows).

- Issue #1693546: fix email.message RFC 2231 parameter encoding to be in better

compliance (no "s around encoded values).

- Improved the diff message in the unittest module's assertCountEqual().

- Issue #1155362: email.utils.parsedate_tz now handles a missing space before

the '-' of a timezone field as well as before a '+'.

- Issue #4871: The zipfile module now gives a more useful error message if

an attempt is made to use a string to specify the archive password.

- Issue #10750: The ``raw`` attribute of buffered IO objects is now read-only.

- Deprecated assertDictContainsSubset() in the unittest module.

C-API

-----

- Issue #10913: Deprecate misleading functions PyEval_AcquireLock() and

PyEval_ReleaseLock(). The thread-state aware APIs should be used instead.

- Issue #10333: Remove ancient GC API, which has been deprecated since Python

2.2.

Build

-----

- Issue #10843: Update third-party library versions used in OS X 32-bit

installer builds: bzip2 1.0.6, readline 6.1.2, SQLite 3.7.4 (with FTS3/FTS4

and RTREE enabled), and ncursesw 5.5 (wide-char support enabled).

- Issue #10820: Fix OS X framework installs to support version-specific

scripts (#10679).

- Issue #7716: Under Solaris, don't assume existence of /usr/xpg4/bin/grep in

the configure script but use $GREP instead. Patch by Fabian Groffen.

- Issue #10475: Don't hardcode compilers for LDSHARED/LDCXXSHARED on NetBSD

and DragonFly BSD. Patch by Nicolas Joly.

- Issue #10679: The "idle", "pydoc" and "2to3" scripts are now installed with

a version-specific suffix on "make altinstall".

- Issue #10655: Fix the build on PowerPC on Linux with GCC when building with

timestamp profiling (--with-tsc): the preprocessor test for the PowerPC

support now looks for "__powerpc__" as well as "__ppc__": the latter seems to

only be present on OS X; the former is the correct one for Linux with GCC.

Tools/Demos

-----------

- Issue #10843: Install the Tools directory on OS X in the applications Extras

(/Applications/Python 3.n/Extras/) where the Demo directory had previous been

installed.

- Issue #7962: The Demo directory is gone. Most of the old and unmaintained

demos have been removed, others integrated in documentation or a new

Tools/demo subdirectory.

- Issue #10502: Addition of the unittestgui tool. Originally by Steve Purcell.

Updated for test discovery by Mark Roddy and Python 3 compatibility by Brian

Curtin.

Tests

-----

- Issue #10822: Fix test_posix:test_getgroups failure under Solaris. Patch

by Ross Lagerwall.

- Make the --coverage flag work for test.regrtest.

- Issue #1677694: Refactor and improve test_timeout. Original patch by

Björn Lindqvist.

- Issue #5485: Add tests for the UseForeignDTD method of expat parser objects.

Patch by Jean-Paul Calderone and Sandro Tosi.

- Issue #6293: Have regrtest.py echo back sys.flags. This is done by default in

whole runs and enabled selectively using ``--header`` when running an explicit

list of tests. Original patch by Collin Winter.

What's New in Python 3.2 Beta 2?

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

*Release date: 19-Dec-2010*

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #8844: Regular and recursive lock acquisitions can now be interrupted

by signals on platforms using pthreads. Patch by Reid Kleckner.

- Issue #4236: PyModule_Create2 now checks the import machinery directly

rather than the Py_IsInitialized flag, avoiding a Fatal Python

error in certain circumstances when an import is done in __del__.

- Issue #5587: add a repr to dict_proxy objects. Patch by David Stanek and

Daniel Urban.

Library

-------

- Issue #3243: Support iterable bodies in httplib. Patch Contributions by

Xuanji Li and Chris AtLee.

- Issue #10611: SystemExit exception will no longer kill a unittest run.

- Issue #9857: It is now possible to skip a test in a setUp, tearDown or clean

up function.

- Issue #10573: use actual/expected consistently in unittest methods.

The order of the args of assertCountEqual is also changed.

- Issue #9286: email.utils.parseaddr no longer concatenates blank-separated

words in the local part of email addresses, thereby preserving the input.

- Issue #6791: Limit header line length (to 65535 bytes) in http.client

and http.server, to avoid denial of services from the other party.

- Issue #10404: Use ctl-button-1 on OSX for the context menu in Idle.

- Issue #9907: Fix tab handling on OSX when using editline by calling

rl_initialize first, then setting our custom defaults, then reading .editrc.

- Issue #4188: Avoid creating dummy thread objects when logging operations

from the threading module (with the internal verbose flag activated).

- Issue #10711: Remove HTTP 0.9 support from http.client. The ``strict``

parameter to HTTPConnection and friends is deprecated.

- Issue #9721: Fix the behavior of urljoin when the relative url starts with a

';' character. Patch by Wes Chow.

- Issue #10714: Limit length of incoming request in http.server to 65536 bytes

for security reasons. Initial patch by Ross Lagerwall.

- Issue #9558: Fix distutils.command.build_ext with VS 8.0.

- Issue #10667: Fast path for collections.Counter().

- Issue #10695: passing the port as a string value to telnetlib no longer

causes debug mode to fail.

- Issue #1078919: add_header now automatically RFC2231 encodes parameters

that contain non-ascii values.

- Issue #10188 (partial resolution): tempfile.TemporaryDirectory emits

a warning on sys.stderr rather than throwing a misleading exception

if cleanup fails due to nulling out of modules during shutdown.

Also avoids an AttributeError when mkdtemp call fails and issues

a ResourceWarning on implicit cleanup via __del__.

- Issue #10107: Warn about unsaved files in IDLE on OSX.

- Issue #7213: subprocess.Popen's default for close_fds has been changed.

It is now True in most cases other than on Windows when input, output or

error handles are provided.

- Issue #6559: subprocess.Popen has a new pass_fds parameter (actually

added in 3.2beta1) to allow specifying a specific list of file descriptors

to keep open in the child process.

- Issue #1731717: Fixed the problem where subprocess.wait() could cause an

OSError exception when The OS had been told to ignore SIGCLD in our process

or otherwise not wait for exiting child processes.

Tests

-----

- Issue #775964: test_grp now skips YP/NIS entries instead of failing when

encountering them.

Tools/Demos

-----------

- Issue #6075: IDLE on Mac OS X now works with both Carbon AquaTk and

Cocoa AquaTk.

- Issue #10710: ``Misc/setuid-prog.c`` is removed from the source tree.

- Issue #10706: Remove outdated script runtests.sh. Either ``make test``

or ``python -m test`` should be used instead.

Build

-----

- The Windows build now uses Tcl/Tk 8.5.9 and sqlite3 3.7.4.

- Issue #9234: argparse supports alias names for subparsers.

What's New in Python 3.2 Beta 1?

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

*Release date: 05-Dec-2010*

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #10630: Return dict views from the dict proxy keys()/values()/items()

methods.

- Issue #10596: Fix float.__mod__ to have the same behaviour as float.__divmod__

with respect to signed zeros. -4.0 % 4.0 should be 0.0, not -0.0.

- Issue #1772833: Add the -q command-line option to suppress copyright and

version output in interactive mode.

- Provide an *optimize* parameter in the built-in compile() function.

- Fixed several corner case issues on Windows in os.stat/os.lstat related to

reparse points.

- PEP 384 (Defining a Stable ABI) is implemented.

- Issue #2690: Range objects support negative indices and slicing.

- Issue #9915: Speed up sorting with a key.

- Issue #8685: Speed up set difference ``a - b`` when source set ``a`` is much

larger than operand ``b``. Patch by Andrew Bennetts.

- Issue #10518: Bring back the callable() builtin.

- Issue #7094: Added alternate formatting (specified by '#') to ``__format__``

method of float, complex, and Decimal. This allows more precise control over

when decimal points are displayed.

- Issue #10474: range.count() should return integers.

- Issue #1574217: isinstance now catches only AttributeError, rather than

masking all errors.

Library

-------

- logging: added "handler of last resort". See http://bit.ly/last-resort-handler

- test.support: Added TestHandler and Matcher classes for better support of

assertions about logging.

- Issue #4391: Use proper plural forms in argparse.

- Issue #10601: sys.displayhook uses 'backslashreplace' error handler on

UnicodeEncodeError.

- Add the "display" and "undisplay" pdb commands.

- Issue #7245: Add a SIGINT handler in pdb that allows to break a program again

after a "continue" command.

- Add the "interact" pdb command.

- Issue #7905: Actually respect the keyencoding parameter to shelve.Shelf.

- Issue #1569291: Speed up array.repeat().

- Provide an interface to set the optimization level of compilation in

py_compile, compileall and zipfile.PyZipFile.

- Issue #7904: Changes to urllib.parse.urlsplit to handle schemes as defined by

RFC3986. Anything before :// is considered a scheme and is followed by an

authority (or netloc) and by '/' led path, which is optional.

- Issue #6045: dbm.gnu databases now support get() and setdefault() methods.

- Issue #10620: `python -m unittest` can accept file paths instead of module

names for running specific tests.

- Issue #9424: Deprecate the `unittest.TestCase` methods `assertEquals`,

`assertNotEquals`, `assertAlmostEquals`, `assertNotAlmostEquals` and `assert_`

and replace them with the correct methods in the Python test suite.

- Issue #10272: The ssl module now raises socket.timeout instead of a generic

SSLError on socket timeouts.

- Issue #10528: Allow translators to reorder placeholders in localizable

messages from argparse.

- Issue #10497: Fix incorrect use of gettext in argparse.

- Issue #10478: Reentrant calls inside buffered IO objects (for example by

way of a signal handler) now raise a RuntimeError instead of freezing the

current process.

- logging: Added getLogRecordFactory/setLogRecordFactory with docs and tests.

- Issue #10549: Fix pydoc traceback when text-documenting certain classes.

- Issue #2001: New HTML server with enhanced Web page features. Patch by Ron

Adam.

- Issue #10360: In WeakSet, do not raise TypeErrors when testing for membership

of non-weakrefable objects.

- Issue #940286: pydoc.Helper.help() ignores input/output init parameters.

- Issue #1745035: Add a command size and data size limit to smtpd.py, to prevent

DoS attacks. Patch by Savio Sena.

- Issue #4925: Add filename to error message when executable can't be found in

subprocess.

- Issue #10391: Don't dereference invalid memory in error messages in the ast

module.

- Issue #10027: st_nlink was not being set on Windows calls to os.stat or

os.lstat. Patch by Hirokazu Yamamoto.

- Issue #9333: Expose os.symlink only when the SeCreateSymbolicLinkPrivilege is

held by the user's account, i.e., when the function can actually be used.

- Issue #8879: Add os.link support for Windows.

- Issue #7911: ``unittest.TestCase.longMessage`` defaults to True for improved

failure messages by default. Patch by Mark Roddy.

- Issue #1486713: HTMLParser now has an optional tolerant mode where it tries to

guess at the correct parsing of invalid html.

- Issue #10554: Add context manager support to subprocess.Popen objects.

- Issue #8989: email.utils.make_msgid now has a domain parameter that can

override the domain name used in the generated msgid.

- Issue #9299: Add exist_ok parameter to os.makedirs to suppress the 'File

exists' exception when a target directory already exists with the specified

mode. Patch by Ray Allen.

- Issue #9573: os.fork() now works correctly when triggered as a side effect of

a module import.

- Issue #10464: netrc now correctly handles lines with embedded '#' characters.

- Added itertools.accumulate().

- Issue #4113: Added custom ``__repr__`` method to ``functools.partial``.

Original patch by Daniel Urban.

- Issue #10273: Rename `assertRegexpMatches` and `assertRaisesRegexp` to

`assertRegex` and `assertRaisesRegex`.

- Issue #10535: Enable silenced warnings in unittest by default.

- Issue #9873: The URL parsing functions in urllib.parse now accept ASCII byte

sequences as input in addition to character strings.

- Issue #10586: The statistics API for the new functools.lru_cache has been

changed to a single cache_info() method returning a named tuple.

- Issue #10323: itertools.islice() now consumes the minimum number of inputs

before stopping. Formerly, the final state of the underlying iterator was

undefined.

- Issue #10565: The collections.Iterator ABC now checks for both __iter__ and

__next__.

- Issue #10242: Fixed implementation of unittest.ItemsEqual and gave it a new

more informative name, unittest.CountEqual.

- Issue #10561: In pdb, clear the breakpoints by the breakpoint number.

- 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 #10534: in difflib, expose bjunk and bpopular sets; deprecate

undocumented and now redundant isbjunk and isbpopular methods.

- Issue #9846: zipfile is now correctly closing underlying file objects.

- Issue #10459: Update CJK character names to Unicode 6.0.

- Issue #4493: urllib.request 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 #10470: 'python -m unittest' will now run test discovery by default,

when no extra arguments have been provided.

- Issue #3709: BaseHTTPRequestHandler will buffer the headers and write to

output stream only when end_headers is invoked. This is a speedup and an

internal optimization. Patch by endian.

- Issue #10220: Added inspect.getgeneratorstate. Initial patch by Rodolpho

Eckhardt.

- Issue #10453: compileall now uses argparse instead of getopt, and thus

provides clean output when called with '-h'.

- Issue #8078: Add constants for higher baud rates in the termios module. Patch

by Rodolpho Eckhardt.

- Issue #10407: Fix two NameErrors in distutils.

- Issue #10371: Deprecated undocumented functions in the trace module.

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

end of the file.

- configparser: 100% test coverage.

- Issue #10499: configparser supports pluggable interpolation handlers. The

default classic interpolation handler is called BasicInterpolation. Another

interpolation handler added (ExtendedInterpolation) which supports the syntax

used by zc.buildout (e.g. interpolation between sections).

- configparser: the SafeConfigParser class has been renamed to ConfigParser.

The legacy ConfigParser class has been removed but its interpolation mechanism

is still available as LegacyInterpolation.

- configparser: Usage of RawConfigParser is now discouraged for new projects

in favor of ConfigParser(interpolation=None).

- Issue #1682942: configparser supports alternative option/value delimiters.

- Issue #5412: configparser supports mapping protocol access.

- Issue #9411: configparser supports specifying encoding for read operations.

- Issue #9421: configparser's getint(), getfloat() and getboolean() methods

accept vars and default arguments just like get() does.

- Issue #9452: configparser supports reading from strings and dictionaries

(thanks to the mapping protocol API, the latter can be used to copy data

between parsers).

- configparser: accepted INI file structure is now customizable, including

comment prefixes, name of the DEFAULT section, empty lines in multiline

values, and indentation.

- Issue 10326: unittest.TestCase instances can be pickled.

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

- Issue #9920: Skip tests for cmath.atan and cmath.atanh applied to complex

zeros on systems where the log1p function fails to respect the sign of zero.

This fixes a test failure on AIX.

- Issue #9732: Addition of getattr_static to the inspect module.

- Issue #10446: Module documentation generated by pydoc now links to a

version-specific online reference manual.

- Make the 'No module named' exception message from importlib consistent.

- Issue #10443: Add the SSLContext.set_default_verify_paths() method.

- Issue #10440: Support RUSAGE_THREAD as a constant in the resource module.

Patch by Robert Collins.

- Issue #10429: IMAP.starttls() stored the capabilities as bytes objects, rather

than strings.

C-API

-----

- Issue #10557: Added a new API function, PyUnicode_TransformDecimalToASCII(),

which transforms non-ASCII decimal digits in a Unicode string to their ASCII

equivalents.

- Issue #9518: Extend the PyModuleDef_HEAD_INIT macro to explicitly

zero-initialize all fields, fixing compiler warnings seen when building

extension modules with gcc with "-Wmissing-field-initializers" (implied by

"-W").

- Issue #10255: Fix reference leak in Py_InitializeEx(). Patch by Neil

Schemenauer.

- structseq.h is now included in Python.h.

- Loosen PyArg_ValidateKeywordArguments to allow dict subclasses.

Tests

-----

- regrtest.py once again ensures the test directory is removed from sys.path

when it is invoked directly as the __main__ module.

- `python -m test` can be used to run the test suite as well as `python -m

test.regrtest`.

- Do not fail test_socket when the IP address of the local hostname cannot be

looked up.

- Issue #8886: Use context managers throughout test_zipfile. Patch by Eric

Carstensen.

Build

-----

- Issue #10325: Fix two issues in the fallback definitions for PY_ULLONG_MAX and

PY_LLONG_MAX that made them unsuitable for use in preprocessor conditionals.

Documentation

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

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

What's New in Python 3.2 Alpha 4?

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

*Release date: 13-Nov-2010*

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #10372: Import the warnings module only after the IO library is

initialized, so as to avoid bootstrap issues with the '-W' option.

- Issue #10293: Remove obsolete field in the PyMemoryView structure, unused

undocumented value PyBUF_SHADOW, and strangely-looking code in

PyMemoryView_GetContiguous.

- Issue #6081: Add str.format_map(), similar to ``str.format(**mapping)``.

- If FileIO.__init__ fails, close the file descriptor.

- 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 #5437: A preallocated MemoryError instance should not keep traceback

data (including local variables caught in the stack trace) alive infinitely.

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

of the offending line.

- Issue #10089: Add support for arbitrary -X options on the command line. They

can be retrieved through a new attribute ``sys._xoptions``.

- Issue #4388: On Mac OS X, decode command line arguments from UTF-8, instead of

the locale encoding. If the LANG (and LC_ALL and LC_CTYPE) environment

variable is not set, the locale encoding is ISO-8859-1, whereas most programs

(including Python) expect UTF-8. Python already uses UTF-8 for the filesystem

encoding and to encode command line arguments on this OS.

- Issue #9713, #10114: Parser functions (e.g. PyParser_ASTFromFile) expect

filenames encoded to the filesystem encoding with the surrogateescape error

handler (to support undecodable bytes), instead of UTF-8 in strict mode.

- 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.

- Use locale encoding instead of UTF-8 to encode and decode filenames if

Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding is not set.

- Issue #10095: fp_setreadl() doesn't reopen the file, instead reuse the file

descriptor.

- Issue #9418: Moved private string methods ``_formatter_parser`` and

``_formatter_field_name_split`` into a new ``_string`` module.

- Issue #9992: Remove PYTHONFSENCODING environment variable.

Library

-------

- Issue #10465: fix broken delegating of attributes by gzip._PaddedFile.

- Issue #10356: Decimal.__hash__(-1) should return -2.

- Issue #1553375: logging: Added stack_info kwarg to display stack information.

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

- Fix Fraction.__hash__ so that Fraction.__hash__(-1) is -2. (See also issue

#10356.)

- Issue #4471: Add the IMAP.starttls() method to enable encryption on standard

IMAP4 connections. Original patch by Lorenzo M. Catucci.

- Issue #1466065: Add 'validate' option to base64.b64decode to raise an error if

there are non-base64 alphabet characters in the input.

- Issue #10386: Add __all__ to token module; this simplifies importing in

tokenize module and prevents leaking of private names through ``import *``.

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

M. Catucci.

- Fix IMAP.login() to work properly.

- Issue #9244: multiprocessing pool worker processes could terminate

unexpectedly if the return value of a task could not be pickled. Only the

``repr`` of such errors are now sent back, wrapped in an

``MaybeEncodingError`` exception.

- Issue #9244: The ``apply_async()`` and ``map_async()`` methods of

``multiprocessing.Pool`` now accepts a ``error_callback`` argument. This can

be a callback with the signature ``callback(exc)``, which will be called if

the target raises an exception.

- Issue #10022: The dictionary returned by the ``getpeercert()`` method of SSL

sockets now has additional items such as ``issuer`` and ``notBefore``.

- ``usenetrc`` is now false by default for NNTP objects.

- Issue #1926: Add support for NNTP over SSL on port 563, as well as STARTTLS.

Patch by Andrew Vant.

- Issue #10335: Add tokenize.open(), detect the file encoding using

tokenize.detect_encoding() and open it in read only mode.

- Issue #10321: Add support for binary data to smtplib.SMTP.sendmail, and a new

method send_message to send an email.message.Message object.

- Issue #6011: sysconfig and distutils.sysconfig use the surrogateescape error

handler to parse the Makefile file. Avoid a UnicodeDecodeError if the source

code directory name contains a non-ASCII character and the locale encoding is

ASCII.

- Issue #10329: The trace module writes reports using the input Python script

encoding, instead of the locale encoding. Patch written by Alexander

Belopolsky.

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

--enable-shared.

- 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 #10180: Pickling file objects is now explicitly forbidden, since

unpickling them produced nonsensical results.