+++++++++++ Python News +++++++++++ (editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.) What's New in Python 2.6 beta 1? ================================ *Release date: XX-June-2008* Core and Builtins ----------------- - Issue #2831: enumerate() now has a ``start`` argument. - Issue #2801: fix bug in the float.is_integer method where a ValueError was sometimes incorrectly raised. - Issue #2790: sys.flags was not properly exposing its bytes_warning attribute. - Issue #2196: hasattr now lets exceptions which do not inherit Exception (KeyboardInterrupt, and SystemExit) propagate instead of ignoring them Extension Modules ----------------- - Support for Windows 9x has been removed from the winsound module. - bsddb module updated to version 4.6.4. Library ------- - The jpeg module from IRIX has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The IOCTL module from IRIX has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The IN module from IRIX has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The imgfile module from IRIX has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The GLWS module from IRIX has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The GET module from IRIX has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The fm module from IRIX has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The FL, flp, and fl modules from IRIX have been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The FILE module on IRIX has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The ERRNO module on IRIX has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The DEVICE, GL, gl, and cgen modules (which indirectly includes cgensupport) have been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The ConfigParser module has been renamed 'configparser'. The old name is now deprecated. - The CL, CL_old, and cl modules for IRIX have been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The cdplayer module for IRIX has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The cddb module for IRIX has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The cd and CD modules for IRIX have been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The al and AL modules for IRIX have been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - #1713041: fix pprint's handling of maximum depth. - The timing module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The sv module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The multifile module has been deprecated as per PEP 4. - The SocketServer module has been renamed 'socketserver'. The old name is now deprecated. - The imageop module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - #2250: Exceptions raised during evaluation of names in rlcompleter's ``Completer.complete()`` method are now caught and ignored. - #2659: Added ``break_on_hyphens`` option to textwrap TextWrapper class. - The mhlib module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The linuxaudiodev module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The ihooks module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The fpformat module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The dl module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The Canvas module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The compiler package has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The Bastion and rexec modules have been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The bsddb185 module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The pure module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - Issue #2487: change the semantics of math.ldexp(x, n) when n is too large to fit in a C long. ldexp(x, n) now returns a zero (with suitable sign) if n is large and negative; previously, it raised OverflowError. - The toaiff module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The test.testall module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The new module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The user module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The stringold module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The mutex module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - The imputil module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - test.test_support.catch_warning() gained a 'record' argument. - os.path.walk is deprecated in favor of os.walk. - pdb gained the "until" command. - The Mac Modules (including Carbon) have been deprecated for removal in 3.0. Build ----- - ``Lib/lib-old`` is now added to sys.path. What's New in Python 2.6 alpha 3? ================================= *Release date: 08-May-2008* Core and builtins ----------------- - Issue #2719: backported the ``next()`` builtin from Python 3. - Issue #2681: The octal literal ``0o8`` was incorrecly acctepted. Now it properly raises a SyntaxError. - Patch #2617: Reserved -J and -X arguments for Jython, IronPython and other implementations of Python. - Implemented PEP 370: Per user site-packages directory Extension Modules ----------------- - Issue #2670: Fix a failure in urllib2.build_opener(), when passed two handlers that derive the same default base class. - Added kill, terminate and send_signal(sig) to subprocess.Popen. - Added phase(z) -> phi, polar(z) -> r, phi and rect(r, phi) -> z to the cmath module. - Four new methods were added to the math and cmath modules: acosh, asinh, atanh and log1p. - zlib.decompressobj().flush(value) no longer crashes the interpreter when passed a value less than or equal to zero. - Issue #1631171: Re-implement the 'warnings' module in C (the original Python code has been kept as backup). This will allow for using the 'warning's machinery in such places as the parser where use of pure Python code is not possible. Both the ``showarning()`` and ``formatwarning()`` gain an optional 'line' argument which is not called by default for backwards-compatibility reasons. Setting ``warnings.showwarning()`` to an implementation that lacks support for the ``line`` argument will raise a DeprecationWarning. Library ------- - The audiodev module has been deprecated for removal in Python 3.0. - Issue #2750: Add the 'json' package. Based on simplejson 1.9 and contributed by Bob Ippolito. - Issue #1734346: Support Unicode file names for zipfiles. - Issue #2581: distutils: Vista UAC/elevation support for bdist_wininst - Issue #2635: Fix bug in 'fix_sentence_endings' textwrap.fill option, where an extra space was added after a word containing (but not ending in) '.', '!' or '?'. - Add from_buffer() and from_buffer_copy() class methods to ctypes data types - Issue #2682: ctypes callback functions no longer contain a cyclic reference to themselves. - The getpass module has been improved on Unix. It now uses /dev/tty by default and uses stderr instead of stdout. A GetPassWarning is issued when input echo cannot be controlled. - Issue #2014: Allow XML-RPC datetime objects to have dates before 1900-01-01. - Issue #2439: Added new function pkgutil.get_data(), which is a convenience wrapper for the PEP 302 get_data() API. - Issue #2616: The ctypes.pointer() and ctypes.POINTER() functions are now implemented in C for better performance. - Issue #2408: The ``_types`` module, which was used as in implementation detail of the public ``types`` module, has been removed and replaced by pure python code. - Issue #2513: distutils on Windows is now capable of cross-compiling extension modules between 32 and 64 bit platforms. See the distutls build documentation for more information. - Issue #815646: Individual file objects may now be used from multiple threads at once without fear of crashing the Python interpreter. If file.close() is called while an object is in use by another thread an IOError exception will be raised and the file will not be closed. - The bundled libffi copy is now in sync with the recently released libffi3.0.5 version, apart from some small changes to Modules/_ctypes/libffi/configure.ac. - Issue #2385: distutils.core.run_script() makes __file__ available, so the controlled environment will more closely mirror the typical script environment. This supports setup.py scripts that refer to data files. Tests ----- - Issue #2550: The approach used by client/server code for obtaining ports to listen on in network-oriented tests has been refined in an effort to facilitate running multiple instances of the entire regression test suite in parallel without issue. test_support.bind_port() has been fixed such that it will always return a unique port -- which wasn't always the case with the previous implementation, especially if socket options had been set that affected address reuse (i.e. SO_REUSEADDR, SO_REUSEPORT). The new implementation of bind_port() will actually raise an exception if it is passed an AF_INET/SOCK_STREAM socket with either the SO_REUSEADDR or SO_REUSEPORT socket option set. Furthermore, if available, bind_port() will set the SO_EXCLUSIVEADDRUSE option on the socket it's been passed. This currently only applies to Windows. This option prevents any other sockets from binding to the host/port we've bound to, thus removing the possibility of the 'non-deterministic' behaviour, as Microsoft puts it, that occurs when a second SOCK_STREAM socket binds and accepts to a host/port that's already been bound by another socket. The optional preferred port parameter to bind_port() has been removed. Under no circumstances should tests be hard coding ports! test_support.find_unused_port() has also been introduced, which will pass a temporary socket object to bind_port() in order to obtain an unused port. The temporary socket object is then closed and deleted, and the port is returned. This method should only be used for obtaining an unused port in order to pass to an external program (i.e. the -accept [port] argument to openssl's s_server mode) or as a parameter to a server-oriented class that doesn't give you direct access to the underlying socket used. Finally, test_support.HOST has been introduced, which should be used for the host argument of any relevant socket calls (i.e. bind and connect). The following tests were updated to following the new conventions: test_socket, test_smtplib, test_asyncore, test_ssl, test_httplib, test_poplib, test_ftplib, test_telnetlib, test_socketserver, test_asynchat and test_socket_ssl. It is now possible for multiple instances of the regression test suite to run in parallel without issue. Build ----- - Issue #1496032: On alpha, use -mieee when gcc is the compiler. - Issue #2544: On HP-UX systems, use 'gcc -shared' for linking when gcc is used as compiler. - Issue #2573: On MacOS X it is now possible to install the framework with a different name using --with-framework-name=NAME. C API ----- - Added implementation of copysign, acosh, asinh, atanh and log1p to the new files Include/pymath.h and Python/pymath.h for platforms which provide the functions through their libm. The files also contains several helpers and constants for math. - Added a new convenience function, PyErr_WarnPy3k, for issuing Py3k warnings. What's New in Python 2.6 alpha 2? ================================= *Release date: 02-Apr-2008* Core and builtins ----------------- - Issue #1733757: The interpreter would hang on shutdown if the tracing function set by sys.settrace is still active and happens to call threading.currentThread(). - Patch #1442: properly report exceptions when the PYTHONSTARTUP file cannot be executed. - The compilation of a class nested in another class used to leak one reference on the outer class name. - Patch #1810: compile() can now compile _ast trees as returned by compile(..., PyCF_ONLY_AST). - Patch #2426: Added sqlite3.Connection.iterdump method to allow easy dumping of databases. Contributed by Paul Kippes at PyCon 2008. - Patch #2477: Added from __future__ import unicode_literals. - Added backport of bytearray type. - Issue #2355: add Py3k warning for buffer(). - Issue #1477: With narrow Unicode builds, the unicode escape sequence \Uxxxxxxxx did not accept values outside the Basic Multilingual Plane. This affected raw unicode literals and the 'raw-unicode-escape' codec. Now UTF-16 surrogates are generated in this case, like normal unicode literals and the 'unicode-escape' codec. - Issue #2348: add Py3k warning for file.softspace. - Issue #2346/#2347: add Py3k warnings for __methods__ and __members__. - Issue #2358: Add a Py3k warning on sys.exc_clear() usage. - Issue #2400: Allow relative imports to "import *". - Issue 1745. Backport print function with: from __future__ import print_function - Issue 2332: add new attribute names for instance method objects. The two changes are: im_self -> __self__ and im_func -> __func__ - Issue 2379: Raise a Py3K warning for __getitem__ or __getslice__ on exception instances. - Issue #2371: Add a Py3k warning when catching an exception that doesn't derive from BaseException. Issue #2341: Add a Py3k warning when raising an exception that doesn't derive from BaseException. - Issue #2321: use pymalloc for unicode object string data to reduce memory usage in some circumstances. - PEP 3127: octal literals now start with "0o". Old-style octal literals are still valid. There are binary literals with a prefix of "0b". This also affects int(x, 0). - Issue #2359: Adding deprecation warnings for array.{read,write}. - Issue #1779871: Gnu gcc can now build Python on OS X because the flags -Wno-long-double, -no-cpp-precomp, and -mno-fused-madd are no longer passed. - Add a warning when asserting a non-empty tuple which is always true. - Issue #2179: speed up with statement execution by storing the exit method on the stack instead of in a temporary variable (patch by Jeffrey Yaskin) - Issue #2238: Some syntax errors in *args and **kwargs expressions could give bogus error messages. - Issue #2143: Fix embedded readline() hang on SSL socket EOF. Extension Modules ----------------- - Patch #2240: Implement signal.setitimer and signal.getitimer. Library ------- - Issue #2315: logging.handlers: TimedRotatingFileHandler now accounts for daylight savings time in calculating the next rollover. - Issue #2316: logging.handlers: TimedRotatingFileHandler now calculates rollovers correctly even when nothing is logged for a while. - Issue #2317: logging.handlers: TimedRotatingFileHandler now uses improved logic for removing old files. - Issue #2495: tokenize.untokenize now inserts a space between two consecutive string literals; previously, ["" ""] was rendered as [""""], which is incorrect python code. - Issue #2248: return the result of the QUIT command. from SMTP.quit(). - Backport of Python 3.0's io module. - Issue #2482: Make sure that the coefficient of a Decimal is always stored as a str instance, not as a unicode instance. This ensures that str(Decimal) is always an instance of str. - Issue #2478: fix failure of decimal.Decimal(0).sqrt() - Issue #2432: give DictReader the dialect and line_num attributes advertised in the docs. - Issue #2460: Make Ellipsis object copyable. - Issue #1681432: Add triangular distribution to the random module - Issue #2136: urllib2's auth handler now allows single-quoted realms in the WWW-Authenticate header. - Issue #2434: Enhanced platform.win32_ver() to also work on Python installation which do not have the win32all package installed. - Added support to platform.uname() to also report the machine and processor information on Windows XP and later. As a result, platform.machine() and platform.processor() will report this information as well. - The library implementing the 2to3 conversion, lib2to3, was added to the standard distribution. - Issue #1747858: Fix chown to work with large uid's and gid's on 64-bit platforms. - Issue #1202: zlib.crc32 and zlib.adler32 no longer return different values on 32-bit vs. 64-bit python interpreters. Both were correct, but they now both return a signed integer object for consistency. - Issue #1158: add %f format (fractions of a second represented as microseconds) to datetime objects. Understood by both strptime and strftime. - Issue #705836: struct.pack(">f", x) now raises OverflowError on all platforms when x is too large to fit into an IEEE 754 float; previously it only raised OverflowError on non IEEE 754 platforms. - Issues #2166, #1741 and #1531505: now distutils deals with HOME correctly under win32 - #1858: distutils: added multiple server support in .pypirc - Issue #1106316: pdb.post_mortem()'s parameter, "traceback", is now optional: it defaults to the traceback of the exception that is currently being handled (is mandatory to be in the middle of an exception, otherwise it raises ValueError). - Issue #1193577: A .shutdown() method has been added to SocketServers which terminates the .serve_forever() loop. - Bug #2220: handle rlcompleter attribute match failure more gracefully. - Issue #2225: py_compile, when executed as a script, now returns a non- zero status code if not all files could be compiled successfully. - Bug #1725737: In distutil's sdist, exclude RCS, CVS etc. also in the root directory, and also exclude .hg, .git, .bzr, and _darcs. - Issue #1872: The struct module typecode for _Bool has been changed from 't' to '?'. - The bundled libffi copy is now in sync with the recently released libffi3.0.4 version, apart from some small changes to Modules/_ctypes/libffi/configure.ac. On OS X, preconfigured libffi files are used. On all linux systems the --with-system-ffi configure option defaults to "yes". - Issue 1577: shutil.move() now calls os.rename() if the destination is a directory instead of copying-then-remove-source. Tests ----- - test_nis no longer fails when test.test_support.verbose is true and NIS is not set up on the testing machine. - Output comparison tests are no longer supported. - Rewrite test_errno to use unittest and no longer be a no-op. - GHOP 234: Convert test_extcall to doctest. - GHOP 290: Convert test_dbm and test_dummy_threading to unittest. - GHOP 293: Convert test_strftime, test_getargs, and test_pep247 to unittest. - Issue #2055: Convert test_fcntl to unittest. - Issue 1960: Convert test_gdbm to unittest. - GHOP 294: Convert test_contains, test_crypt, and test_select to unittest. - GHOP 238: Convert test_tokenize to use doctest. - GHOP 237: Rewrite test_thread using unittest. - Patch #2232: os.tmpfile might fail on Windows if the user has no permission to create files in the root directory. Build ----- - A new script 2to3 is now installed, to run the 2.x to 3.x converter. - Python/memmove.c and Python/strerror.c have been removed; both functions are in the C89 standard library. - Patch #2284: Add -x64 option to rt.bat. C API ----- - Patch #2477: Added PyParser_ParseFileFlagsEx() and PyParser_ParseStringFlagsFilenameEx() What's New in Python 2.6 alpha 1? ================================= *Release date: 29-Feb-2008* Core and builtins ----------------- - Issue #2051: pyc and pyo files are no longer created with permission 644. The mode is now inherited from the py file. - Issue #2067: file.__exit__() now calls subclasses' close() method. - Patch #1759: Backport of PEP 3129 class decorators. - Issue #1881: An internal parser limit has been increased. Also see issue 215555 for a discussion. - Added the future_builtins module, which contains hex() and oct(). These are the PEP 3127 version of these functions, designed to be compatible with the hex() and oct() builtins from Python 3.0. They differ slightly in their output formats from the existing, unchanged Python 2.6 builtins. The expected usage of the future_builtins module is: from future_builtins import hex, oct - Issue #1600: Modifed PyOS_ascii_formatd to use at most 2 digit exponents for exponents with absolute value < 100. Follows C99 standard. This is a change on Windows, which would use 3 digits. Also, added 'n' to the formats that PyOS_ascii_formatd understands, so that any alterations it does to the resulting string will be available in stringlib/formatter.h (for float.__format__). - Implemented PEP 3101, Advanced String Formatting. This adds a new builtin format(); a format() method for str and unicode; a __format__() method to object, str, unicode, int, long, float, and datetime; the class string.Formatter; and the C API PyObject_Format(). - Fixed several potential crashes, all caused by specially crafted __del__ methods exploiting objects in temporarily inconsistent state. - Issue #2115: Important speedup in setting __slot__ attributes. Also prevent a possible crash: an Abstract Base Class would try to access a slot on a registered virtual subclass. - Fixed repr() and str() of complex numbers with infinity or nan as real or imaginary part. - Clear all free lists during a gc.collect() of the highest generation in order to allow pymalloc to free more arenas. Python may give back memory to the OS earlier. - Issue #2045: Fix an infinite recursion triggered when printing a subclass of collections.defaultdict, if its default_factory is set to a bound method. - Fixed a minor memory leak in dictobject.c. The content of the free list was not freed on interpreter shutdown. - Limit free list of method and builtin function objects to 256 entries each. - Patch #1953: Added ``sys._compact_freelists()`` and the C API functions ``PyInt_CompactFreeList`` and ``PyFloat_CompactFreeList`` to compact the internal free lists of pre-allocted ints and floats. - Bug #1983: Fixed return type of fork(), fork1() and forkpty() calls. Python expected the return type int but the fork familie returns pi_t. - Issue #1678380: Fix a bug that identifies 0j and -0j when they appear in the same code unit. - Issue #2025 : Add tuple.count() and tuple.index() methods to comply with the collections.Sequence API. - Patch #1970 by Antoine Pitrou: Speedup unicode whitespace and linebreak detection - Added ``PyType_ClearCache()`` and ``sys._clear_type_cache`` to clear the internal lookup cache for ref leak tests. - Patch #1473257: generator objects gain a gi_code attribute. This is the same object as the func_code attribute of the function that produced the generator. - Issue #1920: "while 0" statements were completely removed by the compiler, even in the presence of an "else" clause, which is supposed to be run when the condition is false. Now the compiler correctly emits bytecode for the "else" suite. - A few crashers fixed: weakref_in_del.py (issue #1377858); loosing_dict_ref.py (issue #1303614, test67.py); borrowed_ref_[34].py (not in tracker). - Issue #1069410: The "can't load dll" message box on Windows is suppressed while an extension is loaded by calling SetErrorMode in dynload_win.c. The error is still reported properly. - Bug #1915: Python compiles with --enable-unicode=no again. However several extension methods and modules do not work without unicode support. - Issue #1882: when compiling code from a string, encoding cookies in the second line of code were not always recognized correctly. - Issue #1679: "0x" was taken as a valid integer literal. - Issue #1865: ``bytes`` as an alias for ``str`` and b"" as an alias "" were added. - sys.float_info / PyFloat_GetInfo: The floating point information object was converted from a dict to a specialized structseq object. - Patch #1816: Added sys.flags structseq. It exposes the status of most command line arguments and PYTHON* environment variables. - Objects/structseq.c: Implemented new structseq representation. The patch makes structseqs (e.g. the return value of os.stat) more readable. - Patch #1700288: added a type attribute cache that caches method accesses, resulting in speedups in heavily object-oriented code. - Bug #1776: __import__() no longer accepts filenames on any platform. The first parameter to __import__() must be a valid module name. - Patch #1668: renamed THREADDEBUG envvar to PYTHONTHREADDEBUG. - Patch #602345: Add -B command line option, PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE envvar and sys.dont_write_bytecode attribute. All these can be set to forbid Python to attempt to write compiled bytecode files. - Improve some exception messages when Windows fails to load an extension module. Now we get for example '%1 is not a valid Win32 application' instead of 'error code 193'. - Bug #1481296: Fixed long(float('nan'))!=0L. - Issue #1640: Added math.isinf(x), math.isnan(x) and math.copysign(x, y) functions. - Issue #1635: Platform independent creation and representation of NaN and INF. float("nan"), float("inf") and float("-inf") now work on every platform with IEEE 754 semantics. - Compiler now generates simpler and faster code for dictionary literals. The oparg for BUILD_MAP now indicates an estimated dictionary size. There is a new opcode, STORE_MAP, for adding entries to the dictionary. - Issue #1638: %zd configure test fails on Linux - Issue #1620: New property decorator syntax was modifying the decorator in place instead of creating a new decorator object. - Issue #1538: Avoid copying string in split/rsplit if the split char is not found. - Issue #1553: An erroneous __length_hint__ can make list() raise a SystemError. - PEP 366: Allow explicit relative imports when executing modules inside packages with the -m switch via a new module level __package__ attribute. - Issue #1402: Fix a crash on exit, when another thread is still running, and if the deallocation of its frames somehow calls the PyGILState_Ensure() / PyGILState_Release() functions. - Expose the Py_Py3kWarningFlag as sys.py3kwarning. - Issue #1445: Fix a SystemError when accessing the ``cell_contents`` attribute of an empty cell object. - Issue #1460: The utf-7 incremental decoder did not accept truncated input. It now correctly saves its state between chunks of data. - Patch #1739468: Directories and zipfiles containing a __main__.py file can now be directly executed by passing their name to the interpreter. The directory/zipfile is automatically inserted as the first entry in sys.path. - Issue #1265: Fix a problem with sys.settrace, if the tracing function uses a generator expression when at the same time the executed code is closing a paused generator. - sets and frozensets now have an isdisjoint() method. - optimize the performance of builtin.sum(). - Fix warnings found by the new version of the Coverity checker. - The enumerate() builtin function is no longer bounded to sequences smaller than LONG_MAX. Formerly, it raised an OverflowError. Now, automatically shifts from ints to longs. - Issue #1686386: Tuple's tp_repr did not take into account the possibility of having a self-referential tuple, which is possible from C code. Nor did object's tp_str consider that a type's tp_str could do something that could lead to an inifinite recursion. Py_ReprEnter() and Py_EnterRecursiveCall(), respectively, fixed the issues. - Issue #1164: It was possible to trigger deadlock when using the 'print' statement to write to a file since the GIL was not released as needed. Now PyObject_Print() does the right thing along with various tp_print implementations of the built-in types and those in the collections module. - Issue #1147: Exceptions were directly allowing string exceptions in their throw() method even though string exceptions no longer allowed. - Issue #1096: Prevent a segfault from getting the repr of a very deeply nested list by using the recursion counter. - Issue #1202533: Fix infinite recursion calls triggered by calls to PyObject_Call() never calling back out to Python code to trigger recursion depth updates/checks. Required the creation of a static RuntimeError instance in case normalizing an exception put the recursion check value past its limit. Fixes crashers infinite_rec_(1|2|4|5).py. - Patch #1031213: Decode source line in SyntaxErrors back to its original source encoding. - Patch #1673759: add a missing overflow check when formatting floats with %G. - Prevent expandtabs() on string and unicode objects from causing a segfault when a large width is passed on 32-bit platforms. - Bug #1733488: Fix compilation of bufferobject.c on AIX. - Bug #1722485: remove docstrings again when running with -OO. - Add new attribute names for function objects. All the func_* become __*__ attributes. (Some already existed, e.g., __doc__ and __name__.) - Add -3 option to the interpreter to warn about features that are deprecated and will be changed/removed in Python 3.0. - Patch #1686487: you can now pass any mapping after '**' in function calls. - except clauses may now be spelled either "except E, target:" or "except E as target:". This is to provide forwards compatibility with Python 3.0. - Deprecate BaseException.message as per PEP 352. - Bug #1303614: don't expose object's __dict__ when the dict is inherited from a builtin base. - When __slots__ are set to a unicode string, make it work the same as setting a plain string, ie don't expand to single letter identifiers. - Request #1191699: Slices can now be pickled. - Request #1193128: str.translate() now allows a None argument for translations that only remove characters without re-mapping the remaining characters. - Patch #1682205: a TypeError while unpacking an iterable is no longer masked by a generic one with the message "unpack non-sequence". - Remove unused file Python/fmod.c. - Bug #1683368: The object.__init__() and object.__new__() methods are now stricter in rejecting excess arguments. The only time when either allows excess arguments is when it is not overridden and the other one is. For backwards compatibility, when both are overridden, it is a deprecation warning (for now; maybe a Py3k warning later). Also, type.__init__() insists on the same signature as supported by type.__new__(). - Patch #1675423: PyComplex_AsCComplex() now tries to convert an object to complex using its __complex__() method before falling back to the __float__() method. Therefore, the functions in the cmath module now can operate on objects that define a __complex__() method. - Patch #1623563: allow __class__ assignment for classes with __slots__. The old and the new class are still required to have the same slot names. - Patch #1642547: Fix an error/crash when encountering syntax errors in complex if statements. - Patch #1462488: Python no longer segfaults when ``object.__reduce_ex__()`` is called with an object that is faking its type. - Patch #1680015: Don't modify __slots__ tuple if it contains an unicode name. - Patch #1444529: the builtin compile() now accepts keyword arguments. - Bug #1678647: write a newline after printing an exception in any case, even when converting the value to a string failed. - The dir() function has been extended to call the __dir__() method on its argument, if it exists. If not, it will work like before. This allows customizing the output of dir() in the presence of a __getattr__(). - Patch #922167: Python no longer segfaults when faced with infinitely self-recursive reload() calls (as reported by bug #742342). - Patch #1675981: remove unreachable code from ``type.__new__()`` method. - Patch #1491866: change the complex() constructor to allow parthensized forms. This means complex(repr(x)) now works instead of raising a ValueError. - Patch #703779: unset __file__ in __main__ after running a file. This makes the filenames the warning module prints much more sensible when a PYTHONSTARTUP file is used. - Variant of patch #697613: don't exit the interpreter on a SystemExit exception if the -i command line option or PYTHONINSPECT environment variable is given, but break into the interactive interpreter just like on other exceptions or normal program exit. - Patch #1638879: don't accept strings with embedded NUL bytes in long(). - Bug #1674503: close the file opened by execfile() in an error condition. - Patch #1674228: when assigning a slice (old-style), check for the sq_ass_slice instead of the sq_slice slot. - When printing an unraisable error, don't print exceptions. before the name. This duplicates the behavior whening normally printing exceptions. - Bug #1653736: Properly discard third argument to slot_nb_inplace_power. - PEP 352: Raising a string exception now triggers a TypeError. Attempting to catch a string exception raises DeprecationWarning. - Bug #1377858: Fix the segfaulting of the interpreter when an object created a weakref on itself during a __del__ call for new-style classes (classic classes still have the bug). - Bug #1579370: Make PyTraceBack_Here use the current thread, not the frame's thread state. - patch #1630975: Fix crash when replacing sys.stdout in sitecustomize.py - Prevent seg fault on shutdown which could occur if an object raised a warning. - Bug #1566280: Explicitly invoke threading._shutdown from Py_Main, to avoid relying on atexit. - Bug #1590891: random.randrange don't return correct value for big number - Patch #1586791: Better exception messages for some operations on strings, tuples and lists. - Bug #1067760: Deprecate passing floats to file.seek. - Bug #1591996: Correctly forward exception in instance_contains(). - Bug #1588287: fix invalid assertion for `1,2` in debug builds. - Bug #1576657: when setting a KeyError for a tuple key, make sure that the tuple isn't used as the "exception arguments tuple". - Bug #1565514, SystemError not raised on too many nested blocks. - Bug #1576174: WindowsError now displays the windows error code again, no longer the posix error code. - Patch #1549049: Support long values in structmember, issue warnings if the assigned value for structmember fields gets truncated. - Update the peephole optimizer to remove more dead code (jumps after returns) and inline unconditional jumps to returns. - Bug #1545497: when given an explicit base, int() did ignore NULs embedded in the string to convert. - Bug #1569998: break inside a try statement (outside a loop) is now recognized and rejected. - list.pop(x) accepts any object x following the __index__ protocol. - A number of places, including integer negation and absolute value, were fixed to not rely on undefined behaviour of the C compiler anymore. - Bug #1566800: make sure that EnvironmentError can be called with any number of arguments, as was the case in Python 2.4. - Patch #1567691: super() and new.instancemethod() now don't accept keyword arguments any more (previously they accepted them, but didn't use them). - Fix a bug in the parser's future statement handling that led to "with" not being recognized as a keyword after, e.g., this statement: from __future__ import division, with_statement - Bug #1557232: fix seg fault with def f((((x)))) and def f(((x),)). - Fix %zd string formatting on Mac OS X so it prints negative numbers. - Allow exception instances to be directly sliced again. - Bug #1551432: Exceptions do not define an explicit __unicode__ method. This allows calling unicode() on exceptions classes directly to succeed. - Bug #1542051: Exceptions now correctly call PyObject_GC_UnTrack. Also make sure that every exception class has __module__ set to 'exceptions'. - Bug #1550983: emit better error messages for erroneous relative imports (if not in package and if beyond toplevel package). - Overflow checking code in integer division ran afoul of new gcc optimizations. Changed to be more standard-conforming. - Patch #1542451: disallow continue anywhere under a finally. - Patch #1546288: fix seg fault in dict_equal due to ref counting bug. - The return tuple from str.rpartition(sep) is (tail, sep, head) where head is the original string if sep was not found. - Bug #1520864: unpacking singleton tuples in list comprehensions and generator expressions (x for x, in ... ) works again. Fixing this problem required changing the .pyc magic number. This means that .pyc files generated before 2.5c2 will be regenerated. - ``with`` and ``as`` are now keywords. - Bug #1664966: Fix crash in exec if Unicode filename can't be decoded. - Issue #1537: Changed GeneratorExit's base class from Exception to BaseException. - Fix Issue #1703448: A joined thread could show up in the threading.enumerate() list after the join() for a brief period until it actually exited. Library ------- - #2274 Add heapq.heappushpop(). - Add inspect.isabstract(object) to fix bug #2223 - Add a __format__ method to Decimal, to support PEP 3101. - Add a timing parameter when using trace.Trace to print out timestamps. - #1627: httplib now ignores negative Content-Length headers. - #900744: If an invalid chunked-encoding header is sent by a server, httplib will now raise IncompleteRead and close the connection instead of raising ValueError. - #1492: The content type of BaseHTTPServer error messages can now be overridden. - Issue 1781: ConfigParser now does not let you add the "default" section (ignore-case) - Removed uses of dict.has_key() from distutils, and uses of callable() from copy_reg.py, so the interpreter now starts up without warnings when '-3' is given. More work like this needs to be done in the rest of the stdlib. - Issue #1916. Added isgenerator() and isgeneratorfunction() to inspect.py. - #1224: Fixed bad url parsing when path begins with double slash. - ctypes instances that are not or do not contain pointers can now be pickled. - Patch #1966: Break infinite loop in httplib when the servers implements the chunked encoding incorrectly. - Rename rational.py to fractions.py and the rational.Rational class to fractions.Fraction, to avoid the name clash with the abstract base class numbers.Rational. See discussion in issue #1682. - The pickletools module now provides an optimize() function that eliminates unused PUT opcodes from a pickle string. - #2021: Allow tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile and SpooledTemporaryFile to be used in with statements by correctly supporting the context management protocol. - #1979: Add rich comparisons to Decimal, and make Decimal comparisons involving a NaN follow the IEEE 754 standard. - #2004: tarfile.py: Use mode 0700 for temporary directories and default permissions for missing directories. - #175006: The debugger used to skip the condition of a "while" statement after the first iteration. Now it correctly steps on the expression, and breakpoints on the "while" statement are honored on each loop. - #1765140: add an optional delay argument to FileHandler and its subclasses. Defaults to false (existing behaviour), but if true, defers opening the file until the first call to emit(). - The pprint module now supports sets and frozensets. - #1221598: add optional callbacks to ftplib.FTP's storbinary() and storlines() methods. (Contributed by Phil Schwartz) - #1715: include sub-extension modules in pydoc's text output. - #1836: fix an off-by-one bug in TimedRotatingHandler's rollover time calculation. - #1021: fix a bug to allow basicConfig to accept NOTSET as a level. - #932563: add LoggerAdapter convenience class to make it easier to add contextual information in logging output. - #1760556: fix a bug to avoid FileHandler throwing an exception in flush(). - Bug #1530959: distutils' build command now uses different build directory when building extension modules against versions of Python compiled with ``--with-pydebug``. - #1555501: move plistlib from plat-mac directory to general library. - #1269: fix a bug in pstats.add_callers() and add a unit test file for pstats. - #1669: don't allow shutil.rmtree() to be called on a symlink to a directory. - #1664522: in urllib, don't read non-existing directories in ftp mode, returning a 0-byte file -- raise an IOError instead. - #856047: respect the ``no_proxy`` environment variable when using the ``http_proxy`` etc. environment variables in urllib. - #1178141: add a getcode() method to the addinfourls that urllib.open() returns so that you can retrieve the HTTP status code. - Issue #1003: Fix zipfile decryption check, it would fail zip files with extended local headers. - #1189216: Fix the zipfile module to work on archives with headers past the 2**31 byte boundary. - #1336: fix a race condition in subprocess.Popen if the garbage collector kicked in at the wrong time that would cause the process to hang when the child wrote to stderr. - #1146: fix how textwrap breaks a long word that would start in the last column of a line. - #1693149: trace.py --ignore-module - accept multiple comma-separated modules to be given. - #1822: MIMEMultipart.is_multipart() behaves correctly for a just-created (and empty) instance. Thanks Jonathan Share. - #1861: Added an attribute to the sched module which returns an ordered list of upcoming events (displayed as named tuples). - #1837: The queue module now also supports a LIFO queue and a priority queue. - Patch #1048820: Add insert-mode editing to curses.textpad.Textbox (patch by Stefan Wehr). Also, fix an off-by-one bug in Textbox.gather(). - Issue #1831: ctypes now raises a TypeError if conflicting positional and named arguments are passed to a Structure or Union initializer. When too many positional arguments are passed, also a TypeError is raised instead of a ValueError. - Convert the internal ctypes array type cache to a WeakValueDict so that array types do not live longer than needed. - Issue #1786: pdb should use its own stdin/stdout around an exec call and when creating a recursive instance. - Issue #1698398 Zipfile.printdir() crashed because the format string expected a tuple type of length six instead of time.struct_time object. - Issue #1780: The Decimal constructor now accepts arbitrary leading and trailing whitespace when constructing from a string. Context.create_decimal no longer accepts trailing newlines. - Decimal.as_tuple(), difflib.find_longest_match() and inspect functions that returned a tuple now return a named tuple. - Doctest now returns results as a named tuple for readability: (0, 7) --> TestResults(failed=0, attempted=7) - Issue #846388. re.match is interruptible now, which is particularly good for long regular expression matches. - pyexpat, patch #1137: allow setting buffer_size attribute on Parser objects to set the character data buffer size. - Issue #1757: The hash of a Decimal instance is no longer affected by the current context. - Patch #467924: add ZipFile.extract() and ZipFile.extractall() in the zipfile module. - Issue #1646: Make socket support the TIPC protocol. - Bug #1742: return os.curdir from os.path.relpath() if both arguments are equal instead of raising an exception. - Patch #1637: fix urlparse for URLs like 'http://x.com?arg=/foo'. - Patch #1698: allow '@' in username parsed by urlparse.py. - Issue #1735: TarFile.extractall() now correctly sets directory permissions and times. - Bug #1713: posixpath.ismount() claims symlink to a mountpoint is a mountpoint. - Bug #1687: Fxed plistlib.py restricts to Python int when writing - Issue #1700: Regular expression inline flags incorrectly handle certain unicode characters. - Issue #1689: PEP 3141, numeric abstract base classes. - Tk issue #1851526: Return results from Python callbacks to Tcl as Tcl objects. - Issue #1642: Fix segfault in ctypes when trying to delete attributes. - Issue #1727780: Support loading pickles of random.Random objects created on 32-bit systems on 64-bit systems, and vice versa. As a consequence of the change, Random pickles created by Python 2.6 cannot be loaded in Python 2.5. - Issue #1455: The distutils package now supports VS 2005 and VS 2008 for both the msvccompiler and cygwincompiler. - Issue #1531: tarfile.py: Read fileobj from the current offset, do not seek to the start. - Issue #1534: Added a dictionary sys.float_info with information about the internal floating point type to the sys module. - Issue 1429818: patch for trace and doctest modules so they play nicely together. - doctest made a bad assumption that a package's __loader__.get_data() method used universal newlines. - Issue #1705170: contextlib.contextmanager was still swallowing StopIteration in some cases. This should no longer happen. - Issue #1292: On alpha, arm, ppc, and s390 linux systems the --with-system-ffi configure option defaults to "yes". - IN module for FreeBSD 8 is added and preexisting FreeBSD 6 and 7 files are updated. - Issues #1181, #1287: unsetenv() is now called when the os.environ.pop() and os.environ.clear() methods are used. - ctypes will now work correctly on 32-bit systems when Python is configured with --with-system-ffi. - Patch #1203: ctypes now does work on OS X when Python is built with --disable-toolbox-glue. - collections.deque() now supports a "maxlen" argument. - itertools.count() is no longer bounded to LONG_MAX. Formerly, it raised an OverflowError. Now, automatically shifts from ints to longs. - Added itertools.product() which forms the Cartesian product of the input iterables. - Added itertools.combinations() and itertools.permutations(). - Patch #1541463: optimize performance of cgi.FieldStorage operations. - Decimal is fully updated to the latest Decimal Specification (v1.66). - Bug #1153: repr.repr() now doesn't require set and dictionary items to be orderable to properly represent them. - A 'c_longdouble' type was added to the ctypes module. - Bug #1709599: Run test_1565150 only if the file system is NTFS. - When encountering a password-protected robots.txt file the RobotFileParser no longer prompts interactively for a username and password (bug 813986). - TarFile.__init__() no longer fails if no name argument is passed and the fileobj argument has no usable name attribute (e.g. StringIO). - The functools module now provides 'reduce', for forward compatibility with Python 3000. - Server-side SSL support and cert verification added, by Bill Janssen. - socket.ssl deprecated; use new ssl module instead. - uuid creation is now threadsafe. - EUC-KR codec now handles the cheot-ga-keut composed make-up hangul syllables. - GB18030 codec now can encode additional two-byte characters that are missing in GBK. - Add new codecs for UTF-32, UTF-32-LE and UTF-32-BE. - Bug #1704793: Return UTF-16 pair if unicodedata.lookup cannot represent the result in a single character. - Bug #978833: Close https sockets by releasing the _ssl object. - Change location of the package index to pypi.python.org/pypi - Bug #1701409: Fix a segfault in printing ctypes.c_char_p and ctypes.c_wchar_p when they point to an invalid location. As a sideeffect the representation of these instances has changed. - tarfile.py: Added "exclude" keyword argument to TarFile.add(). - Bug #1734723: Fix repr.Repr() so it doesn't ignore the maxtuple attribute. - The urlopen function of urllib2 now has an optional timeout parameter (note that it actually works with HTTP, HTTPS, FTP and FTPS connections). - In ftplib, the FTP.ntransfercmd method, when in passive mode, now uses the socket.create_connection function, using the timeout specified at connection time. - Bug #1728403: Fix a bug that CJKCodecs StreamReader hangs when it reads a file that ends with incomplete sequence and sizehint argument for .read() is specified. - Bug #1730389: Change time.strptime() to use ``\s+`` instead of ``\s*`` when matching spaces in the specified format argument. - SF 1668596/1720897: distutils now copies data files even if package_dir is empty. - sha now raises a DeprecationWarning upon import. - md5 now raises a DeprecationWarning upon import. - Issue1385: The hmac module now computes the correct hmac when using hashes with a block size other than 64 bytes (such as sha384 and sha512). - mimify now raises a DeprecationWarning upon import. - MimeWriter now raises a DeprecationWarning upon import. - tarfile.py: Improved unicode support. Unicode input names are now officially supported. Added "errors" argument to the TarFile class. - urllib.ftpwrapper class now accepts an optional timeout. - shlex.split() now has an optional "posix" parameter. - The posixfile module now raises a DeprecationWarning. - Remove the gopherlib module. This also leads to the removal of gopher support in urllib/urllib2. - Fix bug in marshal where bad data would cause a segfault due to lack of an infinite recursion check. - Removed plat-freebsd2 and plat-freebsd3 directories (and IN.py in the directories). - HTML-escape the plain traceback in cgitb's HTML output, to prevent the traceback inadvertently or maliciously closing the comment and injecting HTML into the error page. - The popen2 module and os.popen* are deprecated. Use the subprocess module. - Added an optional credentials argument to SMTPHandler, for use with SMTP servers which require authentication. - Patch #1695948: Added optional timeout parameter to SocketHandler. - Bug #1652788: Minor fix for currentframe. - Patch #1598415: Added WatchedFileHandler to better support external log file rotation using e.g. newsyslog or logrotate. This handler is only useful in Unix/Linux environments. - Bug #1706381: Specifying the SWIG option "-c++" in the setup.py file (as opposed to the command line) will now write file names ending in ".cpp" too. - As specified in RFC 2616, an HTTP response like 2xx indicates that the client's request was successfully received, understood, and accepted. Now in these cases no error is raised in urllib (issue #1177) and urllib2. - Bug #1290505: time.strptime's internal cache of locale information is now properly recreated when the locale is changed. - Patch #1685563: remove (don't add) duplicate paths in distutils.MSVCCompiler. - Added a timeout parameter to the constructor of other protocols (telnetlib, ftplib, smtplib and poplib). This is second part of the work started with create_connection() and timeout in httplib, and closes patch #723312. - Patch #1676823: Added create_connection() to socket.py, which may be called with a timeout, and use it from httplib (whose HTTPConnection and HTTPSConnection now accept an optional timeout). - Bug #978833: Revert r50844, as it broke _socketobject.dup. - Bug #1675967: re patterns pickled with Python 2.4 and earlier can now be unpickled with Python 2.5 and newer. - Patch #1630118: add a SpooledTemporaryFile class to tempfile.py. - Patch #1273829: os.walk() now has a "followlinks" parameter. If set to True (which is not the default), it visits symlinks pointing to directories. - Bug #1681228: the webbrowser module now correctly uses the default GNOME or KDE browser, depending on whether there is a session of one of those present. Also, it tries the Windows default browser before trying Mozilla variants. - Patch #1339796: add a relpath() function to os.path. - Patch #1681153: the wave module now closes a file object it opened if initialization failed. - Bug #767111: fix long-standing bug in urllib which caused an AttributeError instead of an IOError when the server's response didn't contain a valid HTTP status line. - Patch #957650: "%var%" environment variable references are now properly expanded in ntpath.expandvars(), also "~user" home directory references are recognized and handled on Windows. - Patch #1429539: pdb now correctly initializes the __main__ module for the debugged script, which means that imports from __main__ work correctly now. - The nonobvious commands.getstatus() function is now deprecated. - Patch #1393667: pdb now has a "run" command which restarts the debugged Python program, optionally with different arguments. - Patch #1649190: Adding support for _Bool to ctypes as c_bool. - Patch #1530482: add pydoc.render_doc() which returns the documentation for a thing instead of paging it to stdout, which pydoc.doc() does. - Patch #1533909: the timeit module now accepts callables in addition to strings for the code to time and the setup code. Also added two convenience functions for instantiating a Timer and calling its methods. - Patch #1537850: tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile now has a "delete" parameter which can be set to False to prevent the default delete-on-close behavior. - Patch #1581073: add a flag to textwrap that prevents the dropping of whitespace while wrapping. - Patch #1603688: ConfigParser.SafeConfigParser now checks values that are set for invalid interpolation sequences that would lead to errors on reading back those values. - Added support for the POSIX.1-2001 (pax) format to tarfile.py. Extended and cleaned up the test suite. Added a new testtar.tar. - Patch #1449244: Support Unicode strings in email.message.Message.{set_charset,get_content_charset}. - Patch #1542681: add entries for "with", "as" and "CONTEXTMANAGERS" to pydoc's help keywords. - Patch #1555098: use str.join() instead of repeated string concatenation in robotparser. - Patch #1635454: the csv.DictWriter class now includes the offending field names in its exception message if you try to write a record with a dictionary containing fields not in the CSV field names list. - Patch #1668100: urllib2 now correctly raises URLError instead of OSError if accessing a local file via the file:// protocol fails. - Patch #1677862: Require a space or tab after import in .pth files. - Patch #1192590: Fix pdb's "ignore" and "condition" commands so they trap the IndexError caused by passing in an invalid breakpoint number. - Patch #1599845: Add an option to disable the implicit calls to server_bind() and server_activate() in the constructors for TCPServer, SimpleXMLRPCServer and DocXMLRPCServer. - Bug #1531963: Make SocketServer.TCPServer's server_address always be equal to calling getsockname() on the server's socket. Fixed by patch #1545011. - Patch #742598: Add .timeout attribute to SocketServer that calls .handle_timeout() when no requests are received. - Bug #1651235: When a tuple was passed to a ctypes function call, Python would crash instead of raising an error. - Bug #1646630: ctypes.string_at(buf, 0) and ctypes.wstring_at(buf, 0) returned string up to the first NUL character. - Patch #957003: Implement smtplib.LMTP. - Patch #1481079: add support for HTTP_REFERER to CGIHTTPServer. - Patch #1675424: Added tests for uncovered code in the zipfile module. The KeyError raised by Zipfile.getinfo for nonexistent names now has a descriptive message. - Bug #1115886: os.path.splitext('.cshrc') gives now ('.cshrc', ''). - unittest now verifies more of its assumptions. In particular, TestCase and TestSuite subclasses (not instances) are no longer accepted in TestSuite.addTest(). This should cause no incompatibility since it never made sense with ordinary subclasses -- the failure just occurred later, with a more cumbersome exception. - Patch #787789: allow to pass custom TestRunner instances to unittest's main() function. - Patches #1550273, #1550272: fix a few bugs in unittest and add a comprehensive test suite for the module. - Patch #1001604: glob.glob() now returns unicode filenames if it was given a unicode argument and os.listdir() returns unicode filenames. - Patch #1673619: setup.py identifies extension modules it doesn't know how to build and those it knows how to build but that fail to build. - Patch #912410: Replace HTML entity references for attribute values in HTMLParser. - Patch #1663234: you can now run doctest on test files and modules using "python -m doctest [-v] filename ...". - Patch #1121142: Implement ZipFile.open. - Taught setup.py how to locate Berkeley DB on Macs using MacPorts. - Added heapq.merge() for merging sorted input streams. - Added collections.namedtuple() for assigning field names to tuples. - Added itertools.izip_longest(). - Have the encoding package's search function dynamically import using absolute import semantics. - Patch #1647484: Renamed GzipFile's filename attribute to name. - Patch #1517891: Mode 'a' for ZipFile now creates the file if it doesn't exist. - Patch #698833: Support file decryption in zipfile. - Patch #685268: Consider a package's __path__ in imputil. - Patch 1463026: Support default namespace in XMLGenerator. - Patch 1571379: Make trace's --ignore-dir facility work in the face of relative directory names. - Bug #1600860: Search for shared python library in LIBDIR, not lib/python/config, on "linux" and "gnu" systems. - Patch #1652681: tarfile.py: create nonexistent files in append mode and allow appending to empty files. - Bug #1124861: Automatically create pipes if GetStdHandle fails in subprocess. - Patch #1634778: add missing encoding aliases for iso8859_15 and iso8859_16. - Patch #1638243: the compiler package is now able to correctly compile a with statement; previously, executing code containing a with statement compiled by the compiler package crashed the interpreter. - Bug #1643943: Fix time.strptime's support for the %U directive. - Patch #1507247: tarfile.py: use current umask for intermediate directories. - Patch #1627441: close sockets properly in urllib2. - Bug #494589: make ntpath.expandvars behave according to its docstring. - Changed platform module API python_version_tuple() to actually return a tuple (it used to return a list). - Added new platform module APIs python_branch(), python_revision(), python_implementation() and linux_distribution(). - Added support for IronPython and Jython to the platform module. - The sets module has been deprecated. Use the built-in set/frozenset types instead. - Bug #1610795: make ctypes.util.find_library work on BSD systems. - Fixes for 64-bit Windows: In ctypes.wintypes, correct the definitions of HANDLE, WPARAM, LPARAM data types. Make parameterless foreign function calls work. - The version number of the ctypes package changed to "1.1.0". - Bug #1627575: logging: Added _open() method to FileHandler which can be used to reopen files. The FileHandler instance now saves the encoding (which can be None) in an attribute called "encoding". - Bug #411881: logging.handlers: bare except clause removed from SMTPHandler.emit. Now, only ImportError is trapped. - Bug #411881: logging.handlers: bare except clause removed from SocketHandler.createSocket. Now, only socket.error is trapped. - Bug #411881: logging: bare except clause removed from LogRecord.__init__. Now, only ValueError, TypeError and AttributeError are trapped. - Patch #1504073: Fix tarfile.open() for mode "r" with a fileobj argument. - Patch #1182394 from Shane Holloway: speed up HMAC.hexdigest. - Patch #1262036: Prevent TarFiles from being added to themselves under certain conditions. - Patch #1230446: tarfile.py: fix ExFileObject so that read() and tell() work correctly together with readline(). - Patch #1484695: The tarfile module now raises a HeaderError exception if a buffer given to frombuf() is invalid. - Bug #1503765: Fix a problem in logging.config with spaces in comma- separated lists read from logging config files. - Patch #1604907: Fix problems in logging.handlers caused at logging shutdown when syslog handlers fail to initialize because of syslogd problems. - Patch #1608267: fix a race condition in os.makedirs() if the directory to be created is already there. - Patch #1610437: fix a tarfile bug with long filename headers. - Patch #1371075: Make ConfigParser accept optional dict type for ordering, sorting, etc. - Bug #1563807: _ctypes built on AIX fails with ld ffi error. - Bug #1598620: A ctypes Structure cannot contain itself. - Patch #1070046: Marshal new-style objects like InstanceType in xmlrpclib. - cStringIO.truncate(-1) now raises an IOError, like StringIO and regular files. - Patch #1472877: Fix Tix subwidget name resolution. - Patch #1594554: Always close a tkSimpleDialog on ok(), even if an exception occurs. - Patch #1538878: Don't make tkSimpleDialog dialogs transient if the parent window is withdrawn. - Bug #1597824: return the registered function from atexit.register() to facilitate usage as a decorator. - Patch #1360200: Use unmangled_version RPM spec field to deal with file name mangling. - Patch #1359217: Process 2xx response in an ftplib transfer that precedes an 1xx response. - Patch #1355023: support whence argument for GzipFile.seek. - Patch #1065257: Support passing open files as body in HTTPConnection.request(). - Bug #1569790: mailbox.py: Maildir.get_folder() and MH.get_folder() weren't passing the message factory on to newly created Maildir/MH objects. - Patch #1514543: mailbox.py: In the Maildir class, report errors if there's a filename clash instead of possibly losing a message. (Patch by David Watson.) - Patch #1514544: Try to ensure that messages/indexes have been physically written to disk after calling .flush() or .close(). (Patch by David Watson.) - Patch #1592250: Add elide argument to Tkinter.Text.search. - Patch #838546: Make terminal become controlling in pty.fork(). - Patch #1351744: Add askyesnocancel helper for tkMessageBox. - Patch #1060577: Extract list of RPM files from spec file in bdist_rpm. - Bug #1586613: fix zlib and bz2 codecs' incremental en/decoders. - Patch #1583880: fix tarfile's problems with long names and posix/ GNU modes. - Bug #1586448: the compiler module now emits the same bytecode for list comprehensions as the builtin compiler, using the LIST_APPEND opcode. - Fix codecs.EncodedFile which did not use file_encoding in 2.5.0, and fix all codecs file wrappers to work correctly with the "with" statement (bug #1586513). - Lib/modulefinder.py now handles absolute and relative imports correctly. - Patch #1567274: Support SMTP over TLS. - Patch #1560695: Add .note.GNU-stack to ctypes' sysv.S so that ctypes isn't considered as requiring executable stacks. - ctypes callback functions only support 'fundamental' data types as result type. Raise an error when something else is used. This is a partial fix for Bug #1574584. - Fix turtle so that time.sleep is imported for the entire library. Allows the demo2 function to be executed on its own instead of only when the module is run as a script. - Bug #813342: Start the IDLE subprocess with -Qnew if the parent is started with that option. - Bug #1565150: Fix subsecond processing for os.utime on Windows. - Support for MSVC 8 was added to bdist_wininst. - Bug #1446043: correctly raise a LookupError if an encoding name given to encodings.search_function() contains a dot. - Bug #1560617: in pyclbr, return full module name not only for classes, but also for functions. - Bug #1457823: cgi.(Sv)FormContentDict's constructor now takes keep_blank_values and strict_parsing keyword arguments. - Bug #1566602: correct failure of posixpath unittest when $HOME ends with a slash. - Bug #1565661: in webbrowser, split() the command for the default GNOME browser in case it is a command with args. - Made the error message for time.strptime when the data data and format do match be more clear. - Fix a bug in traceback.format_exception_only() that led to an error being raised when print_exc() was called without an exception set. In version 2.4, this printed "None", restored that behavior. - Make webbrowser.BackgroundBrowser usable in Windows (it wasn't because the close_fds arg to subprocess.Popen is not supported). - Reverted patch #1504333 to sgmllib because it introduced an infinite loop. - Patch #1553314: Fix the inspect.py slowdown that was hurting IPython & SAGE by adding smarter caching in inspect.getmodule() - Fix missing import of the types module in logging.config. - Patch #1550886: Fix decimal module context management implementation to match the localcontext() example from PEP 343. - Bug #1545341: The 'classifier' keyword argument to the Distutils setup() function now accepts tuples as well as lists. - Bug #1541863: uuid.uuid1 failed to generate unique identifiers on systems with low clock resolution. - Bug #1531862: Do not close standard file descriptors in subprocess. - idle: Honor the "Cancel" action in the save dialog (Debian bug #299092). - Fix utf-8-sig incremental decoder, which didn't recognise a BOM when the first chunk fed to the decoder started with a BOM, but was longer than 3 bytes. - The implementation of UnicodeError objects has been simplified (start and end attributes are now stored directly as Py_ssize_t members). - Issue829951: In the smtplib module, SMTP.starttls() now complies with RFC 3207 and forgets any knowledge obtained from the server not obtained from the TLS negotiation itself. Patch contributed by Bill Fenner. - Issue1339: The smtplib.SMTP class has been refactored a bit such that the SMTP.starttls() caller no longer needs to call ehlo() beforehand. SMTP.starttls() now raises an exception of the server does not claim to support starttls. Adds the SMTP.ehlo_or_helo_if_needed() method. Patch contributed by Bill Fenner. - Patch #1089358: Add signal.siginterrupt, a wrapper around siginterrupt(3). Extension Modules ----------------- - Patch #1657: added select.epoll and select.kqueue - Patch #1506171: added operator.methodcaller(). - Patch #1826: operator.attrgetter() now supports dotted attribute paths. - Patch #1957: syslogmodule: Release GIL when calling syslog(3) - #2112: mmap.error is now a subclass of EnvironmentError and not a direct EnvironmentError - Bug #2111: mmap segfaults when trying to write a block opened with PROT_READ - #2063: correct order of utime and stime in os.times() result on Windows. - Patch #1736: Fix file name handling of _msi.FCICreate. - Updated ``big5hkscs`` codec to the HKSCS revision of 2004. - #1940: make it possible to use curses.filter() before curses.initscr() as the documentation says. - Backport of _fileio module from Python 3.0. - #1087741: mmap.mmap is now a class, not a factory function. It is also subclassable now. - Patch #1648: added ``sys.getprofile()`` and ``sys.gettrace()``. - Patch #1663329: added ``os.closerange()`` function to quickly close a range of file descriptors without considering errors. - Patch 976880: ``mmap`` objects now have an ``rfind`` method that works as expected. ``mmap.find`` also takes an optional ``end`` parameter. - _winreg's HKEY object has gained __enter__ and __exit__ methods to support the context manager protocol. The _winreg module also gained a new function ``ExpandEnvironmentStrings`` to expand REG_EXPAND_SZ keys. - itertools.starmap() now accepts any iterable input. Previously, it required the function inputs to be tuples. - itertools.chain() now has an alternate constructor, chain.from_iterable(). - Issue #1646: Make socket support TIPC. The socket module now has support for TIPC under Linux, see http://tipc.sf.net/ for more information. - Added interface for Windows' WSAIoctl to socket object and added an example for a simple network sniffer. - Bug #1301: Bad assert in _tkinter fixed. - Added bdist_wininst executable for VS 2008. - Bug #1604: collections.deque.__init__(iterable) now clears any prior contents before adding elements from the iterable. This fix brings the behavior into line with that for list.__init__(). - Added wide char functions to msvcrt module: getwch, getwche, putwch and ungetwch. The functions accept or return unicode. - os.access now returns True on Windows for any existing directory. - Added warnpy3k function to the warnings module. - Marshal.dumps() now expects exact type matches for int, long, float, complex, tuple, list, dict, set, and frozenset. Formerly, it would silently miscode subclasses of those types. Now, it raises a ValueError instead. - Patch #1388440: Add set_completion_display_matches_hook and get_completion_type to readline. - Bug #1649098: Avoid declaration of zero-sized array declaration in structure. - Removed the rgbimg module; been deprecated since Python 2.5. - Bug #1721309: prevent bsddb module from freeing random memory. - Bug #1233: fix bsddb.dbshelve.DBShelf append method to work as intended for RECNO databases. - pybsddb.sf.net Bug #477182: Load the database flags at database open time so that opening a database previously created with the DB_DUP or DB_DUPSORT flag set will keep the proper behavior on subsequent opens. Specifically: dictionary assignment to a DB object will replace all values for a given key when the database allows duplicate values. DB users should use DB.put(k, v) when they want to store duplicates; not DB[k] = v. - Add the bsddb.db.DBEnv.lock_id_free method. - Bug #1686475: Support stat'ing open files on Windows again. - Patch #1185447: binascii.b2a_qp() now correctly quotes binary characters with ASCII value less than 32. Also, it correctly quotes dots only if they occur on a single line, as opposed to the previous behavior of quoting dots if they are the second character of any line. - Bug #1622896: fix a rare corner case where the bz2 module raised an error in spite of a succesful compression. - Patch #1654417: make operator.{get,set,del}slice use the full range of Py_ssize_t. - Patch #1646728: datetime.fromtimestamp fails with negative fractional times. With unittest. - Patch #1490190: posixmodule now includes os.chflags() and os.lchflags() functions on platforms where the underlying system calls are available. - Patch #1494140: Add documentation for the new struct.Struct object. - Patch #1432399: Support the HCI protocol for bluetooth sockets - Patch #1657276: Make NETLINK_DNRTMSG conditional. - Bug #1653736: Complain about keyword arguments to time.isoformat. - Bug #1486663: don't reject keyword arguments for subclasses of builtin types. - Patch #1610575: The struct module now supports the 't' code, for C99 _Bool. - Patch #1635058: ensure that htonl and friends never accept or return negative numbers, per the underlying C implementation. - Patch #1544279: Improve thread-safety of the socket module by moving the sock_addr_t storage out of the socket object. - Patch #1019808: fix bug that causes an incorrect error to be returned when a socket timeout is set and a connection attempt fails. - Speed up function calls into the math module. - Bug #1588217: don't parse "= " as a soft line break in binascii's a2b_qp() function, instead leave it in the string as quopri.decode() does. - Bug #1599782: Fix segfault on bsddb.db.DB().type(). - Bug #1567666: Emulate GetFileAttributesExA for Win95. - Patch #1576166: Support os.utime for directories on Windows NT+. - Patch #1572724: fix typo ('=' instead of '==') in _msi.c. - Bug #1572832: fix a bug in ISO-2022 codecs which may cause segfault when encoding non-BMP unicode characters. - Bug #1556784: allow format strings longer than 127 characters in datetime's strftime function. - Fix itertools.count(n) to work with negative numbers again. - RLIMIT_SBSIZE was added to the resource module where available. - Bug #1551427: fix a wrong NULL pointer check in the win32 version of os.urandom(). - Bug #1548092: fix curses.tparm seg fault on invalid input. - Patch #1114: fix curses module compilation on 64-bit AIX, & possibly other 64-bit LP64 platforms where attr_t is not the same size as a long. (Contributed by Luke Mewburn.) - Bug #1550714: fix SystemError from itertools.tee on negative value for n. - Fixed a few bugs on cjkcodecs: - gbk and gb18030 codec now handle U+30FB KATAKANA MIDDLE DOT correctly. - iso2022_jp_2 codec now encodes into G0 for KS X 1001, GB2312 codepoints to conform the standard. - iso2022_jp_3 and iso2022_jp_2004 codec can encode JIS X 0213:2 codepoints now. - Bug #1552726: in readline.c, avoid repeatedly polling in interactive mode by only placing a timeout on the select() if an input hook has been defined. This prevents an interactive Python from waking up 10 times per second. Patch by Richard Boulton. - fixed a bug with bsddb.DB.stat: the flags and txn keyword arguments were transposed. - Added support for linking the bsddb module against BerkeleyDB 4.5.x and 4.6.x. - Bug #1633621: if curses.resizeterm() or curses.resize_term() is called, update _curses.LINES, _curses.COLS, curses.LINES and curses.COLS. - Fix an off-by-one bug in locale.strxfrm(). - Fix libffi configure for hppa*-*-linux* | parisc*-*-linux*. - Build using system ffi library on arm*-linux*. - Bug #1372: zlibmodule.c: int overflow in PyZlib_decompress - bsddb module: Fix memory leak when using database cursors on databases without a DBEnv. - The sqlite3 module was updated to pysqlite 2.4.1. Tests ----- - Refactor test_logging to use unittest. - Refactor test_profile and test_cprofile to use the same code to profile. - Make test_runpy reentrant by fixing _check_module to clear out any module being tested. Was causing an error by __import__ doing a reload on the second run and thus suppressing bytecode recreation. - Capture socket connection resets and timeouts in test_socket_ssl and test_urllib2net and raise test.test_support.ResourceDenied. - Patch #1559413: Fix test_cmd_line if sys.executable contains a space. - Added test.test_support.TransientResource which is a context manager to surround calls to resources that are not guaranteed to work even if test.test_support.requires says that the resource should exist. - Added a test for slicing of an exception. - Added test.test_support.EnvironmentVarGuard. It's a class that provides a context manager so that one can temporarily set or unset environment variables. - Added some tests for modulefinder. - Converted test_imp to use unittest. - Fix bsddb test_basics.test06_Transactions to check the version number properly. - test.test_support.catch_warning is a new context manager that can be used to catch the warnings issued by the warning framework. Tools ----- - Tools/scripts/reindent.py now creates the backup file using shutil.copy to preserve user/group and permissions. Added also a --nobackup option to not create the backup if the user is concerned regarding this. Check issue 1050828 for more details. - Tools/scripts/win_add2path.py was added. The simple script modifes the PATH environment var of the HKCU tree and adds the python bin and script directory. - Tools/18n/pygettext.py was added to the list of scripts installed by Tools/scripts/setup.py (tracker item 642309). - Added IronPython and Jython support to pybench (part of which was patch #1563844) - Made some minor changes to pybench output to allow the user to see which Python version is running pybench - Added support for the new platform module feature platform.python_implementation(); this will now be saved in the benchmark pickle Documentation ------------- - RFE #1765140: Updated documentation on FileHandler and subclasses to include new optional delay argument. - Bug #932563: Added section on getting contextual information into logging output, and added documentation for the new LoggerAdapter class. - Bug #1295: Added information about caching of formatted exception information in the LogRecord by Formatter.format(). - Bug #1637365: add subsection about "__name__ == __main__" to the Python tutorial. - Patch #1698768: updated the "using Python on the Mac" intro. - Bug #1569057: Document that calling file.next() when the file is open for writing is undefined. - Patch #1489771: the syntax rules in Python Reference Manual were updated to reflect the current Python syntax. - Patch #1686451: Fix return type for PySequence_{Count,Index,Fast_GET_SIZE}. - Patch #1679379: add documentation for fnmatch.translate(). - Bug #1629566: clarify the docs on the return values of parsedate() and parsedate_tz() in email.utils and rfc822. - Patch #1671450: add a section about subclassing builtin types to the "extending and embedding" tutorial. - Bug #1629125: fix wrong data type (int -> Py_ssize_t) in PyDict_Next docs. - Bug #1565919: document set types in the Language Reference. - Bug #1546052: clarify that PyString_FromString(AndSize) copies the string pointed to by its parameter. - Bug #1566663: remove obsolete example from datetime docs. - Bug #1541682: Fix example in the "Refcount details" API docs. Additionally, remove a faulty example showing PySequence_SetItem applied to a newly created list object and add notes that this isn't a good idea. Tools/Demos ----------- - Patch #1552024: add decorator support to unparse.py demo script. - Make auto-generated python.vim file list built-ins and exceptions in alphatbetical order. Makes output more deterministic and easier to tell if the file is stale or not. - Bug #1546372: Fixed small bugglet in pybench that caused a missing file not to get reported properly. Build ----- - Have the search path for building extensions follow the declared order in $CPPFLAGS and $LDFLAGS when adding directories from those environment variables. - Bug #1983: Added a check to pyport to verify that sizeof(pid_t) is smaller or equal sizeof(long). - Bug #1234: Fixed semaphore errors on AIX 5.2 - Issue #1726: Remove Python/atof.c from PCBuild/pythoncore.vcproj - Removed PCbuild8/ directory and added a new build directory for VS 2005 based on the VS 2008 build directory to PC/VS8.0. The script PCbuild/vs8to9.py was added to sync changes from PCbuild to PC/VS8.0. - Moved PCbuild/ directory for VS 2003 to PC/VS7.1 and renamed PCBuild9/ directory to PCBuild/. - Bug #1699: Define _BSD_SOURCE only on OpenBSD. - Bug #1608: use -fwrapv when GCC supports it. This is important, newer GCC versions may optimize away overflow buffer overflow checks without this option! - Patch #1418: Make the AC_REPLACE_FUNCS object files actually work. - Add a FAST_LOOPS build option that speeds-up looping by trading away periodic threadstate and signal checking in tight loops. By default, this option is turned-off. It should only be enabled in debugged, performance critical applications. - Patch #786737: Allow building in a tree of symlinks pointing to a readonly source. - Bug #1737210: Change Manufacturer of Windows installer to PSF. - Bug #1746880: Correctly install DLLs into system32 folder on Win64. - Define _BSD_SOURCE, to get access to POSIX extensions on OpenBSD 4.1+. - Stop supporting AtheOS and cause a build error in configure for the platform. - Bug #1655392: don't add -L/usr/lib/pythonX.Y/config to the LDFLAGS returned by python-config if Python was built with --enable-shared because that prevented the shared library from being used. - Patch #1569798: fix a bug in distutils when building Python from a directory within sys.exec_prefix. - Bug #1675511: Use -Kpic instead of -xcode=pic32 on Solaris/x86. - Disable _XOPEN_SOURCE on NetBSD 1.x. - configure now checks whether gcc supports the PyArg_ParseTuple format attribute. - Bug #1578513: Cross compilation was broken by a change to configure. Repair so that it's back to how it was in 2.4.3. - Patch #1576954: Update VC6 build directory; remove redundant files in VC7. - Bug #1568842: Fix test for uintptr_t. - Patch #1540470, for OpenBSD 4.0. - Fix build failure on kfreebsd and on the hurd. - Fix the build of the library reference in info format. - Allow Emacs 22 for building the documentation in info format. - Makefile.pre.in(buildbottest): Run an optional script pybuildbot.identify to include some information about the build environment. C API ----- - Unified naming convention for free lists and their limits. All free lists in Object/ are named ``free_list``, the counter ``numfree`` and the upper limit is a macro ``PyName_MAXFREELIST`` inside an #ifndef block. - ``PySet_Add()`` can now modify a newly created frozenset. Similarly to ``PyTuple_SetItem``, it can be used to populate a brand new frozenset; but it does not steal a reference to the added item. - Added ``PySet_Check()`` and ``PyFrozenSet_Check()`` to the set API. - Backport of PyUnicode_FromString(), _FromStringAndSize(), _Format and _FormatV from Python 3.0. Made PyLong_AsSsize_t and PyLong_FromSsize_t public functions. - Patch #1720595: add T_BOOL to the range of structmember types. - Issue #1534: Added ``PyFloat_GetMax()``, ``PyFloat_GetMin()`` and ``PyFloat_GetInfo()`` to the float API. - Issue #1521: On 64bit platforms, using PyArgs_ParseTuple with the t# of w# format code incorrectly truncated the length to an int, even when PY_SSIZE_T_CLEAN is set. The str.decode method used to return incorrect results with huge strings. - Issue #1629: Renamed Py_Size, Py_Type and Py_Refcnt to Py_SIZE, Py_TYPE and Py_REFCNT. - PEP 3123: Provide forward compatibility with Python 3.0, while keeping backwards compatibility. Add Py_Refcnt, Py_Type, Py_Size, and PyVarObject_HEAD_INIT. - Py_ssize_t fields work in structmember when HAVE_LONG_LONG is not defined. - Patch #1733960: Allow T_LONGLONG to accept ints. - T_PYSSIZET can now be used in PyMemberDef lists for Py_ssize_t members. - Added a new API function ``PyImport_ImportModuleNoBlock``. - Bug #1637022: Prefix AST symbols with _Py_. - Fix some leftovers from the conversion from int to Py_ssize_t (relevant to strings and sequences of more than 2**31 items). - Make _PyGILState_NoteThreadState() static, it was not used anywhere outside of pystate.c and should not be necessary. - ``PyImport_Import`` and ``PyImport_ImportModule`` now always do absolute imports. In earlier versions they might have used relative imports under some conditions. - Added case insensitive comparison methods ``PyOS_stricmp(char*, char*)`` and ``PyOS_strnicmp(char*, char*, Py_ssize_t)``. - Bug #1542693: remove semi-colon at end of PyImport_ImportModuleEx macro so it can be used as an expression. Windows ------- - Patch #1706: Drop support for Win9x, WinME and NT4. Python now requires Windows 2000 or greater. The _WINVER and NTDDI_VERSION macros are set to Win2k for x86/32bit builds and WinXP for AMD64 builds. - Conditionalize definition of _CRT_SECURE_NO_DEPRECATE and _CRT_NONSTDC_NO_DEPRECATE. - Bug #1216: Restore support for Visual Studio 2002. Mac --- - cfmfile now raises a DeprecationWarning. - buildtools now raises a DeprecationWarning. - Removed the macfs module. It had been deprecated since Python 2.5. This lead to the deprecation of macostools.touched() as it relied solely on macfs and was a no-op under OS X. ---- **(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**