__init+++++++++++ Python News +++++++++++ (editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.) What's New in Python 2.6 alpha 1? ================================= *Release date: XX-XXX-200X* Core and builtins ----------------- - 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 - Bug #1637022: Prefix AST symbols with _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. - Fix some leftovers from the conversion from int to Py_ssize_t (relevant to strings and sequences of more than 2**31 items). - 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. - Make _PyGILState_NoteThreadState() static, it was not used anywhere outside of pystate.c and should not be necessary. - 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. - Add new requirements for metaclasses. 1) If type or a subclass of type occurs in __bases__, it must occur before any non-type bases, e.g. before regular classes. 2) If you assign to __bases__, you may not change the metaclass. Many more illegal assignments to __bases__ are now checked and raise TypeErrors. This changed fixed at least one known crash. Library ------- - Patch #1676823: Added create_connection() to socket.py, which may be called with a timeout, and use it from httplib (whose HTTPConnection now accepts 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. - 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. - 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 elidge 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). Extension Modules ----------------- - 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. - 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+. - Bug #1548891: The cStringIO.StringIO() constructor now encodes unicode arguments with the system default encoding just like the write() method does, instead of converting it to a raw buffer. - 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. - 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. - Bug #1633621: if curses.resizeterm() or curses.resize_term() is called, update _curses.LINES, _curses.COLS, curses.LINES and curses.COLS. Tests ----- - 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 guard_warnings_filter to test.test_support. It returns a context manager that protects the 'warnings' module's filter from being mutated once the context has been exited. - Added some tests for modulefinder. - Converted test_imp to use unittest. - Fix bsddb test_basics.test06_Transactions to check the version number properly. Tools ----- - 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 ------------- - 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 ----- - 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. C API ----- - Bug #1542693: remove semi-colon at end of PyImport_ImportModuleEx macro so it can be used as an expression. Windows ------- - Conditionalize definition of _CRT_SECURE_NO_DEPRECATE and _CRT_NONSTDC_NO_DEPRECATE. Mac --- What's New in Python 2.5 release candidate 1? ============================================= *Release date: 17-AUG-2006* Core and builtins ----------------- - Unicode objects will no longer raise an exception when being compared equal or unequal to a string and a UnicodeDecodeError exception occurs, e.g. as result of a decoding failure. Instead, the equal (==) and unequal (!=) comparison operators will now issue a UnicodeWarning and interpret the two objects as unequal. The UnicodeWarning can be filtered as desired using the warning framework, e.g. silenced completely, turned into an exception, logged, etc. Note that compare operators other than equal and unequal will still raise UnicodeDecodeError exceptions as they've always done. - Fix segfault when doing string formatting on subclasses of long. - Fix bug related to __len__ functions using values > 2**32 on 64-bit machines with new-style classes. - Fix bug related to __len__ functions returning negative values with classic classes. - Patch #1538606, Fix __index__() clipping. There were some problems discovered with the API and how integers that didn't fit into Py_ssize_t were handled. This patch attempts to provide enough alternatives to effectively use __index__. - Bug #1536021: __hash__ may now return long int; the final hash value is obtained by invoking hash on the long int. - Bug #1536786: buffer comparison could emit a RuntimeWarning. - Bug #1535165: fixed a segfault in input() and raw_input() when sys.stdin is closed. - On Windows, the PyErr_Warn function is now exported from the Python dll again. - Bug #1191458: tracing over for loops now produces a line event on each iteration. Fixing this problem required changing the .pyc magic number. This means that .pyc files generated before 2.5c1 will be regenerated. - Bug #1333982: string/number constants were inappropriately stored in the byte code and co_consts even if they were not used, ie immediately popped off the stack. - Fixed a reference-counting problem in property(). Library ------- - Fix a bug in the ``compiler`` package that caused invalid code to be generated for generator expressions. - The distutils version has been changed to 2.5.0. The change to keep it programmatically in sync with the Python version running the code (introduced in 2.5b3) has been reverted. It will continue to be maintained manually as static string literal. - If the Python part of a ctypes callback function returns None, and this cannot be converted to the required C type, an exception is printed with PyErr_WriteUnraisable. Before this change, the C callback returned arbitrary values to the calling code. - The __repr__ method of a NULL ctypes.py_object() no longer raises an exception. - uuid.UUID now has a bytes_le attribute. This returns the UUID in little-endian byte order for Windows. In addition, uuid.py gained some workarounds for clocks with low resolution, to stop the code yielding duplicate UUIDs. - Patch #1540892: site.py Quitter() class attempts to close sys.stdin before raising SystemExit, allowing IDLE to honor quit() and exit(). - Bug #1224621: make tabnanny recognize IndentationErrors raised by tokenize. - Patch #1536071: trace.py should now find the full module name of a file correctly even on Windows. - logging's atexit hook now runs even if the rest of the module has already been cleaned up. - Bug #1112549, fix DoS attack on cgi.FieldStorage. - Bug #1531405, format_exception no longer raises an exception if str(exception) raised an exception. - Fix a bug in the ``compiler`` package that caused invalid code to be generated for nested functions. Extension Modules ----------------- - Patch #1511317: don't crash on invalid hostname (alias) info. - Patch #1535500: fix segfault in BZ2File.writelines and make sure it raises the correct exceptions. - Patch # 1536908: enable building ctypes on OpenBSD/AMD64. The '-no-stack-protector' compiler flag for OpenBSD has been removed. - Patch #1532975 was applied, which fixes Bug #1533481: ctypes now uses the _as_parameter_ attribute when objects are passed to foreign function calls. The ctypes version number was changed to 1.0.1. - Bug #1530559, struct.pack raises TypeError where it used to convert. Passing float arguments to struct.pack when integers are expected now triggers a DeprecationWarning. Tests ----- - test_socketserver should now work on cygwin and not fail sporadically on other platforms. - test_mailbox should now work on cygwin versions 2006-08-10 and later. - Bug #1535182: really test the xreadlines() method of bz2 objects. - test_threading now skips testing alternate thread stack sizes on platforms that don't support changing thread stack size. Documentation ------------- - Patch #1534922: unittest docs were corrected and enhanced. Build ----- - Bug #1535502, build _hashlib on Windows, and use masm assembler code in OpenSSL. - Bug #1534738, win32 debug version of _msi should be _msi_d.pyd. - Bug #1530448, ctypes build failure on Solaris 10 was fixed. C API ----- - New API for Unicode rich comparisons: PyUnicode_RichCompare() - Bug #1069160. Internal correctness changes were made to ``PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc()``. A test case was added, and the documentation was changed to state that the return value is always 1 (normal) or 0 (if the specified thread wasn't found). What's New in Python 2.5 beta 3? ================================ *Release date: 03-AUG-2006* Core and builtins ----------------- - _PyWeakref_GetWeakrefCount() now returns a Py_ssize_t; it previously returned a long (see PEP 353). - Bug #1515471: string.replace() accepts character buffers again. - Add PyErr_WarnEx() so C code can pass the stacklevel to warnings.warn(). This provides the proper warning for struct.pack(). PyErr_Warn() is now deprecated in favor of PyErr_WarnEx(). - Patch #1531113: Fix augmented assignment with yield expressions. Also fix a SystemError when trying to assign to yield expressions. - Bug #1529871: The speed enhancement patch #921466 broke Python's compliance with PEP 302. This was fixed by adding an ``imp.NullImporter`` type that is used in ``sys.path_importer_cache`` to cache non-directory paths and avoid excessive filesystem operations during imports. - Bug #1521947: When checking for overflow, ``PyOS_strtol()`` used some operations on signed longs that are formally undefined by C. Unfortunately, at least one compiler now cares about that, so complicated the code to make that compiler happy again. - Bug #1524310: Properly report errors from FindNextFile in os.listdir. - Patch #1232023: Stop including current directory in search path on Windows. - Fix some potential crashes found with failmalloc. - Fix warnings reported by Klocwork's static analysis tool. - Bug #1512814, Fix incorrect lineno's when code within a function had more than 255 blank lines. - Patch #1521179: Python now accepts the standard options ``--help`` and ``--version`` as well as ``/?`` on Windows. - Bug #1520864: unpacking singleton tuples in a 'for' loop (for x, in) works again. Fixing this problem required changing the .pyc magic number. This means that .pyc files generated before 2.5b3 will be regenerated. - Bug #1524317: Compiling Python ``--without-threads`` failed. The Python core compiles again, and, in a build without threads, the new ``sys._current_frames()`` returns a dictionary with one entry, mapping the faux "thread id" 0 to the current frame. - Bug #1525447: build on MacOS X on a case-sensitive filesystem. Library ------- - Correction of patch #1455898: In the mbcs decoder, set final=False for stream decoder, but final=True for the decode function. - os.urandom no longer masks unrelated exceptions like SystemExit or KeyboardInterrupt. - Bug #1525866: Don't copy directory stat times in shutil.copytree on Windows - Bug #1002398: The documentation for os.path.sameopenfile now correctly refers to file descriptors, not file objects. - The renaming of the xml package to xmlcore, and the import hackery done to make it appear at both names, has been removed. Bug #1511497, #1513611, and probably others. - Bug #1441397: The compiler module now recognizes module and function docstrings correctly as it did in Python 2.4. - Bug #1529297: The rewrite of doctest for Python 2.4 unintentionally lost that tests are sorted by name before being run. This rarely matters for well-written tests, but can create baffling symptoms if side effects from one test to the next affect outcomes. ``DocTestFinder`` has been changed to sort the list of tests it returns. - The distutils version has been changed to 2.5.0, and is now kept in sync with sys.version_info[:3]. - Bug #978833: Really close underlying socket in _socketobject.close. - Bug #1459963: urllib and urllib2 now normalize HTTP header names with title(). - Patch #1525766: In pkgutil.walk_packages, correctly pass the onerror callback to recursive calls and call it with the failing package name. - Bug #1525817: Don't truncate short lines in IDLE's tool tips. - Patch #1515343: Fix printing of deprecated string exceptions with a value in the traceback module. - Resync optparse with Optik 1.5.3: minor tweaks for/to tests. - Patch #1524429: Use repr() instead of backticks in Tkinter again. - Bug #1520914: Change time.strftime() to accept a zero for any position in its argument tuple. For arguments where zero is illegal, the value is forced to the minimum value that is correct. This is to support an undocumented but common way people used to fill in inconsequential information in the time tuple pre-2.4. - Patch #1220874: Update the binhex module for Mach-O. - The email package has improved RFC 2231 support, specifically for recognizing the difference between encoded (name*0*=) and non-encoded (name*0=) parameter continuations. This may change the types of values returned from email.message.Message.get_param() and friends. Specifically in some cases where non-encoded continuations were used, get_param() used to return a 3-tuple of (None, None, string) whereas now it will just return the string (since non-encoded continuations don't have charset and language parts). Also, whereas % values were decoded in all parameter continuations, they are now only decoded in encoded parameter parts. - Bug #1517990: IDLE keybindings on MacOS X now work correctly - Bug #1517996: IDLE now longer shows the default Tk menu when a path browser, class browser or debugger is the frontmost window on MacOS X - Patch #1520294: Support for getset and member descriptors in types.py, inspect.py, and pydoc.py. Specifically, this allows for querying the type of an object against these built-in types and more importantly, for getting their docstrings printed in the interactive interpreter's help() function. Extension Modules ----------------- - Patch #1519025 and bug #926423: If a KeyboardInterrupt occurs during a socket operation on a socket with a timeout, the exception will be caught correctly. Previously, the exception was not caught. - Patch #1529514: The _ctypes extension is now compiled on more openbsd target platforms. - The ``__reduce__()`` method of the new ``collections.defaultdict`` had a memory leak, affecting pickles and deep copies. - Bug #1471938: Fix curses module build problem on Solaris 8; patch by Paul Eggert. - Patch #1448199: Release interpreter lock in _winreg.ConnectRegistry. - Patch #1521817: Index range checking on ctypes arrays containing exactly one element enabled again. This allows iterating over these arrays, without the need to check the array size before. - Bug #1521375: When the code in ctypes.util.find_library was run with root privileges, it could overwrite or delete /dev/null in certain cases; this is now fixed. - Bug #1467450: On Mac OS X 10.3, RTLD_GLOBAL is now used as the default mode for loading shared libraries in ctypes. - Because of a misspelled preprocessor symbol, ctypes was always compiled without thread support; this is now fixed. - pybsddb Bug #1527939: bsddb module DBEnv dbremove and dbrename methods now allow their database parameter to be None as the sleepycat API allows. - Bug #1526460: Fix socketmodule compile on NetBSD as it has a different bluetooth API compared with Linux and FreeBSD. Tests ----- - Bug #1501330: Change test_ossaudiodev to be much more tolerant in terms of how long the test file should take to play. Now accepts taking 2.93 secs (exact time) +/- 10% instead of the hard-coded 3.1 sec. - Patch #1529686: The standard tests ``test_defaultdict``, ``test_iterlen``, ``test_uuid`` and ``test_email_codecs`` didn't actually run any tests when run via ``regrtest.py``. Now they do. Build ----- - Bug #1439538: Drop usage of test -e in configure as it is not portable. Mac --- - PythonLauncher now works correctly when the path to the script contains characters that are treated specially by the shell (such as quotes). - Bug #1527397: PythonLauncher now launches scripts with the working directory set to the directory that contains the script instead of the user home directory. That latter was an implementation accident and not what users expect. What's New in Python 2.5 beta 2? ================================ *Release date: 11-JUL-2006* Core and builtins ----------------- - Bug #1441486: The literal representation of -(sys.maxint - 1) again evaluates to a int object, not a long. - Bug #1501934: The scope of global variables that are locally assigned using augmented assignment is now correctly determined. - Bug #927248: Recursive method-wrapper objects can now safely be released. - Bug #1417699: Reject locale-specific decimal point in float() and atof(). - Bug #1511381: codec_getstreamcodec() in codec.c is corrected to omit a default "error" argument for NULL pointer. This allows the parser to take a codec from cjkcodecs again. - Bug #1519018: 'as' is now validated properly in import statements. - On 64 bit systems, int literals that use less than 64 bits are now ints rather than longs. - Bug #1512814, Fix incorrect lineno's when code at module scope started after line 256. - New function ``sys._current_frames()`` returns a dict mapping thread id to topmost thread stack frame. This is for expert use, and is especially useful for debugging application deadlocks. The functionality was previously available in Fazal Majid's ``threadframe`` extension module, but it wasn't possible to do this in a wholly threadsafe way from an extension. Library ------- - Bug #1257728: Mention Cygwin in distutils error message about a missing VS 2003. - Patch #1519566: Update turtle demo, make begin_fill idempotent. - Bug #1508010: msvccompiler now requires the DISTUTILS_USE_SDK environment variable to be set in order to the SDK environment for finding the compiler, include files, etc. - Bug #1515998: Properly generate logical ids for files in bdist_msi. - warnings.py now ignores ImportWarning by default - string.Template() now correctly handles tuple-values. Previously, multi-value tuples would raise an exception and single-value tuples would be treated as the value they contain, instead. - Bug #822974: Honor timeout in telnetlib.{expect,read_until} even if some data are received. - Bug #1267547: Put proper recursive setup.py call into the spec file generated by bdist_rpm. - Bug #1514693: Update turtle's heading when switching between degrees and radians. - Reimplement turtle.circle using a polyline, to allow correct filling of arcs. - Bug #1514703: Only setup canvas window in turtle when the canvas is created. - Bug #1513223: .close() of a _socketobj now releases the underlying socket again, which then gets closed as it becomes unreferenced. - Bug #1504333: Make sgmllib support angle brackets in quoted attribute values. - Bug #853506: Fix IPv6 address parsing in unquoted attributes in sgmllib ('[' and ']' were not accepted). - Fix a bug in the turtle module's end_fill function. - Bug #1510580: The 'warnings' module improperly required that a Warning category be either a types.ClassType and a subclass of Warning. The proper check is just that it is a subclass with Warning as the documentation states. - The compiler module now correctly compiles the new try-except-finally statement (bug #1509132). - The wsgiref package is now installed properly on Unix. - A bug was fixed in logging.config.fileConfig() which caused a crash on shutdown when fileConfig() was called multiple times. - The sqlite3 module did cut off data from the SQLite database at the first null character before sending it to a custom converter. This has been fixed now. Extension Modules ----------------- - #1494314: Fix a regression with high-numbered sockets in 2.4.3. This means that select() on sockets > FD_SETSIZE (typically 1024) work again. The patch makes sockets use poll() internally where available. - Assigning None to pointer type fields in ctypes structures possible overwrote the wrong fields, this is fixed now. - Fixed a segfault in _ctypes when ctypes.wintypes were imported on non-Windows platforms. - Bug #1518190: The ctypes.c_void_p constructor now accepts any integer or long, without range checking. - Patch #1517790: It is now possible to use custom objects in the ctypes foreign function argtypes sequence as long as they provide a from_param method, no longer is it required that the object is a ctypes type. - The '_ctypes' extension module now works when Python is configured with the --without-threads option. - Bug #1513646: os.access on Windows now correctly determines write access, again. - Bug #1512695: cPickle.loads could crash if it was interrupted with a KeyboardInterrupt. - Bug #1296433: parsing XML with a non-default encoding and a CharacterDataHandler could crash the interpreter in pyexpat. - Patch #1516912: improve Modules support for OpenVMS. Build ----- - Automate Windows build process for the Win64 SSL module. - 'configure' now detects the zlib library the same way as distutils. Previously, the slight difference could cause compilation errors of the 'zlib' module on systems with more than one version of zlib. - The MSI compileall step was fixed to also support a TARGETDIR with spaces in it. - Bug #1517388: sqlite3.dll is now installed on Windows independent of Tcl/Tk. - Bug #1513032: 'make install' failed on FreeBSD 5.3 due to lib-old trying to be installed even though it's empty. Tests ----- - Call os.waitpid() at the end of tests that spawn child processes in order to minimize resources (zombies). Documentation ------------- - Cover ImportWarning, PendingDeprecationWarning and simplefilter() in the documentation for the warnings module. - Patch #1509163: MS Toolkit Compiler no longer available. - Patch #1504046: Add documentation for xml.etree. What's New in Python 2.5 beta 1? ================================ *Release date: 20-JUN-2006* Core and builtins ----------------- - Patch #1507676: Error messages returned by invalid abstract object operations (such as iterating over an integer) have been improved and now include the type of the offending object to help with debugging. - Bug #992017: A classic class that defined a __coerce__() method that returned its arguments swapped would infinitely recurse and segfault the interpreter. - Fix the socket tests so they can be run concurrently. - Removed 5 integers from C frame objects (PyFrameObject). f_nlocals, f_ncells, f_nfreevars, f_stack_size, f_restricted. - Bug #532646: object.__call__() will continue looking for the __call__ attribute on objects until one without one is found. This leads to recursion when you take a class and set its __call__ attribute to an instance of the class. Originally fixed for classic classes, but this fix is for new-style. Removes the infinite_rec_3 crasher. - The string and unicode methods startswith() and endswith() now accept a tuple of prefixes/suffixes to look for. Implements RFE #1491485. - Buffer objects, at the C level, never used the char buffer implementation even when the char buffer for the wrapped object was explicitly requested (originally returned the read or write buffer). Now a TypeError is raised if the char buffer is not present but is requested. - Patch #1346214: Statements like "if 0: suite" are now again optimized away like they were in Python 2.4. - Builtin exceptions are now full-blown new-style classes instead of instances pretending to be classes, which speeds up exception handling by about 80% in comparison to 2.5a2. - Patch #1494554: Update unicodedata.numeric and unicode.isnumeric to Unicode 4.1. - Patch #921466: sys.path_importer_cache is now used to cache valid and invalid file paths for the built-in import machinery which leads to fewer open calls on startup. - Patch #1442927: ``long(str, base)`` is now up to 6x faster for non-power- of-2 bases. The largest speedup is for inputs with about 1000 decimal digits. Conversion from non-power-of-2 bases remains quadratic-time in the number of input digits (it was and remains linear-time for bases 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32). - Bug #1334662: ``int(string, base)`` could deliver a wrong answer when ``base`` was not 2, 4, 8, 10, 16 or 32, and ``string`` represented an integer close to ``sys.maxint``. This was repaired by patch #1335972, which also gives a nice speedup. - Patch #1337051: reduced size of frame objects. - PyErr_NewException now accepts a tuple of base classes as its "base" parameter. - Patch #876206: function call speedup by retaining allocated frame objects. - Bug #1462152: file() now checks more thoroughly for invalid mode strings and removes a possible "U" before passing the mode to the C library function. - Patch #1488312, Fix memory alignment problem on SPARC in unicode - Bug #1487966: Fix SystemError with conditional expression in assignment - WindowsError now has two error code attributes: errno, which carries the error values from errno.h, and winerror, which carries the error values from winerror.h. Previous versions put the winerror.h values (from GetLastError()) into the errno attribute. - Patch #1475845: Raise IndentationError for unexpected indent. - Patch #1479181: split open() and file() from being aliases for each other. - Patch #1497053 & bug #1275608: Exceptions occurring in ``__eq__()`` methods were always silently ignored by dictionaries when comparing keys. They are now passed through (except when using the C API function ``PyDict_GetItem()``, whose semantics did not change). - Bug #1456209: In some obscure cases it was possible for a class with a custom ``__eq__()`` method to confuse dict internals when class instances were used as a dict's keys and the ``__eq__()`` method mutated the dict. No, you don't have any code that did this ;-) Extension Modules ----------------- - Bug #1295808: expat symbols should be namespaced in pyexpat - Patch #1462338: Upgrade pyexpat to expat 2.0.0 - Change binascii.hexlify to accept a read-only buffer instead of only a char buffer and actually follow its documentation. - Fixed a potentially invalid memory access of CJKCodecs' shift-jis decoder. - Patch #1478788 (modified version): The functional extension module has been renamed to _functools and a functools Python wrapper module added. This provides a home for additional function related utilities that are not specifically about functional programming. See PEP 309. - Patch #1493701: performance enhancements for struct module. - Patch #1490224: time.altzone is now set correctly on Cygwin. - Patch #1435422: zlib's compress and decompress objects now have a copy() method. - Patch #1454481: thread stack size is now tunable at runtime for thread enabled builds on Windows and systems with Posix threads support. - On Win32, os.listdir now supports arbitrarily-long Unicode path names (up to the system limit of 32K characters). - Use Win32 API to implement os.{access,chdir,chmod,mkdir,remove,rename,rmdir,utime}. As a result, these functions now raise WindowsError instead of OSError. - ``time.clock()`` on Win64 should use the high-performance Windows ``QueryPerformanceCounter()`` now (as was already the case on 32-bit Windows platforms). - Calling Tk_Init twice is refused if the first call failed as that may deadlock. - bsddb: added the DB_ARCH_REMOVE flag and fixed db.DBEnv.log_archive() to accept it without potentially using an uninitialized pointer. - bsddb: added support for the DBEnv.log_stat() and DBEnv.lsn_reset() methods assuming BerkeleyDB >= 4.0 and 4.4 respectively. [pybsddb project SF patch numbers 1494885 and 1494902] - bsddb: added an interface for the BerkeleyDB >= 4.3 DBSequence class. [pybsddb project SF patch number 1466734] - bsddb: fix DBCursor.pget() bug with keyword argument names when no data parameter is supplied. [SF pybsddb bug #1477863] - bsddb: the __len__ method of a DB object has been fixed to return correct results. It could previously incorrectly return 0 in some cases. Fixes SF bug 1493322 (pybsddb bug 1184012). - bsddb: the bsddb.dbtables Modify method now raises the proper error and aborts the db transaction safely when a modifier callback fails. Fixes SF python patch/bug #1408584. - bsddb: multithreaded DB access using the simple bsddb module interface now works reliably. It has been updated to use automatic BerkeleyDB deadlock detection and the bsddb.dbutils.DeadlockWrap wrapper to retry database calls that would previously deadlock. [SF python bug #775414] - Patch #1446489: add support for the ZIP64 extensions to zipfile. - Patch #1506645: add Python wrappers for the curses functions is_term_resized, resize_term and resizeterm. Library ------- - Patch #815924: Restore ability to pass type= and icon= in tkMessageBox functions. - Patch #812986: Update turtle output even if not tracing. - Patch #1494750: Destroy master after deleting children in Tkinter.BaseWidget. - Patch #1096231: Add ``default`` argument to Tkinter.Wm.wm_iconbitmap. - Patch #763580: Add name and value arguments to Tkinter variable classes. - Bug #1117556: SimpleHTTPServer now tries to find and use the system's mime.types file for determining MIME types. - Bug #1339007: Shelf objects now don't raise an exception in their __del__ method when initialization failed. - Patch #1455898: The MBCS codec now supports the incremental mode for double-byte encodings. - ``difflib``'s ``SequenceMatcher.get_matching_blocks()`` was changed to guarantee that adjacent triples in the return list always describe non-adjacent blocks. Previously, a pair of matching blocks could end up being described by multiple adjacent triples that formed a partition of the matching pair. - Bug #1498146: fix optparse to handle Unicode strings in option help, description, and epilog. - Bug #1366250: minor optparse documentation error. - Bug #1361643: fix textwrap.dedent() so it handles tabs appropriately; clarify docs. - The wsgiref package has been added to the standard library. - The functions update_wrapper() and wraps() have been added to the functools module. These make it easier to copy relevant metadata from the original function when writing wrapper functions. - The optional ``isprivate`` argument to ``doctest.testmod()``, and the ``doctest.is_private()`` function, both deprecated in 2.4, were removed. - Patch #1359618: Speed up charmap encoder by using a trie structure for lookup. - The functions in the ``pprint`` module now sort dictionaries by key before computing the display. Before 2.5, ``pprint`` sorted a dictionary if and only if its display required more than one line, although that wasn't documented. The new behavior increases predictability; e.g., using ``pprint.pprint(a_dict)`` in a doctest is now reliable. - Patch #1497027: try HTTP digest auth before basic auth in urllib2 (thanks for J. J. Lee). - Patch #1496206: improve urllib2 handling of passwords with respect to default HTTP and HTTPS ports. - Patch #1080727: add "encoding" parameter to doctest.DocFileSuite. - Patch #1281707: speed up gzip.readline. - Patch #1180296: Two new functions were added to the locale module: format_string() to get the effect of "format % items" but locale-aware, and currency() to format a monetary number with currency sign. - Patch #1486962: Several bugs in the turtle Tk demo module were fixed and several features added, such as speed and geometry control. - Patch #1488881: add support for external file objects in bz2 compressed tarfiles. - Patch #721464: pdb.Pdb instances can now be given explicit stdin and stdout arguments, making it possible to redirect input and output for remote debugging. - Patch #1484695: Update the tarfile module to version 0.8. This fixes a couple of issues, notably handling of long file names using the GNU LONGNAME extension. - Patch #1478292. ``doctest.register_optionflag(name)`` shouldn't create a new flag when ``name`` is already the name of an option flag. - Bug #1385040: don't allow "def foo(a=1, b): pass" in the compiler package. - Patch #1472854: make the rlcompleter.Completer class usable on non- UNIX platforms. - Patch #1470846: fix urllib2 ProxyBasicAuthHandler. - Bug #1472827: correctly escape newlines and tabs in attribute values in the saxutils.XMLGenerator class. Build ----- - Bug #1502728: Correctly link against librt library on HP-UX. - OpenBSD 3.9 is supported now. - Patch #1492356: Port to Windows CE. - Bug/Patch #1481770: Use .so extension for shared libraries on HP-UX for ia64. - Patch #1471883: Add --enable-universalsdk. C API ----- Tests ----- Tools ----- Documentation ------------- What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 2? ================================= *Release date: 27-APR-2006* Core and builtins ----------------- - Bug #1465834: 'bdist_wininst preinstall script support' was fixed by converting these apis from macros into exported functions again: PyParser_SimpleParseFile PyParser_SimpleParseString PyRun_AnyFile PyRun_AnyFileEx PyRun_AnyFileFlags PyRun_File PyRun_FileEx PyRun_FileFlags PyRun_InteractiveLoop PyRun_InteractiveOne PyRun_SimpleFile PyRun_SimpleFileEx PyRun_SimpleString PyRun_String Py_CompileString - Under COUNT_ALLOCS, types are not necessarily immortal anymore. - All uses of PyStructSequence_InitType have been changed to initialize the type objects only once, even if the interpreter is initialized multiple times. - Bug #1454485, array.array('u') could crash the interpreter. This was due to PyArgs_ParseTuple(args, 'u#', ...) trying to convert buffers (strings) to unicode when it didn't make sense. 'u#' now requires a unicode string. - Py_UNICODE is unsigned. It was always documented as unsigned, but due to a bug had a signed value in previous versions. - Patch #837242: ``id()`` of any Python object always gives a positive number now, which might be a long integer. ``PyLong_FromVoidPtr`` and ``PyLong_AsVoidPtr`` have been changed accordingly. Note that it has never been correct to implement a ``__hash()__`` method that returns the ``id()`` of an object: def __hash__(self): return id(self) # WRONG because a hash result must be a (short) Python int but it was always possible for ``id()`` to return a Python long. However, because ``id()`` could return negative values before, on a 32-bit box an ``id()`` result was always usable as a hash value before this patch. That's no longer necessarily so. - Python on OS X 10.3 and above now uses dlopen() (via dynload_shlib.c) to load extension modules and now provides the dl module. As a result, sys.setdlopenflags() now works correctly on these systems. (SF patch #1454844) - Patch #1463867: enhanced garbage collection to allow cleanup of cycles involving generators that have paused outside of any ``try`` or ``with`` blocks. (In 2.5a1, a paused generator that was part of a reference cycle could not be garbage collected, regardless of whether it was paused in a ``try`` or ``with`` block.) Extension Modules ----------------- - Patch #1191065: Fix preprocessor problems on systems where recvfrom is a macro. - Bug #1467952: os.listdir() now correctly raises an error if readdir() fails with an error condition. - Fixed bsddb.db.DBError derived exceptions so they can be unpickled. - Bug #1117761: bsddb.*open() no longer raises an exception when using the cachesize parameter. - Bug #1149413: bsddb.*open() no longer raises an exception when using a temporary db (file=None) with the 'n' flag to truncate on open. - Bug #1332852: bsddb module minimum BerkeleyDB version raised to 3.3 as older versions cause excessive test failures. - Patch #1062014: AF_UNIX sockets under Linux have a special abstract namespace that is now fully supported. Library ------- - Bug #1223937: subprocess.CalledProcessError reports the exit status of the process using the returncode attribute, instead of abusing errno. - Patch #1475231: ``doctest`` has a new ``SKIP`` option, which causes a doctest to be skipped (the code is not run, and the expected output or exception is ignored). - Fixed contextlib.nested to cope with exceptions being raised and caught inside exit handlers. - Updated optparse module to Optik 1.5.1 (allow numeric constants in hex, octal, or binary; add ``append_const`` action; keep going if gettext cannot be imported; added ``OptionParser.destroy()`` method; added ``epilog`` for better help generation). - Bug #1473760: ``tempfile.TemporaryFile()`` could hang on Windows, when called from a thread spawned as a side effect of importing a module. - The pydoc module now supports documenting packages contained in .zip or .egg files. - The pkgutil module now has several new utility functions, such as ``walk_packages()`` to support working with packages that are either in the filesystem or zip files. - The mailbox module can now modify and delete messages from mailboxes, in addition to simply reading them. Thanks to Gregory K. Johnson for writing the code, and to the 2005 Google Summer of Code for funding his work. - The ``__del__`` method of class ``local`` in module ``_threading_local`` returned before accomplishing any of its intended cleanup. - Patch #790710: Add breakpoint command lists in pdb. - Patch #1063914: Add Tkinter.Misc.clipboard_get(). - Patch #1191700: Adjust column alignment in bdb breakpoint lists. - SimpleXMLRPCServer relied on the fcntl module, which is unavailable on Windows. Bug #1469163. - The warnings, linecache, inspect, traceback, site, and doctest modules were updated to work correctly with modules imported from zipfiles or via other PEP 302 __loader__ objects. - Patch #1467770: Reduce usage of subprocess._active to processes which the application hasn't waited on. - Patch #1462222: Fix Tix.Grid. - Fix exception when doing glob.glob('anything*/') - The pstats.Stats class accepts an optional stream keyword argument to direct output to an alternate file-like object. Build ----- - The Makefile now has a reindent target, which runs reindent.py on the library. - Patch #1470875: Building Python with MS Free Compiler - Patch #1161914: Add a python-config script. - Patch #1324762:Remove ccpython.cc; replace --with-cxx with --with-cxx-main. Link with C++ compiler only if --with-cxx-main was specified. (Can be overridden by explicitly setting LINKCC.) Decouple CXX from --with-cxx-main, see description in README. - Patch #1429775: Link extension modules with the shared libpython. - Fixed a libffi build problem on MIPS systems. - ``PyString_FromFormat``, ``PyErr_Format``, and ``PyString_FromFormatV`` now accept formats "%u" for unsigned ints, "%lu" for unsigned longs, and "%zu" for unsigned integers of type ``size_t``. Tests ----- - test_contextlib now checks contextlib.nested can cope with exceptions being raised and caught inside exit handlers. - test_cmd_line now checks operation of the -m and -c command switches - The test_contextlib test in 2.5a1 wasn't actually run unless you ran it separately and by hand. It also wasn't cleaning up its changes to the current Decimal context. - regrtest.py now has a -M option to run tests that test the new limits of containers, on 64-bit architectures. Running these tests is only sensible on 64-bit machines with more than two gigabytes of memory. The argument passed is the maximum amount of memory for the tests to use. Tools ----- - Added the Python benchmark suite pybench to the Tools/ directory; contributed by Marc-Andre Lemburg. Documentation ------------- - Patch #1473132: Improve docs for ``tp_clear`` and ``tp_traverse``. - PEP 343: Added Context Types section to the library reference and attempted to bring other PEP 343 related documentation into line with the implementation and/or python-dev discussions. - Bug #1337990: clarified that ``doctest`` does not support examples requiring both expected output and an exception. What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1? ================================= *Release date: 05-APR-2006* Core and builtins ----------------- - PEP 338: -m command line switch now delegates to runpy.run_module allowing it to support modules in packages and zipfiles - On Windows, .DLL is not an accepted file name extension for extension modules anymore; extensions are only found if they end in .PYD. - Bug #1421664: sys.stderr.encoding is now set to the same value as sys.stdout.encoding. - __import__ accepts keyword arguments. - Patch #1460496: round() now accepts keyword arguments. - Fixed bug #1459029 - unicode reprs were double-escaped. - Patch #1396919: The system scope threads are reenabled on FreeBSD 5.4 and later versions. - Bug #1115379: Compiling a Unicode string with an encoding declaration now gives a SyntaxError. - Previously, Python code had no easy way to access the contents of a cell object. Now, a ``cell_contents`` attribute has been added (closes patch #1170323). - Patch #1123430: Python's small-object allocator now returns an arena to the system ``free()`` when all memory within an arena becomes unused again. Prior to Python 2.5, arenas (256KB chunks of memory) were never freed. Some applications will see a drop in virtual memory size now, especially long-running applications that, from time to time, temporarily use a large number of small objects. Note that when Python returns an arena to the platform C's ``free()``, there's no guarantee that the platform C library will in turn return that memory to the operating system. The effect of the patch is to stop making that impossible, and in tests it appears to be effective at least on Microsoft C and gcc-based systems. Thanks to Evan Jones for hard work and patience. - Patch #1434038: property() now uses the getter's docstring if there is no "doc" argument given. This makes it possible to legitimately use property() as a decorator to produce a read-only property. - PEP 357, patch 1436368: add an __index__ method to int/long and a matching nb_index slot to the PyNumberMethods struct. The slot is consulted instead of requiring an int or long in slicing and a few other contexts, enabling other objects (e.g. Numeric Python's integers) to be used as slice indices. - Fixed various bugs reported by Coverity's Prevent tool. - PEP 352, patch #1104669: Make exceptions new-style objects. Introduced the new exception base class, BaseException, which has a new message attribute. KeyboardInterrupt and SystemExit to directly inherit from BaseException now. Raising a string exception now raises a DeprecationWarning. - Patch #1438387, PEP 328: relative and absolute imports. Imports can now be explicitly relative, using 'from .module import name' to mean 'from the same package as this module is in. Imports without dots still default to the old relative-then-absolute, unless 'from __future__ import absolute_import' is used. - Properly check if 'warnings' raises an exception (usually when a filter set to "error" is triggered) when raising a warning for raising string exceptions. - CO_GENERATOR_ALLOWED is no longer defined. This behavior is the default. The name was removed from Include/code.h. - PEP 308: conditional expressions were added: (x if cond else y). - Patch 1433928: - The copy module now "copies" function objects (as atomic objects). - dict.__getitem__ now looks for a __missing__ hook before raising KeyError. - PEP 343: with statement implemented. Needs ``from __future__ import with_statement``. Use of 'with' as a variable will generate a warning. Use of 'as' as a variable will also generate a warning (unless it's part of an import statement). The following objects have __context__ methods: - The built-in file type. - The thread.LockType type. - The following types defined by the threading module: Lock, RLock, Condition, Semaphore, BoundedSemaphore. - The decimal.Context class. - Fix the encodings package codec search function to only search inside its own package. Fixes problem reported in patch #1433198. Note: Codec packages should implement and register their own codec search function. PEP 100 has the details. - PEP 353: Using ``Py_ssize_t`` as the index type. - ``PYMALLOC_DEBUG`` builds now add ``4*sizeof(size_t)`` bytes of debugging info to each allocated block, since the ``Py_ssize_t`` changes (PEP 353) now allow Python to make use of memory blocks exceeding 2**32 bytes for some purposes on 64-bit boxes. A ``PYMALLOC_DEBUG`` build was limited to 4-byte allocations before. - Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale. This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of . for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods. - Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8. configure would break checking curses.h. - Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set. - Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed. - Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations. - Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter. - Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works. This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError. - Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.subversion. Build number is now displayed in interactive prompt banner. - Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally. "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913. - Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec now encodes backslash correctly. - Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005. - Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correctly even with unsigned longs and long longs. - SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import" It was possible for dlerror() to return a NULL pointer, so it will now use a default error message in this case. - Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo) - Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings - Sped up some Unicode operations. - A new AST parser implementation was completed. The abstract syntax tree is available for read-only (non-compile) access to Python code; an _ast module was added. - SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being produced for generator expressions. The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10)) - SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1. - SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory. Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line. - Fix segfault with invalid coding. - SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError. - All iterators now have a Boolean value of True. Formerly, some iterators supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator was empty. - On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be represented as a C int, raise OverflowError. - test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is present). - SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format codes. - Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron). - Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212). - Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them (fixes bug #1119418). - Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors. - SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for exceptions that cause a function to exit. - The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged. - SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow(). - SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some reference counts in some error exit cases. - SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so there's no portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C realloc. - SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime(). - SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just like their int counterparts. - SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html for a longer write-up of the problem). - SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when serializing floats. - SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats, the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations of floats now simply copy bytes around. - bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP 278. - patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of PyNumber_*(). Thanks Walter D�rwald. - Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent with the equivalent pure-Python implementation. - It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads() before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet). - Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads disabled caused a crash. - Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called. - Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761 - Added two new builtins, any() and all(). - Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error). Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package (thanks to logistix for that added support). - Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember. - Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was returning None. - Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character ('\') with a specific error message. - Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format. - Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode. - Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and an ferror() call. - min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in list.sort(). - The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions: (2+3) --> (5). - set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985. - Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption in calls to os.read(). - The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future statement occurs after anything other than a doc string. - Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance. - Patch #1413181: changed ``PyThreadState_Delete()`` to forget about the current thread state when the auto-GIL-state machinery knows about it (since the thread state is being deleted, continuing to remember it can't help, but can hurt if another thread happens to get created with the same thread id). Extension Modules ----------------- - Patch #1380952: fix SSL objects timing out on consecutive read()s - Patch #1309579: wait3 and wait4 were added to the posix module. - Patch #1231053: The audioop module now supports encoding/decoding of alaw. In addition, the existing ulaw code was updated. - RFE #567972: Socket objects' family, type and proto properties are now exposed via new attributes. - Everything under lib-old was removed. This includes the following modules: Para, addpack, cmp, cmpcache, codehack, dircmp, dump, find, fmt, grep, lockfile, newdir, ni, packmail, poly, rand, statcache, tb, tzparse, util, whatsound, whrandom, zmod - The following modules were removed: regsub, reconvert, regex, regex_syntax. - re and sre were swapped, so help(re) provides full help. importing sre is deprecated. The undocumented re.engine variable no longer exists. - Bug #1448490: Fixed a bug that ISO-2022 codecs could not handle SS2 (single-shift 2) escape sequences correctly. - The unicodedata module was updated to the 4.1 version of the Unicode database. The 3.2 version is still available as unicodedata.db_3_2_0 for applications that require this specific version (such as IDNA). - The timing module is no longer built by default. It was deprecated in PEP 4 in Python 2.0 or earlier. - Patch 1433928: Added a new type, defaultdict, to the collections module. This uses the new __missing__ hook behavior added to dict (see above). - Bug #854823: socketmodule now builds on Sun platforms even when INET_ADDRSTRLEN is not defined. - Patch #1393157: os.startfile() now has an optional argument to specify a "command verb" to invoke on the file. - Bug #876637, prevent stack corruption when socket descriptor is larger than FD_SETSIZE. - Patch #1407135, bug #1424041: harmonize mmap behavior of anonymous memory. mmap.mmap(-1, size) now returns anonymous memory in both Unix and Windows. mmap.mmap(0, size) should not be used on Windows for anonymous memory. - Patch #1422385: The nis module now supports access to domains other than the system default domain. - Use Win32 API to implement os.stat/fstat. As a result, subsecond timestamps are reported, the limit on path name lengths is removed, and stat reports WindowsError now (instead of OSError). - Add bsddb.db.DBEnv.set_tx_timestamp allowing time based database recovery. - Bug #1413192, fix seg fault in bsddb if a transaction was deleted before the env. - Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support. - Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...) - Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints. Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly. The code now conforms to the documented signature. - Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr() without prior setting of the userptr. - Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb. - Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods. - Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build problem on AIX. - Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments - Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint - Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors - Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs. - Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1. - Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4 - Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2 - Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1, but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format - Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads. - Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3). - Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error returns in cStringIO.c. - Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec, MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter - Fix memory leak in posix.access(). - Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode. - Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in the file system encoding. - Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for platforms that don't have inet_aton(). - Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets. - Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one line without newlines. - Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did on Windows. - Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen, st_birthtime for FreeBSD. - Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour for large or negative values. - Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false. - Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly. - Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute if available on the platform. - Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if available on the platform. - Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions were set in a different thread than that which called readline. - collections.deque objects now support a remove() method. - operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple keys (primary, secondary, etc). - os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems. - Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer in pyexpat.GetInputContext. - Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current file size. - Added functional.partial(). See PEP309. - Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline. {remove_history,replace_history} - The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password database. - stat_float_times is now True. - array.array objects are now picklable. - the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the args tuple returned by __reduce__(). - itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments. This allows islice() to work more readily with slices: islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step) - datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to create datetime object using a string and format. - Patch #1117961: Replace the MD5 implementation from RSA Data Security Inc with the implementation from http://sourceforge.net/projects/libmd5-rfc/. Library ------- - Patch #1388073: Numerous __-prefixed attributes of unittest.TestCase have been renamed to have only a single underscore prefix. This was done to make subclassing easier. - PEP 338: new module runpy defines a run_module function to support executing modules which provide access to source code or a code object via the PEP 302 import mechanisms. - The email module's parsedate_tz function now sets the daylight savings flag to -1 (unknown) since it can't tell from the date whether it should be set. - Patch #624325: urlparse.urlparse() and urlparse.urlsplit() results now sport attributes that provide access to the parts of the result. - Patch #1462498: sgmllib now handles entity and character references in attribute values. - Added the sqlite3 package. This is based on pysqlite2.1.3, and provides a DB-API interface in the standard library. You'll need sqlite 3.0.8 or later to build this - if you have an earlier version, the C extension module will not be built. - Bug #1460340: ``random.sample(dict)`` failed in various ways. Dicts aren't officially supported here, and trying to use them will probably raise an exception some day. But dicts have been allowed, and "mostly worked", so support for them won't go away without warning. - Bug #1445068: getpass.getpass() can now be given an explicit stream argument to specify where to write the prompt. - Patch #1462313, bug #1443328: the pickle modules now can handle classes that have __private names in their __slots__. - Bug #1250170: mimetools now handles socket.gethostname() failures gracefully. - patch #1457316: "setup.py upload" now supports --identity to select the key to be used for signing the uploaded code. - Queue.Queue objects now support .task_done() and .join() methods to make it easier to monitor when daemon threads have completed processing all enqueued tasks. Patch #1455676. - popen2.Popen objects now preserve the command in a .cmd attribute. - Added the ctypes ffi package. - email 4.0 package now integrated. This is largely the same as the email 3.0 package that was included in Python 2.3, except that PEP 8 module names are now used (e.g. mail.message instead of email.Message). The MIME classes have been moved to a subpackage (e.g. email.mime.text instead of email.MIMEText). The old names are still supported for now. Several deprecated Message methods have been removed and lots of bugs have been fixed. More details can be found in the email package documentation. - Patches #1436130/#1443155: codecs.lookup() now returns a CodecInfo object (a subclass of tuple) that provides incremental decoders and encoders (a way to use stateful codecs without the stream API). Python functions codecs.getincrementaldecoder() and codecs.getincrementalencoder() as well as C functions PyCodec_IncrementalEncoder() and PyCodec_IncrementalDecoder() have been added. - Patch #1359365: Calling next() on a closed StringIO.String object raises a ValueError instead of a StopIteration now (like file and cString.String do). cStringIO.StringIO.isatty() will raise a ValueError now if close() has been called before (like file and StringIO.StringIO do). - A regrtest option -w was added to re-run failed tests in verbose mode. - Patch #1446372: quit and exit can now be called from the interactive interpreter to exit. - The function get_count() has been added to the gc module, and gc.collect() grew an optional 'generation' argument. - A library msilib to generate Windows Installer files, and a distutils command bdist_msi have been added. - PEP 343: new module contextlib.py defines decorator @contextmanager and helpful context managers nested() and closing(). - The compiler package now supports future imports after the module docstring. - Bug #1413790: zipfile now sanitizes absolute archive names that are not allowed by the specs. - Patch #1215184: FileInput now can be given an opening hook which can be used to control how files are opened. - Patch #1212287: fileinput.input() now has a mode parameter for specifying the file mode input files should be opened with. - Patch #1215184: fileinput now has a fileno() function for getting the current file number. - Patch #1349274: gettext.install() now optionally installs additional translation functions other than _() in the builtin namespace. - Patch #1337756: fileinput now accepts Unicode filenames. - Patch #1373643: The chunk module can now read chunks larger than two gigabytes. - Patch #1417555: SimpleHTTPServer now returns Last-Modified headers. - Bug #1430298: It is now possible to send a mail with an empty return address using smtplib. - Bug #1432260: The names of lambda functions are now properly displayed in pydoc. - Patch #1412872: zipfile now sets the creator system to 3 (Unix) unless the system is Win32. - Patch #1349118: urllib now supports user:pass@ style proxy specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections. - Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications. - Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse. - Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py. - Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters any more. - Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for. - Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature. - Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode - Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility, LoadError subclasses IOError. - Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications. In Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python: "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05), is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but that research should continue, and other alternatives may arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK." - Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6. - Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles. - Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again. - Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an illegal argument) - Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there is an error in the format string. - Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann). - Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional "parent" argument. - Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes for padding. - Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows. - Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE to get the correct encoding. - Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of languages. - Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance. - Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime(). - Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0. - Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook functionality. - Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty. - Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output separator and do not output trailing semicolon. - Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not match the Content-Length header. - Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings. - Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code. - Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb. - Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py. - Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath. - Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking Tkdnd. - Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and docstrings to either "article number" or "message id". - Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None". - textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2). Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly). - urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944. - Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom, as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors. - Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module; it can be missing in embedded interpreters - Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib. - Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via error messages. - Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code. - The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors. Bug #1224621. - The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python source code. In addition, the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that terminates by raising StopIteration. - Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor. - Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first component of the path. - Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent, support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper class at all. - distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution files to PyPI. - distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting them to PyPI. - decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them work as expected. - Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError. - Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r. - Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile. - Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing to build. - Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring symbolic links on Windows. - Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in profile.py if available. - Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py. - Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values in LWPCookieJar. - Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests. - Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder. - Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush. - Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject. - Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands. - Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands. - Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False. - Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583. - Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can be exploited in various ways. - Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec flags on the HTTP listening socket. - Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large. Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read(). - Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler. - Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again. - Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options. - os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience. - Enhancements to the csv module: + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with PEP 305. + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error reporting. + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305 dictates. + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters. + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric types, rather than any object that can be represented as a numeric. + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields to floats. + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed \n to be quoted). + writer doublequote handling improved. + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required this, but the mechanism was unreliable). + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects. + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable. + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects without first creating a dialect class. + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added - previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported. + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial limit is 128kB. + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not the same as the number of records returned, as records can span multiple lines. + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC. This has been fixed. - _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632. - The imghdr module now detects Exif files. - StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute. (Bug #951915). - locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's encoding alias table. - moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache. - the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the args tuple returned by __reduce__(). - optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py. - the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter. - the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter. - the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method. - the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument. - unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905). - heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in list.sort(). - Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the tokenizer with very long source lines. - Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls. - The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The reconvert module now has some simple documentation. - ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__`` - Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05") correctly. - Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split between two lines. - Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error handlers. - Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct encoding instead of a unicode string. - Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than considering it exactly like a '*'. - Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to ``encodings.aliases``. - ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames. - Patch #1413711: Certain patterns of differences were making difflib touch the recursion limit. - Bug #947906: An object oriented interface has been added to the calendar module. It's possible to generate HTML calendar now and the module can be called as a script (e.g. via ``python -mcalendar``). Localized month and weekday names can be ouput (even if an exotic encoding is used) using special classes that use unicode. Build ----- - Fix test_float, test_long, and test_struct failures on Tru64 with gcc by using -mieee gcc option. - Patch #1432345: Make python compile on DragonFly. - Build support for Win64-AMD64 was added. - Patch #1428494: Prefer linking against ncursesw over ncurses library. - Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd. - The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3). The zlib module is now builtin on Windows. - Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro. - Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0. - Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2. - EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils. - SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance, and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right. - Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again. - spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X. - setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink, ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts). - Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec). Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined. Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond. C API ----- - ``PyMem_{Del, DEL}`` and ``PyMem_{Free, FREE}`` no longer map to ``PyObject_{Free, FREE}``. They map to the system ``free()`` now. If memory is obtained via the ``PyObject_`` family, it must be released via the ``PyObject_`` family, and likewise for the ``PyMem_`` family. This has always been officially true, but when Python's small-object allocator was introduced, an attempt was made to cater to a few extension modules discovered at the time that obtained memory via ``PyObject_New`` but released it via ``PyMem_DEL``. It's years later, and if such code still exists it will fail now (probably with segfaults, but calling wrong low-level memory management functions can yield many symptoms). - Added a C API for set and frozenset objects. - Removed PyRange_New(). - Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined mappings. Tests ----- - In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME. - Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables even impatient people to run tests that require remote files. Documentation ------------- - Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes. - Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid values for text files with UNIX-style line endings. - Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc(). - Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py. - Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation. - Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S. - Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows. - Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference. - Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1. - Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag. - Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property(). - Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module. Closes bug #1166582. - Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X. Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen. Mac --- New platforms ------------- - FreeBSD 7 support is added. Tools/Demos ----------- - Created Misc/Vim/vim_syntax.py to auto-generate a python.vim file in that directory for syntax highlighting in Vim. Vim directory was added and placed vimrc to it (was previous up a level). - Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python source files that need an encoding declaration. Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann. - Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable. - Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__. - Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to wiggle over by a pixel. ---- **(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**