+++++++++++ Python News +++++++++++ (editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.) What's New in Python 3.1.2? =========================== *Release date: 20xx-xx-xx* Core and Builtins ----------------- - Issue #7419: setlocale() could crash the interpreter on Windows when called with invalid values. - Issue #6077: On Windows, files opened with tempfile.TemporaryFile in "wt+" mode would appear truncated on the first '0x1a' byte (aka. Ctrl+Z). - Issue #7085: Fix crash when importing some extensions in a thread on MacOSX 10.6. - Issue #7298: fixes for range and reversed(range(...)). Iteration over range(a, b, c) incorrectly gave an empty iterator when a, b and c fit in C long but the length of the range did not. Also fix several cases where reversed(range(a, b, c)) gave wrong results, and fix a refleak for reversed(range(a, b, c)) with large arguments. - Issue #7244: itertools.izip_longest() no longer ignores exceptions raised during the formation of an output tuple. - Issue #3297: On wide unicode builds, do not split unicode characters into surrogates. - Issue #1722344: threading._shutdown() is now called in Py_Finalize(), which fixes the problem of some exceptions being thrown at shutdown when the interpreter is killed. Patch by Adam Olsen. - Issue #7065: Fix a crash in bytes.maketrans and bytearray.maketrans when using byte values greater than 127. Patch by Derk Drukker. - Issue #7019: Raise ValueError when unmarshalling bad long data, instead of producing internally inconsistent Python longs. - Issue #6990: Fix threading.local subclasses leaving old state around after a reference cycle GC which could be recycled by new locals. - Issue #6846: Fix bug where bytearray.pop() returns negative integers. - Issue #6750: A text file opened with io.open() could duplicate its output when writing from multiple threads at the same time. Library ------- - Issue #4120: Drop reference to CRT from manifest when building extensions with msvc9compiler. - Issue #7410: deepcopy of itertools.count was resetting the count. - Issue #4486: When an exception has an explicit cause, do not print its implicit context too. This affects the `traceback` module as well as built-in exception printing. - Issue #1488943: difflib.Differ() doesn't always add hints for tab characters - Issue #7354: distutils.tests.test_msvc9compiler - dragfullwindows can be 2. - Issue #3976: pprint for sets, frozensets, and dicts now succeed when they contain unorderable types. - Issue #5037: Proxy the __bytes__ special method instead to __bytes__ instead of __str__. - Issue #7341: Close the internal file object in the TarFile constructor in case of an error. - Issue #7293: distutils.test_msvc9compiler is fixed to work on any fresh Windows box. Help provided by David Bolen. - Issue #7328: pydoc no longer corrupts sys.path when run with the '-m' switch - Issue #7318: multiprocessing now uses a timeout when it fails to establish a connection with another process, rather than looping endlessly. The default timeout is 20 seconds, which should be amply sufficient for local connections. - Issue #7282: Fix a memory leak when an RLock was used in a thread other than those started through `threading.Thread` (for example, using `_thread.start_new_thread()`). - Issue #7187: Importlib would not silence the IOError raised when trying to write new bytecode when it was made read-only. - Issue #7264: Fix a possible deadlock when deallocating thread-local objects which are part of a reference cycle. - Issue #6896: mailbox.Maildir now invalidates its internal cache each time a modification is done through it. This fixes inconsistencies and test failures on systems with slightly bogus mtime behaviour. - Issue #6665: Fix fnmatch to properly match filenames with newlines in them. - Issue #7246 & Issue #7208: getpass now properly flushes input before reading from stdin so that existing input does not confuse it and lead to incorrect entry or an IOError. It also properly flushes it afterwards to avoid the terminal echoing the input afterwards on OSes such as Solaris. - Issue #7233: Fix a number of two-argument Decimal methods to make sure that they accept an int or long as the second argument. Also fix buggy handling of large arguments (those with coefficient longer than the current precision) in shift and rotate. - Issue #7205: Fix a possible deadlock when using a BZ2File object from several threads at once. - Issue #7071: byte-compilation in Distutils is now done with respect to sys.dont_write_bytecode. - Issue #7099: Decimal.is_normal now returns True for numbers with exponent larger than emax. - Issue #7080: locale.strxfrm() raises a MemoryError on 64-bit non-Windows platforms, and assorted locale fixes by Derk Drukker. - Issue #5833: Fix extra space character in readline completion with the GNU readline library version 6.0. - Issue #6894: Fixed the issue urllib2 doesn't respect "no_proxy" environment - Issue #7082: When falling back to the MIME 'name' parameter, the correct place to look for it is the Content-Type header. - Make tokenize.detect_coding() normalize utf-8 and iso-8859-1 variants like the builtin tokenizer. - Issue #7048: Force Decimal.logb to round its result when that result is too large to fit in the current precision. - Issue #6236, #6348: Fix various failures in the I/O library under AIX and other platforms, when using a non-gcc compiler. Patch by Derk Drukker. - Issue #6954: Fixed crash when using DISTUTILS_DEBUG flag in Distutils. - Issue #4606: Passing 'None' if ctypes argtype is set to POINTER(...) does now always result in NULL. - Issue #5042: Structure sub-subclass does now initialize correctly with base class positional arguments. - Issue #6882: Import uuid creates zombies processes. - Issue #6635: Fix profiler printing usage message. - Issue #6888: pdb's alias command was broken when no arguments were given. - Issue #6795: int(Decimal('nan')) now raises ValueError instead of returning NaN or raising InvalidContext. Also, fix infinite recursion in long(Decimal('nan')). - Issue #6850: Fix bug in Decimal._parse_format_specifier for formats with no type specifier. - Issue #6239: ctypes.c_char_p return value must return bytes. - Issue #6838: Use a list to accumulate the value instead of repeatedly concatenating strings in http.client's HTTPResponse._read_chunked providing a significant speed increase when downloading large files servend with a Transfer-Encoding of 'chunked'. - Have importlib raise ImportError if None is found in sys.modules for a module. - Issue #6794: Fix Decimal.compare_total and Decimal.compare_total_mag: NaN payloads are now ordered by integer value rather than lexicographically. - Issue #6163: Fixed HP-UX runtime library dir options in distutils.unixcompiler. Initial patch by Sridhar Ratnakumar and Michael Haubenwallner. Extension Modules ----------------- - Issue #7078: Set struct.__doc__ from _struct.__doc__. - Issue #6848: Fix curses module build failure on OS X 10.6. Tests ----- - Issue #7324: add a sanity check to regrtest argument parsing to catch the case of an option with no handler. - Issue #6551: test_zipimport could import and then destroy some modules of the encodings package, which would make other tests fail further down the road because the internally cached encoders and decoders would point to empty global variables. - Issue #7295: Do not use a hardcoded file name in test_tarfile. - Issue #7270: Add some dedicated unit tests for multi-thread synchronization primitives such as Lock, RLock, Condition, Event and Semaphore. - Issue #7248 (part 2): Use a unique temporary directory for importlib source tests instead of tempfile.tempdir. This prevents the tests from sharing state between concurrent executions on the same system. - Issue #7248: In importlib.test.source.util a try/finally block did not make sure that some referenced objects actually were created in the block before calling methods on the object. - Issue #7055: test___all__ now greedily detects all modules which have an __all__ attribute, rather than using a hardcoded and incomplete list. - Issue #7058: Added save/restore for argv and os.environ to runtest_inner in regrtest, with warnings if the called test modifies them. - Issue #7042: Fix test_signal (test_itimer_virtual) failure on OS X 10.6. Build ----- - Issue #6603: Change READ_TIMESTAMP macro in ceval.c so that it compiles correctly under gcc on x86-64. This fixes a reported problem with the --with-tsc build on x86-64. - Issue #6802: Fix build issues on MacOSX 10.6 - Issue #6801 : symmetric_difference_update also accepts |. Thanks to Carl Chenet. Documentation ------------- - Issue #6556: Fixed the Distutils configuration files location explanation for Windows. What's New in Python 3.1.1? =========================== *Release date: 2009-08-13* Core and Builtins ----------------- - Issue #6707: dir() on an uninitialized module caused a crash. - Issue #6540: Fixed crash for bytearray.translate() with invalid parameters. - Issue #6573: set.union() stopped processing inputs if an instance of self occurred in the argument chain. - Issue #6070: On posix platforms import no longer copies the execute bit from the .py file to the .pyc file if it is set. - Issue #6428: Since Python 3.0, the __bool__ method must return a bool object, and not an int. Fix the corresponding error message, and the documentation. - Issue #6347: Include inttypes.h as well as stdint.h in pyport.h. This fixes a build failure on HP-UX: int32_t and uint32_t are defined in inttypes.h instead of stdint.h on that platform. - Issue #6373: Fixed a SystemError when encoding with the latin-1 codec and the 'surrogateescape' error handler, a string which contains unpaired surrogates. C-API ----- - Issue #7414: 'C' code wasn't being skipped properly (for keyword arguments) in PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords. - Issue #6624: yArg_ParseTuple with "s" format when parsing argument with NUL: Bogus TypeError detail string. - Issue #6405: Remove duplicate type declarations in descrobject.h. - The code flags for old __future__ features are now available again. Library ------- - Issue #6106: telnetlib.Telnet.process_rawq doesn't handle default WILL/WONT DO/DONT correctly. - Issue #6126: Fixed pdb command-line usage. - Issue #6629: Fix a data corruption issue in the new I/O library, which could occur when writing to a BufferedRandom object (e.g. a file opened in "rb+" or "wb+" mode) after having buffered a certain amount of data for reading. This bug was not present in the pure Python implementation. - Issue #6622: Fix "local variable 'secret' referenced before assignment" bug in POP3.apop. - Issue #6637: defaultdict.copy() did not work when the default factory was left unspecified. Also, the eval/repr round-trip would fail when the default_factory was None. - Issue #2715: Remove remnants of Carbon.File from binhex module. - Issue #6595: The Decimal constructor now allows arbitrary Unicode decimal digits in input, as recommended by the standard. Previously it was restricted to accepting [0-9]. - Issues #5155, #5313, #5331: multiprocessing.Process._bootstrap was unconditionally calling "os.close(sys.stdin.fileno())" resulting in file descriptor errors - Issue #1424152: Fix for http.client, urllib.request to support SSL while working through proxy. Original patch by Christopher Li, changes made by Senthil Kumaran - importlib.abc.PyLoader did not inherit from importlib.abc.ResourceLoader like the documentation said it did even though the code in PyLoader relied on the abstract method required by ResourceLoader. - Issue #6431: Make Fraction type return NotImplemented when it doesn't know how to handle a comparison without loss of precision. Also add correct handling of infinities and nans for comparisons with float. - Issue #6415: Fixed warnings.warn segfault on bad formatted string. - Issue #6358: The exit status of a command started with os.popen() was reported differently than it did with python 2.x. - Issue #6323: The pdb debugger did not exit when running a script with a syntax error. - Issue #3392: The subprocess communicate() method no longer fails in select() when file descriptors are large; communicate() now uses poll() when possible. - Issue #6369: Fix an RLE decompression bug in the binhex module. - Issue #6344: Fixed a crash of mmap.read() when passed a negative argument. - Issue #4005: Fixed a crash of pydoc when there was a zip file present in sys.path. Extension Modules ----------------- - Fix a segfault in expat. - Issue #4509: array.array objects are no longer modified after an operation failing due to the resize restriction in-place when the object has exported buffers. Build ----- - Issue 4601: 'make install' did not set the appropriate permissions on directories. - Issue 5390: Add uninstall icon independent of whether file extensions are installed. Test ---- - Fix a test in importlib.test.source.test_abc_loader that was incorrectly testing when a .pyc file lacked an code object bytecode. What's New in Python 3.1? ========================= *Release date: 27-June-2009* Core and Builtins ----------------- - Issue #6334: Fix bug in range length calculation for ranges with large arguments. - Issue #6329: Fixed iteration for memoryview objects (it was being blocked because it wasn't recognized as a sequence). Library ------- - Issue #6314: logging.basicConfig() performs extra checks on the "level" argument. - Issue #6274: Fixed possible file descriptors leak in subprocess.py - Accessing io.StringIO.buffer now raises an AttributeError instead of io.UnsupportedOperation. - Issue #6271: mmap tried to close invalid file handle (-1) when anonymous. (On Unix) - Issue #1202: zipfile module would cause a struct.error when attempting to store files with a CRC32 > 2**31-1. Extension Modules ----------------- - Issue #5590: Remove unused global variable in pyexpat extension. What's New in Python 3.1 Release Candidate 2? ============================================= *Release date: 13-June-2009* Core and Builtins ----------------- - Fixed SystemError triggered by "range([], 1, -1)". - Issue #5924: On Windows, a large PYTHONPATH environment variable (more than 255 characters) would be completely ignored. - Issue #4547: When debugging a very large function, it was not always possible to update the lineno attribute of the current frame. - Issue #5330: C functions called with keyword arguments were not reported by the various profiling modules (profile, cProfile). Patch by Hagen Fürstenau. Library ------- - Issue #6438: Fixed distutils.cygwinccompiler.get_versions : the regular expression string pattern was trying to match against a bytes returned by Popen. Tested under win32 to build the py-postgresql project. - Issue #6258: Support AMD64 in bdist_msi. - Issue #6195: fixed doctest to no longer try to read 'source' data from binary files. - Issue #5262: Fixed bug in next rollover time computation in TimedRotatingFileHandler. - Issue #6217: The C implementation of io.TextIOWrapper didn't include the errors property. Additionally, the errors and encoding properties of StringIO are always None now. - Issue #6137: The pickle module now translates module names when loading or dumping pickles with a 2.x-compatible protocol, in order to make data sharing and migration easier. This behaviour can be disabled using the new `fix_imports` optional argument. - Removed the ipaddr module. - Issue #3613: base64.{encode,decode}string are now called base64.{encode,decode}bytes which reflects what type they accept and return. The old names are still there as deprecated aliases. - Issue #5767: Remove sgmlop support from xmlrpc.client. - Issue #6150: Fix test_unicode on wide-unicode builds. - Issue #6149: Fix initialization of WeakValueDictionary objects from non-empty parameters. Windows ------- - Issue #6221: Delete test registry key before running the test. - Issue #6158: Package Sine-1000Hz-300ms.aif in MSI file. C-API ----- - Issue #5735: Python compiled with --with-pydebug should throw an ImportError when trying to import modules compiled without --with-pydebug, and vice-versa. Build ----- - Issue #6154: Make sure the intl library is added to LIBS if needed. Also added LIBS to OS X framework builds. - Issue #5809: Specifying both --enable-framework and --enable-shared is an error. Configure now explicity tells you about this. What's New in Python 3.1 release candidate 1? ============================================= *Release date: 2009-05-30* Core and Builtins ----------------- - Issue #6097: Escape UTF-8 surrogates resulting from mbstocs conversion of the command line. - Issue #6012: Add cleanup support to O& argument parsing. - Issue #6089: Fixed str.format with certain invalid field specifiers that would raise SystemError. - Issue #5982: staticmethod and classmethod now expose the wrapped function with __func__. - Added support for multiple context managers in the same with-statement. Deprecated contextlib.nested() which is no longer needed. - Issue #5829: complex("1e500") no longer raises OverflowError. This makes it consistent with float("1e500") and interpretation of real and imaginary literals. - Issue #3527: Removed Py_WIN_WIDE_FILENAMES which is not used any more. - Issue #5994: the marshal module now has docstrings. - Issue #5981: Fix three minor inf/nan issues in float.fromhex: (1) inf and nan strings with trailing whitespace were incorrectly rejected; (2) parsing of strings representing infinities and nans was locale aware; and (3) the interpretation of fromhex('-nan') didn't match that of float('-nan'). Library ------- - Issue #4859: Implement PEP 383 for pwd, spwd, and grp. - smtplib 'login' and 'cram-md5' login are also fixed (see Issue #5259). - Issue #6121: pydoc now ignores leading and trailing spaces in the argument to the 'help' function. - Issue #6118: urllib.parse.quote_plus ignored the encoding and errors arguments for strings with a space in them. - collections.namedtuple() was not working with the following field names: cls, self, tuple, itemgetter, and property. - In unittest, using a skipping decorator on a class is now equivalent to skipping every test on the class. The ClassTestSuite class has been removed. - Issue #6050: Don't fail extracting a directory from a zipfile if the directory already exists. - Issue #1309352: fcntl now converts its third arguments to a C `long` rather than an int, which makes some operations possible under 64-bit Linux (e.g. DN_MULTISHOT with F_NOTIFY). - Issue #5761: Add the name of the underlying file to the repr() of various IO objects. - Issue #5259: smtplib plain auth login no longer gives a traceback. Fix by Musashi Tamura, tests by Marcin Bachry. - Issue #1983: Fix functions taking or returning a process identifier to use the dedicated C type ``pid_t`` instead of a C ``int``. Some platforms have a process identifier type wider than the standard C integer type. - Issue #4066: smtplib.SMTP_SSL._get_socket now correctly returns the socket. Patch by Farhan Ahmad, test by Marcin Bachry. - Issue #2116: Weak references and weak dictionaries now support copy()ing and deepcopy()ing. - Issue #1655: Make imaplib IPv6-capable. Patch by Derek Morr. - Issue #5918: Fix a crash in the parser module. - Issue #1664: Make nntplib IPv6-capable. Patch by Derek Morr. - Issue #5006: Better handling of unicode byte-order marks (BOM) in the io library. This means, for example, that opening an UTF-16 text file in append mode doesn't add a BOM at the end of the file if the file isn't empty. - Issue #4050: inspect.findsource/getsource now raise an IOError if the 'source' file is a binary. Patch by Brodie Rao, tests by Daniel Diniz. This fix corrects a pydoc regression. - Issue 5955: aifc's close method did not close the file it wrapped, now it does. This also means getfp method now returns the real fp. Installation ------------ - Issue #6047: fullinstall has been removed because Python 3's executable will now be known as python3. - Lib/smtpd.py is no longer installed as a script. Extension Modules ----------------- - Issue #3061: Use wcsftime for time.strftime where available. - Issue #4873: Fix resource leaks in error cases of pwd and grp. - Issue #6093: Fix off-by-one error in locale.strxfrm. - The _functools and _locale modules are now built into the libpython shared library instead of as extension modules. Build ----- - Issue #3585: Add pkg-config support. It creates a python-2.7.pc file and a python3.pc symlink in the $(LIBDIR)/pkgconfig directory. Patch by Clinton Roy. Tests ----- - Issue 5442: Tests for importlib were not properly skipping case-sensitivity tests on darwin even when the OS was installed on a case-sensitive filesystem. Also fixed tests that should not be run when sys.dont_write_bytecode is true. What's New in Python 3.1 beta 1? ================================ *Release date: 2009-05-06* Core and Builtins ----------------- - Issue #5914: Add new C API function PyOS_string_to_double, and deprecate PyOS_ascii_strtod and PyOS_ascii_atof. - Issue #3382: float.__format__, complex.__format__, and %-formatting no longer map 'F' to 'f'. Because of issue #5859 (below), this only affects nan -> NAN and inf -> INF. - Issue #5799: ntpath (ie, os.path on Windows) fully supports UNC pathnames in all operations, including splitdrive, split, etc. splitunc() now issues a PendingDeprecation warning. - Issue #5920: For float.__format__, change the behavior with the empty presentation type (that is, not one of 'e', 'f', 'g', or 'n') to be like 'g' but with at least one decimal point and with a default precision of 12. Previously, the behavior the same but with a default precision of 6. This more closely matches str(), and reduces surprises when adding alignment flags to the empty presentation type. This also affects the new complex.__format__ in the same way. - Implement PEP 383, Non-decodable Bytes in System Character Interfaces. - Issue #5890: in subclasses of 'property' the __doc__ attribute was shadowed by classtype's, even if it was None. property now inserts the __doc__ into the subclass instance __dict__. - Issue #4426: The UTF-7 decoder was too strict and didn't accept some legal sequences. Patch by Nick Barnes and Victor Stinner. - Issue #3672: Reject surrogates in utf-8 codec; add surrogatepass error handler. - Issue #5883: In the io module, the BufferedIOBase and TextIOBase ABCs have received a new method, detach(). detach() disconnects the underlying stream from the buffer or text IO and returns it. - Issue #5859: Remove switch from '%f' to '%g'-style formatting for floats with absolute value over 1e50. Also remove length restrictions for float formatting: '%.67f' % 12.34 and '%.120e' % 12.34 no longer raise an exception. - Issue #1588: Add complex.__format__. For example, format(complex(1, 2./3), '.5') now produces a sensible result. - Issue #5864: Fix empty format code formatting for floats so that it never gives more than the requested number of significant digits. - Issue #5793: Rationalize isdigit / isalpha / tolower, etc. Includes new Py_ISDIGIT / Py_ISALPHA / Py_TOLOWER, etc. in pctypes.h. - Issue #5835: Deprecate PyOS_ascii_formatd. - Issue #4971: Fix titlecase for characters that are their own titlecase, but not their own uppercase. - Issue #5283: Setting __class__ in __del__ caused a segfault. - Issue #5816: complex(repr(z)) now recovers z exactly, even when z involves nans, infs or negative zeros. - Issue #3166: Make int -> float conversions correctly rounded. - Issue #1869 (and many duplicates): make round(x, n) correctly rounded for a float x, by using the decimal <-> binary conversions from Python/dtoa.c. As a consequence, (e.g.) round(x, 2) now consistently agrees with format(x, '.2f'). - Issue #5787: object.__getattribute__(some_type, "__bases__") segfaulted on some builtin types. - Issue #5772: format(1e100, '<') produces '1e+100', not '1.0e+100'. - Issue #5515: str.format() type 'n' combined with commas and leading zeros no longer gives odd results with ints and floats. - Implement PEP 378, Format Specifier for Thousands Separator, for floats. - The str function switches to exponential notation at 1e11, not 1e12. This avoids printing 13 significant digits in situations where only 12 of them are correct. Example problem value: str(1e11 + 0.5). (This minor issue has existed in 2.x for a long time.) - Issue #1580: On most platforms, use a 'short' float repr: for a finite float x, repr(x) now outputs a string based on the shortest sequence of decimal digits that rounds to x. Previous behaviour was to output 17 significant digits and then strip trailing zeros. Another minor difference is that the new repr switches to exponential notation at 1e16 instead of the previous 1e17; this avoids misleading output in some cases. There's a new sys attribute sys.float_repr_style, which takes the value 'short' to indicate that we're using short float repr, and 'legacy' if the short float repr isn't available for one reason or another. The float repr change involves incorporating David Gay's 'perfect rounding' code into the Python core (it's in Python/dtoa.c). As a secondary consequence, all string-to-float and float-to-string conversions (including all float formatting operations) will be correctly rounded on these platforms. See issue 1580 discussions for details of platforms for which this change does not apply. - Issue #5759: float() didn't call __float__ on str subclasses. - The string.maketrans() function is deprecated; there is a new static method maketrans() on the bytes and bytearray classes. This removes confusion about the types string.maketrans() is supposed to work with, and mirrors the methods available on the str class. - Issue #2170: refactored xml.dom.minidom.normalize, increasing both its clarity and its speed. - Issue #1113244: Py_XINCREF, Py_DECREF, Py_XDECREF: Add `do { ... } while (0)' to avoid compiler warnings. - Issue #3739: The unicode-internal encoder now reports the number of characters consumed like any other encoder (instead of the number of bytes). Installation ------------ - Issue #5756: Install idle and pydoc with a 3 suffix. Library ------- - Issue #5311: bdist_msi can now build packages that do not depend on a specific Python version. - Issue #5150: IDLE's format menu now has an option to strip trailing whitespace. - Issue #5940: distutils.command.build_clib.check_library_list was not doing the right type checkings anymore. - Issue #4875: On win32, ctypes.util.find_library does no longer return directories. - Issue #5142: Add the ability to skip modules while stepping to pdb. - Issue #1309567: Fix linecache behavior of stripping subdirectories when looking for files given by a relative filename. - Issue #5923: Update the ``turtle`` module to version 1.1, add two new turtle demos in Demo/turtle. - Issue #5692: In :class:`zipfile.Zipfile`, fix wrong path calculation when extracting a file to the root directory. - Issue #5913: os.listdir() should fail for empty path on windows. - Issue #5084: unpickling now interns the attribute names of pickled objects, saving memory and avoiding growth in size of subsequent pickles. Proposal and original patch by Jake McGuire. - The json module now works exclusively with str and not bytes. - Issue #3959: The ipaddr module has been added to the standard library. Contributed by Google. - Issue #3002: ``shutil.copyfile()`` and ``shutil.copytree()`` now raise an error when a named pipe is encountered, rather than blocking infinitely. - Issue #5857: tokenize.tokenize() now returns named tuples. - Issue #4305: ctypes should now build again on mipsel-linux-gnu - Issue #1734234: Massively speedup ``unicodedata.normalize()`` when the string is already in normalized form, by performing a quick check beforehand. Original patch by Rauli Ruohonen. - Issue #5853: calling a function of the mimetypes module from several threads at once could hit the recursion limit if the mimetypes database hadn't been initialized before. - Issue #5854: Updated __all__ to include some missing names and remove some names which should not be exported. - Issue #3102: All global symbols that the _ctypes extension defines are now prefixed with 'Py' or '_ctypes'. - Issue #5041: ctypes does now allow pickling wide character. - Issue #5812: For the two-argument form of the Fraction constructor, Fraction(m, n), m and n are permitted to be arbitrary Rational instances. - Issue #5812: Fraction('1e6') is valid: more generally, any string that's valid for float() is now valid for Fraction(), with the exception of strings representing NaNs and infinities. - Issue #5734: BufferedRWPair was poorly tested and had several glaring bugs. Patch by Brian Quinlan. - Issue #1161031: fix readwrite select flag handling: POLLPRI now results in a handle_expt_event call, not handle_read_event, and POLLERR and POLLNVAL now call handle_close, not handle_expt_event. Also, dispatcher now has an 'ignore_log_types' attribute for suppressing log messages, which is set to 'warning' by default. - Issue #2703: SimpleXMLRPCDispatcher.__init__: Provide default values for new arguments introduced in 2.5. - Issue #5828 (Invalid behavior of unicode.lower): Fixed bogus logic in makeunicodedata.py and regenerated the Unicode database (This fixes u'\u1d79'.lower() == '\x00'). Extension Modules ----------------- - Issue #5881: Remove old undocumented compatibility interfaces in hashlib and pwd. - Issue #5463: In struct module, remove deprecated float coercion for integer type codes: struct.pack('L', 0.3) should now raise an error. The _PY_STRUCT_FLOAT_COERCE constant has been removed. The version number has been bumped to 0.3. - Issue #5359: Readd the Berkley-DB detection code to allow _dbm be built using Berkley-DB. Tests ----- - Issue #5354: New test support function import_fresh_module() makes it easy to import both normal and optimised versions of modules. test_heapq and test_warnings have been adjusted to use it, tests for other modules with both C and Python implementations in the stdlib can be adjusted to use it over time. - Issue #5837: Certain sequences of calls to set() and unset() for support.EnvironmentVarGuard objects restored the environment variables incorrectly on __exit__. C-API ----- - Issue #5630: A replacement PyCObject API, PyCapsule, has been added. What's New in Python 3.1 alpha 2? ================================= *Release date: 2009-4-4* Core and Builtins ----------------- - Implement PEP 378, Format Specifier for Thousands Separator, for integers. - Issue #5666: Py_BuildValue's 'c' code should create byte strings. - Issue #5499: The 'c' code for argument parsing functions now only accepts a byte, and the 'C' code only accepts a unicode character. - Fix a problem in PyErr_NormalizeException that leads to "undetected errors" when hitting the recursion limit under certain circumstances. - Issue #1665206: Remove the last eager import in _warnings.c and make it lazy. - Fix a segfault when running test_exceptions with coverage, caused by insufficient checks in accessors of Exception.__context__. - Issue #5604: non-ASCII characters in module name passed to imp.find_module() were converted to UTF-8 while the path is converted to the default filesystem encoding, causing nonsense. - Issue #5126: str.isprintable() returned False for space characters. - Issue #4865: On MacOSX /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages is added to the end sys.path, for compatibility with the system install of Python. - Issue #4688: Add a heuristic so that tuples and dicts containing only untrackable objects are not tracked by the garbage collector. This can reduce the size of collections and therefore the garbage collection overhead on long-running programs, depending on their particular use of datatypes. - Issue #5512: Rewrite PyLong long division algorithm (x_divrem) to improve its performance. Long divisions and remainder operations are now between 50% and 150% faster. - Issue #4258: Make it possible to use base 2**30 instead of base 2**15 for the internal representation of integers, for performance reasons. Base 2**30 is enabled by default on 64-bit machines. Add --enable-big-digits option to configure, which overrides the default. Add sys.int_info structseq to provide information about the internal format. - Issue #4474: PyUnicode_FromWideChar now converts characters outside the BMP to surrogate pairs, on systems with sizeof(wchar_t) == 4 and sizeof(Py_UNICODE) == 2. - Issue #5237: Allow auto-numbered fields in str.format(). For example: '{} {}'.format(1, 2) == '1 2'. - Issue #5392: when a very low recursion limit was set, the interpreter would abort with a fatal error after the recursion limit was hit twice. - Issue #3845: In PyRun_SimpleFileExFlags avoid invalid memory access with short file names. Library ------- - Issue #2625: added missing items() call to the for loop in mailbox.MH.get_message(). - Issue #5640: Fix _multibytecodec so that CJK codecs don't repeat error substitutions from non-strict codec error callbacks in incrementalencoder and StreamWriter. - Issue #5656: Fix the coverage reporting when running the test suite with the -T argument. - Issue #5647: MutableSet.__iand__() no longer mutates self during iteration. - Issue #5624: Fix the _winreg module name still used in several modules. - Issue #5628: Fix io.TextIOWrapper.read() with a unreadable buffer. - Issue #5619: Multiprocessing children disobey the debug flag and causes popups on windows buildbots. Patch applied to work around this issue. - Issue #5400: Added patch for multiprocessing on netbsd compilation/support - Issue #5387: Fixed mmap.move crash by integer overflow. - Issue #5261: Patch multiprocessing's semaphore.c to support context manager use: "with multiprocessing.Lock()" works now. - Issue #5236: Change time.strptime() to only take strings. Didn't work with bytes already but the failure was non-obvious. - Issue #5177: Multiprocessing's SocketListener class now uses socket.SO_REUSEADDR on all connections so that the user no longer needs to wait 120 seconds for the socket to expire. - Issue #5595: Fix UnboundedLocalError in ntpath.ismount(). - Issue #1174606: Calling read() without arguments of an unbounded file (typically /dev/zero under Unix) could crash the interpreter. - The max_buffer_size arguments of io.BufferedWriter, io.BufferedRWPair, and io.BufferedRandom have been deprecated for removal in Python 3.2. - Issue #5068: Fixed the tarfile._BZ2Proxy.read() method that would loop forever on incomplete input. That caused tarfile.open() to hang when used with mode 'r' or 'r:bz2' and a fileobj argument that contained no data or partial bzip2 compressed data. - Issue #2110: Add support for thousands separator and 'n' type specifier to Decimal.__format__ - Fix Decimal.__format__ bug that swapped the meanings of the '<' and '>' alignment characters. - The error detection code in FileIO.close() could fail to reflect the `errno` value, and report it as -1 instead. - Issue #5016: FileIO.seekable() could return False if the file position was negative when truncated to a C int. Patch by Victor Stinner. Extension Modules ----------------- - Issue #5391: mmap now deals exclusively with bytes. - Issue #5463: In struct module, remove deprecated overflow wrapping when packing an integer: struct.pack('=L', -1) now raises struct.error instead of returning b'\xff\xff\xff\xff'. The _PY_STRUCT_RANGE_CHECKING and _PY_STRUCT_OVERFLOW_MASKING constants have been removed from the struct module. What's New in Python 3.1 alpha 1 ================================ *Release date: 2009-03-07* Core and Builtins ----------------- - The io module has been reimplemented in C for speed. - Give dict views an informative __repr__. - Issue #5247: Improve error message when unknown format codes are used when using str.format() with str, int, and float arguments. - Issue #5249: time.strftime returned malformed string when format string contained non ascii character on windows. - Issue #4626: compile(), exec(), and eval() ignore the coding cookie if the source has already been decoded into str. - Issue #5186: Reduce hash collisions for objects with no __hash__ method by rotating the object pointer by 4 bits to the right. - Issue #4575: Fix Py_IS_INFINITY macro to work correctly on x87 FPUs: it now forces its argument to double before testing for infinity. - Issue #5137: Make len() correctly raise a TypeError when a __len__ method returns a non-number type. - Issue #5182: Removed memoryview.__str__. - Issue #1717: Removed builtin cmp() function, dropped tp_compare slot, the C API functions PyObject_Compare and PyUnicode_Compare and the type definition cmpfunc. The tp_compare slot has been renamed to tp_reserved, and is reserved for future usage. - Issue #1242657: the __len__() and __length_hint__() calls in several tools were suppressing all exceptions. These include list() and bytearray(). - Issue #4707: round(x, n) now returns an integer if x is an integer. Previously it returned a float. - Issue #4753: By enabling a configure option named '--with-computed-gotos' on compilers that support it (notably: gcc, SunPro, icc), the bytecode evaluation loop is compiled with a new dispatch mechanism which gives speedups of up to 20%, depending on the system, on various benchmarks. - Issue #4874: Most builtin decoders now reject unicode input. - Issue #4842: Don't allow trailing 'L' when constructing an integer from a string. - Issue #4991: os.fdopen now raises an OSError for invalid file descriptors. - Issue #4838: When a module is deallocated, free the memory backing the optional module state data. - Issue #4910: Rename nb_long slot to nb_reserved, and change its type to (void *). - Issue #4935: The overflow checking code in the expandtabs() method common to str, bytes and bytearray could be optimized away by the compiler, letting the interpreter segfault instead of raising an error. - Issue #3720: Fix a crash when an iterator modifies its class and removes its __next__ method. - Issue #4910: Builtin int() function and PyNumber_Long/PyNumber_Int API function no longer attempt to call the __long__ slot to convert an object to an integer. Only the __int__ and __trunc__ slots are examined. - Issue #4893: Use NT threading on CE. - Issue #4915: Port sysmodule to Windows CE. - Issue #4868: utf-8, utf-16 and latin1 decoding are now 2x to 4x faster. The common cases are optimized thanks to a dedicated fast path and a moderate amount of loop unrolling. - Issue #4074: Change the criteria for doing a full garbage collection (i.e. collecting the oldest generation) so that allocating lots of objects without destroying them does not show quadratic performance. Based on a proposal by Martin von Löwis at http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2008-June/080579.html. - Issue #4604: Some objects of the I/O library could still be used after having been closed (for instance, a read() call could return some previously buffered data). Patch by Dmitry Vasiliev. - Issue #4705: Fix the -u ("unbuffered binary stdout and stderr") command-line flag to work properly. Furthermore, when specifying -u, the text stdout and stderr streams have line-by-line buffering enabled (the default being to buffer arbitrary chunks of data). - The internal table, _PyLong_DigitValue, is now an array of unsigned chars instead of ints (reducing its size from 4 to 8 times thereby reducing Python's overall memory). - Issue #1180193: When importing a module from a .pyc (or .pyo) file with an existing .py counterpart, override the co_filename attributes of all code objects if the original filename is obsolete (which can happen if the file has been renamed, moved, or if it is accessed through different paths). Patch by Ziga Seilnacht and Jean-Paul Calderone. - Issue #4580: Fix slicing of memoryviews when the item size is greater than one byte. Also fixes the meaning of len() so that it returns the number of items, rather than the size in bytes. - Issue #4075: Use OutputDebugStringW in Py_FatalError. - Issue #4747: When the terminal does not use utf-8, executing a script with non-ascii characters in its name could fail with a "SyntaxError: None" error. - Issue #4797: IOError.filename was not set when _fileio.FileIO failed to open file with `bytes' filename on Windows. - Issue #3680: Reference cycles created through a dict, set or deque iterator did not get collected. - Issue #4701: PyObject_Hash now implicitly calls PyType_Ready on types where the tp_hash and tp_dict slots are both NULL. - Issue #4759: None is now allowed as the first argument of bytearray.translate(). It was always allowed for bytes.translate(). - Added test case to ensure attempts to read from a file opened for writing fail. - Issue #3106: Speedup some comparisons (str/str and int/int). - Issue #2183: Simplify and optimize bytecode for list, dict and set comprehensions. Original patch for list comprehensions by Neal Norwitz. - Issue #2467: gc.DEBUG_STATS reported invalid elapsed times. Also, always print elapsed times, not only when some objects are uncollectable / unreachable. Original patch by Neil Schemenauer. - Issue #3439: Add a bit_length method to int. - Issue #2173: When getting device encoding, check that return value of nl_langinfo is not the empty string. This was causing silent build failures on OS X. - Issue #4597: Fixed several opcodes that weren't always propagating exceptions. - Issue #4589: Fixed exception handling when the __exit__ function of a context manager returns a value that cannot be converted to a bool. - Issue #4445: Replace "sizeof(PyBytesObject)" with "offsetof(PyBytesObject, ob_sval) + 1" when allocating memory for bytes instances. On a typical machine this saves 3 bytes of memory (on average) per allocation of a bytes instance. - Issue #4533: File read operation was dreadfully slow due to a slowly growing read buffer. Fixed by using the same growth rate algorithm as Python 2.x. - Issue #4509: Various issues surrounding resize of bytearray objects to which there are buffer exports (e.g. memoryview instances). - Issue #4233: Changed semantic of ``_fileio.FileIO``'s ``close()`` method on file objects with closefd=False. The file descriptor is still kept open but the file object behaves like a closed file. The ``FileIO`` object also got a new readonly attribute ``closefd``. - Issue #4569: Interpreter crash when mutating a memoryview with an item size larger than 1. - Issue #4748: Lambda generators no longer return a value. - The re.sub(), re.subn() and re.split() functions now accept a flags parameter. - Issue #5108: Handle %s like %S, %R and %A in PyUnicode_FromFormatV(): Call PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8() once, remember the result and output it in a second step. This avoids problems with counting UTF-8 bytes that ignores the effect of using the replace error handler in PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8(). Library ------- - Issue #7066: archive_util.make_archive now restores the cwd if an error is raised. Initial patch by Ezio Melotti. - Issue #6545: Removed assert statements in distutils.Extension, so the behavior is similar when used with -O. - Issue #6459: distutils.command.build_ext.get_export_symbols now uses the "PyInit" prefix, rather than "init". - Issue #6433: fixed issues with multiprocessing.pool.map hanging on empty list - Issue #6455: Fixed test_build_ext under win32. - Issue #6413: Fixed the log level in distutils.dist for announce. - Issue #6403: Fixed package path usage in build_ext. - Issue #6365: Distutils build_ext inplace mode was copying the compiled extension in a subdirectory if the extension name had dots. - Issue #6287: Added the license field in Distutils documentation. - Issue #6263: Fixed syntax error in distutils.cygwincompiler. - Issue #5201: distutils.sysconfig.parse_makefile() now understands `$$` in Makefiles. This prevents compile errors when using syntax like: `LDFLAGS='-rpath=\$$LIB:/some/other/path'`. Patch by Floris Bruynooghe. - Issue #6131: test_modulefinder leaked when run after test_distutils. Patch by Hirokazu Yamamoto. - Issue #6048: Now Distutils uses the tarfile module in archive_util. - Issue #6062: In distutils, fixed the package option of build_ext. Feedback and tests on pywin32 by Tim Golden. - Issue #6053: Fixed distutils tests on win32. patch by Hirokazu Yamamoto. - Issue #6046: Fixed the library extension when distutils build_ext is used inplace. Initial patch by Roumen Petrov. - Issue #6041: Now distutils `sdist` and `register` commands use `check` as a subcommand. - Issue #6022: a test file was created in the current working directory by test_get_outputs in Distutils. - Issue #5977: distutils build_ext.get_outputs was not taking into account the inplace option. Initial patch by kxroberto. - Issue #5984: distutils.command.build_ext.check_extensions_list checks were broken for old-style extensions. - Issue #5976: Fixed Distutils test_check_environ. - Issue #5941: Distutils build_clib command was not working anymore because of an incomplete costumization of the archiver command. Added ARFLAGS in the Makefile besides AR and make Distutils use it. Original patch by David Cournapeau. - Issue #2245: aifc now skips chunk types it doesn't recognize, per spec. - Issue #5874: distutils.tests.test_config_cmd is not locale-sensitive anymore. - Issue #5810: Fixed Distutils test_build_scripts so it uses sysconfig.get_config_vars. - Issue #4951: Fixed failure in test_httpservers. - Issue #5795: Fixed test_distutils failure on Debian ppc. - Issue #5607: fixed Distutils test_get_platform for Mac OS X fat binaries. - Issue #5741: don't disallow "%%" (which is an escape for "%") when setting a value in SafeConfigParser. - Issue #5732: added a new command in Distutils: check. - Issue #5731: Distutils bdist_wininst no longer worked on non-Windows platforms. Initial patch by Paul Moore. - Issue #5095: Added bdist_msi to the list of bdist supported formats. Initial fix by Steven Bethard. - Issue #1491431: Fixed distutils.filelist.glob_to_re for edge cases. Initial fix by Wayne Davison. - Issue #5694: removed spurious test output in Distutils (test_clean). - Issue #1326077: fix the formatting of SyntaxErrors by the traceback module. - Issue #1665206 (partially): Move imports in cgitb to the top of the module instead of performing them in functions. Helps prevent import deadlocking in threads. - Issue #2522: locale.format now checks its first argument to ensure it has been passed only one pattern, avoiding mysterious errors where it appeared that it was failing to do localization. - Issue #5583: Added optional Extensions in Distutils. Initial patch by Georg Brandl. - Issue #1222: locale.format() bug when the thousands separator is a space character. - Issue #5472: Fixed distutils.test_util tear down. Original patch by Tim Golden. - collections.deque() objects now have a read-only attribute called maxlen. - Issue #2638: Show a window constructed with tkSimpleDialog.Dialog only after it is has been populated and properly configured in order to prevent window flashing. - Issue #4792: Prevent a segfault in _tkinter by using the guaranteed to be safe interp argument given to the PythonCmd in place of the Tcl interpreter taken from a PythonCmd_ClientData. - Issue #5193: Guarantee that tkinter.Text.search returns a string. - Issue #5394: removed > 2.3 syntax from distutils.msvc9compiler. Original patch by Akira Kitada. - Issue #5334: array.fromfile() failed to insert values when EOFError was raised. - Issue #5385: Fixed mmap crash after resize failure on windows. - Issue #5179: Fixed subprocess handle leak on failure on windows. - PEP 372: Added collections.OrderedDict(). - The _asdict() for method for namedtuples now returns an OrderedDict(). - configparser now defaults to using an ordered dictionary. - Issue #5401: Fixed a performance problem in mimetypes when ``from mimetypes import guess_extension`` was used. - Issue #1733986: Fixed mmap crash in accessing elements of second map object with same tagname but larger size than first map. (Windows) - Issue #5386: mmap.write_byte didn't check map size, so it could cause buffer overrun. - Issue #1533164: Installed but not listed *.pyo was breaking Distutils bdist_rpm command. - Issue #5378: added --quiet option to Distutils bdist_rpm command. - Issue #5052: make Distutils compatible with 2.3 again. - Issue #5316: Fixed buildbot failures introduced by multiple inheritance in Distutils tests. - Issue #5287: Add exception handling around findCaller() call to help out IronPython. - Issue #5282: Fixed mmap resize on 32bit windows and unix. When offset > 0, The file was resized to wrong size. - Issue #5292: Fixed mmap crash on its boundary access m[len(m)]. - Issue #2279: distutils.sdist.add_defaults now add files from the package_data and the data_files metadata. - Issue #5257: refactored all tests in distutils, so they use support.TempdirManager, to avoid writing in the tests directory. - Issue #4524: distutils build_script command failed with --with-suffix=3. Initial patch by Amaury Forgeot d'Arc. - Issue #2461: added tests for distutils.util - Issue #4998: The memory saving effect of __slots__ had been lost on Fractions which inherited from numbers.py which did not have __slots__ defined. The numbers hierarchy now has its own __slots__ declarations. - Issue #4631: Fix urlopen() result when an HTTP response uses chunked encoding. - Issue #5203: Fixed ctypes segfaults when passing a unicode string to a function without argtypes (only occurs if HAVE_USABLE_WCHAR_T is false). - Issue #3386: distutils.sysconfig.get_python_lib prefix argument was ignored under NT and OS2. Patch by Philip Jenvey. - Issue #5128: Make compileall properly inspect bytecode to determine if needs to be recreated. This avoids a timing hole thanks to the old reliance on the ctime of the files involved. - Issue #5122: Synchronize tk load failure check to prevent a potential deadlock. - Issue #1818: collections.namedtuple() now supports a keyword argument 'rename' which lets invalid fieldnames be automatically converted to positional names in the form, _1, _2, ... - Issue #4890: Handle empty text search pattern in Tkinter.Text.search. - Issue #4512 (part 2): Promote ``ZipImporter._get_filename()`` to be a public documented method ``ZipImporter.get_filename()``. - Issue #4195: The ``runpy`` module (and the ``-m`` switch) now support the execution of packages by looking for and executing a ``__main__`` submodule when a package name is supplied. Initial patch by Andi Vajda. - Issue #1731706: Call Tcl_ConditionFinalize for Tcl_Conditions that will not be used again (this requires Tcl/Tk 8.3.1), also fix a memory leak in Tkapp_Call when calling from a thread different than the one that created the Tcl interpreter. Patch by Robert Hancock. - Issue #4285: Change sys.version_info to be a named tuple. Patch by Ross Light. - Issue #1520877: Now distutils.sysconfig reads $AR from the environment/Makefile. Patch by Douglas Greiman. - Issue #1276768: The verbose option was not used in the code of distutils.file_util and distutils.dir_util. - Issue #5132: Fixed trouble building extensions under Solaris with --enabled-shared activated. Initial patch by Dave Peterson. - Issue #1581476: Always use the Tcl global namespace when calling into Tcl. - The shelve module now defaults to pickle protocol 3. - Fix a bug in the trace module where a bytes object from co_lnotab had its items being passed through ord(). - Issue #2047: shutil.move() could believe that its destination path was inside its source path if it began with the same letters (e.g. "src" vs. "src.new"). - Added the ttk module. See issue #2983: Ttk support for Tkinter. - Removed isSequenceType(), isMappingType, and isNumberType() from the operator module; use the abstract base classes instead. Also removed the repeat() function; use mul() instead. - Issue #5021: doctest.testfile() did not create __name__ and collections.namedtuple() relied on __name__ being defined. - Backport importlib from Python 3.1. Only the import_module() function has been backported to help facilitate transitions from 2.7 to 3.1. - Issue #1885: distutils. When running sdist with --formats=tar,gztar the tar file was overriden by the gztar one. - Issue #4863: distutils.mwerkscompiler has been removed. - Added a new itertools functions: combinations_with_replacement() and compress(). - Issue #5032: added a step argument to itertools.count() and allowed non-integer arguments. - Fix and properly document the multiprocessing module's logging support, expose the internal levels and provide proper usage examples. - Issue #1672332: fix unpickling of subnormal floats, which was producing a ValueError on some platforms. - Issue #3881: Help Tcl to load even when started through the unreadable local symlink to "Program Files" on Vista. - Issue #4710: Extract directories properly in the zipfile module; allow adding directories to a zipfile. - Issue #3807: _multiprocessing build fails when configure is passed --without-threads argument. When this occurs, _multiprocessing will be disabled, and not compiled. - Issue #5008: When a file is opened in append mode with the new IO library, do an explicit seek to the end of file (so that e.g. tell() returns the file size rather than 0). This is consistent with the behaviour of the traditional 2.x file object. - Issue #5013: Fixed a bug in FileHandler which occurred when the delay parameter was set. - Issue #4842: Always append a trailing 'L' when pickling longs using pickle protocol 0. When reading, the 'L' is optional. - Add the importlib package. - Issue #4301: Patch the logging module to add processName support, remove _check_logger_class from multiprocessing. - Issue #3325: Remove python2.x try: except: imports for old cPickle from multiprocessing. - Issue #4959: inspect.formatargspec now works for keyword only arguments without defaults. - Issue #3321: _multiprocessing.Connection() doesn't check handle; added checks for *nix machines for negative handles and large int handles. Without this check it is possible to segfault the interpreter. - Issue #4449: AssertionError in mp_benchmarks.py, caused by an underlying issue in sharedctypes.py. - Issue #1225107: inspect.isclass() returned True for instances with a custom __getattr__. - Issue #3826 and #4791: The socket module now closes the underlying socket appropriately when it is being used via socket.makefile() objects rather than delaying the close by waiting for garbage collection to do it. - Issue #1696199: Add collections.Counter() for rapid and convenient counting. - Issue #3860: GzipFile and BZ2File now support the context manager protocol. - Issue #4867: Fixed a crash in ctypes when passing a string to a function without defining argtypes. - Issue #4272: Add an optional argument to the GzipFile constructor to override the timestamp in the gzip stream. The default value remains the current time. The information can be used by e.g. gunzip when decompressing. Patch by Jacques Frechet. - Restore Python 2.3 compatibility for decimal.py. - Issue #3638: Remove functions from _tkinter module level that depend on TkappObject to work with multiple threads. - Issue #4718: Adapt the wsgiref package so that it actually works with Python 3.x, in accordance with the `official amendments of the spec `_. - Issue #4796: Added Decimal.from_float() and Context.create_decimal_from_float() to the decimal module. - Fractions.from_float() no longer loses precision for integers too big to cast as floats. - Issue #4812: add missing underscore prefix to some internal-use-only constants in the decimal module. (Dec_0 becomes _Dec_0, etc.) - Issue #4790: The nsmallest() and nlargest() functions in the heapq module did unnecessary work in the common case where no key function was specified. - Issue #4795: inspect.isgeneratorfunction() returns False instead of None when the function is not a generator. - Issue #4702: Throwing a DistutilsPlatformError instead of IOError in case no MSVC compiler is found under Windows. Original patch by Philip Jenvey. - Issue #4646: distutils was choking on empty options arg in the setup function. Original patch by Thomas Heller. - Issue #3767: Convert Tk object to string in tkColorChooser. - Issue #3248: Allow placing ScrolledText in a PanedWindow. - Issue #4444: Allow assertRaises() to be used as a context handler, so that the code under test can be written inline if more practical. - Issue #4739: Add pydoc help topics for symbols, so that e.g. help('@') works as expected in the interactive environment. - Issue #4756: zipfile.is_zipfile() now supports file-like objects. Patch by Gabriel Genellina. - Issue #4574: reading an UTF16-encoded text file crashes if \r on 64-char boundary. - Issue #4223: inspect.getsource() will now correctly display source code for packages loaded via zipimport (or any other conformant PEP 302 loader). Original patch by Alexander Belopolsky. - Issue #4201: pdb can now access and display source code loaded via zipimport (or any other conformant PEP 302 loader). Original patch by Alexander Belopolsky. - Issue #4197: doctests in modules loaded via zipimport (or any other PEP 302 conformant loader) will now work correctly in most cases (they are still subject to the constraints that exist for all code running from inside a module loaded via a PEP 302 loader and attempting to perform IO operations based on __file__). Original patch by Alexander Belopolsky. - Issues #4082 and #4512: Add runpy support to zipimport in a manner that allows backporting to maintenance branches. Original patch by Alexander Belopolsky. - Issue #4163: textwrap module: allow word splitting on a hyphen preceded by a non-ASCII letter. - Issue #4616: TarFile.utime(): Restore directory times on Windows. - Issue #4021: tokenize.detect_encoding() now raises a SyntaxError when the codec cannot be found. This is for compatibility with the builtin behavior. - Issue #4084: Fix max, min, max_mag and min_mag Decimal methods to give correct results in the case where one argument is a quiet NaN and the other is a finite number that requires rounding. - Issue #4483: _dbm module now builds on systems with gdbm & gdbm_compat libs. - Added the subprocess.check_call_output() convenience function to get output from a subprocess on success or raise an exception on error. - Issue #1055234: cgi.parse_header(): Fixed parsing of header parameters to support unusual filenames (such as those containing semi-colons) in Content-Disposition headers. - Issue #4384: Added logging integration with warnings module using captureWarnings(). This change includes a NullHandler which does nothing; it will be of use to library developers who want to avoid the "No handlers could be found for logger XXX" message which can appear if the library user doesn't configure logging. - Issue #3741: DISTUTILS_USE_SDK set causes msvc9compiler.py to raise an exception. - Issue #4529: fix the parser module's validation of try-except-finally statements. - Issue #4458: getopt.gnu_getopt() now recognizes a single "-" as an argument, not a malformed option. - Added the subprocess.check_output() convenience function to get output from a subprocess on success or raise an exception on error. - Issue #4542: On Windows, binascii.crc32 still accepted str as binary input; the corresponding tests now pass. - Issue #4537: webbrowser.UnixBrowser would fail to open the browser because it was calling the wrong open() function. - Issue #1055234: cgi.parse_header(): Fixed parsing of header parameters to support unusual filenames (such as those containing semi-colons) in Content-Disposition headers. - Issue #4861: ctypes.util.find_library(): Robustify. Fix library detection on biarch systems. Try to rely on ldconfig only, without using objdump and gcc. - Issue #5104: The socket module now raises OverflowError when 16-bit port and protocol numbers are supplied outside the allowed 0-65536 range on bind() and getservbyport(). - Windows locale mapping updated to Vista. Tools/Demos ----------- - Issue #4704: remove use of cmp() in pybench, bump its version number to 2.1, and make it 2.6-compatible. - Ttk demos added in Demo/tkinter/ttk/ - Issue #4677: add two list comprehension tests to pybench. Build ----- - Issue #6094: Build correctly with Subversion 1.7. - Issue #5847: Remove -n switch on "Edit with IDLE" menu item. - Issue #5726: Make Modules/ld_so_aix return the actual exit code of the linker, rather than always exit successfully. Patch by Floris Bruynooghe. - Issue #4587: Add configure option --with-dbmliborder=db1:db2:... to specify the order that backends for the dbm extension are checked. - Link the shared python library with $(MODLIBS). - Issue #5134: Silence compiler warnings when compiling sqlite with VC++. - Issue #4494: Fix build with Py_NO_ENABLE_SHARED on Windows. - Issue #4895: Use _strdup on Windows CE. - Issue #4472: "configure --enable-shared" now works on OSX - Issues #4728 and #4060: WORDS_BIGEDIAN is now correct in Universal builds. - Issue #4389: Add icon to the uninstall entry in "add-and-remove-programs". - Issue #4289: Remove Cancel button from AdvancedDlg. - Issue #1656675: Register a drop handler for .py* files on Windows. - Issue #4120: Exclude manifest from extension modules in VS2008. - Issue #4091: Install pythonxy.dll in system32 again. - Issue #4018: Disable "for me" installations on Vista. - Issue #3758: Add ``patchcheck`` build target to .PHONY. - Issue #4204: Fixed module build errors on FreeBSD 4. C-API ----- - Issue #5175: PyLong_AsUnsignedLongLong now raises OverflowError for negative arguments. Previously, it raised TypeError. - Issue #4720: The format for PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords can begin with '|'. - Issue #3632: from the gdb debugger, the 'pyo' macro can now be called when the GIL is released, or owned by another thread. - Issue #4122: On Windows, fix a compilation error when using the Py_UNICODE_ISSPACE macro in an extension module. Extension Modules ----------------- - Issue #3745: Fix hashlib to always reject unicode and non buffer-api supporting objects as input no matter how it was compiled (built in implementations or external openssl library). - Issue #4397: Fix occasional test_socket failure on OS X. - Issue #4279: Fix build of parsermodule under Cygwin. - Issue #4751: hashlib now releases the GIL when hashing large buffers (with a hardwired threshold of 2048 bytes), allowing better parallelization on multi-CPU systems. Contributed by Lukas Lueg (ebfe) and Victor Stinner. - Issue #4051: Prevent conflict of UNICODE macros in cPickle. - Issue #4738: Each zlib object now has a separate lock, allowing to compress or decompress several streams at once on multi-CPU systems. Also, the GIL is now released when computing the CRC of a large buffer. Patch by ebfe. - Issue #4228: Pack negative values the same way as 2.4 in struct's L format. - Issue #1040026: Fix os.times result on systems where HZ is incorrect. - Issues #3167, #3682: Fix test_math failures for log, log10 on Solaris, OpenBSD. - Issue #4583: array.array would not always prohibit resizing when a buffer has been exported, resulting in an interpreter crash when accessing the buffer. - Issue #5228: Make functools.partial objects can now be pickled. Tests ----- - Issue #5450: Moved tests involving loading tk from Lib/test/test_tcl to Lib/tkinter/test/test_tkinter/test_loadtk. With this, these tests demonstrate the same behaviour as test_ttkguionly (and now also test_tk) which is to skip the tests if DISPLAY is defined but can't be used. - regrtest no longer treats ImportError as equivalent to SkipTest. Imports that should cause a test to be skipped are now done using import_module from test support, which does the conversion. - Issue #5083: New 'gui' resource for regrtest. Docs ---- **(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**