cpython/Misc/NEWS.d/2.6b3.rst

.. bpo: 1878
.. date: 7111
.. nonce: exCmjh
.. release date: 20-Aug-2008
.. section: Core and Builtins

Remove Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_VERSION_TAG from Py_TPFLAGS_DEFAULT when not building
the core.  This means 3rd party extensions do not automatically benefit from
the class attribute cache; they will have to explicitly add
Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_VERSION_TAG to their tp_flags field if they care.  This is a
backwards compatibility feature; in 3.0, all types will use the cache by
default.

..

.. bpo: 0
.. date: 7110
.. nonce: 7crJgG
.. section: Core and Builtins

Keyword arguments can now follow starred arguments. (``f(a, *args,
keyword=23)`` is now valid syntax.)

..

.. bpo: 0
.. date: 7109
.. nonce: OfzhCP
.. section: Core and Builtins

ctypes function pointers that are COM methods have a boolean True value
again.

..

.. bpo: 3139
.. date: 7108
.. nonce: j4FT95
.. section: Core and Builtins

Make buffer-interface thread-safe wrt. PyArg_ParseTuple, by denying s# to
parse objects that have a releasebuffer procedure, and introducing s*.

..

.. bpo: 3537
.. date: 7107
.. nonce: Jd1RRZ
.. section: Core and Builtins

Fix an assertion failure when an empty but presized dict object was stored
in the freelist.

..

.. bpo: 1481296
.. date: 7106
.. nonce: 9MXKTf
.. section: Core and Builtins

Make long(float('nan')) and int(float('nan')) raise ValueError consistently
across platforms.

..

.. bpo: 3479
.. date: 7105
.. nonce: 2x4rkT
.. section: Core and Builtins

On platforms where sizeof(int) is smaller than sizeof(long) (64bit Unix, for
example), unichr() would truncate its argument and return u'\x00' for
unichr(2**32). Now it properly raises an OverflowError.

..

.. bpo: 0
.. date: 7104
.. nonce: dpio6h
.. section: Core and Builtins

Apply security patches from Apple.

..

.. bpo: 2542
.. date: 7103
.. nonce: OGrPLh
.. section: Core and Builtins

Now that issubclass() may call arbitrary code, ensure that
PyErr_ExceptionMatches returns 0 when an exception occurs there.

..

.. bpo: 1819
.. date: 7102
.. nonce: LzrD36
.. section: Core and Builtins

function calls with several named parameters are now on average 35% faster
(as measured by pybench).

..

.. bpo: 2378
.. date: 7101
.. nonce: jnJN2_
.. section: Core and Builtins

An unexpected UnboundLocalError or NameError could appear when the python
debugger steps into a class statement: the free variables (local variables
defined in an outer scope) would be deleted from the outer scope.

..

.. bpo: 2620
.. date: 7100
.. nonce: g7NRZZ
.. section: Core and Builtins

Overflow checking when allocating or reallocating memory was not always
being done properly in some python types and extension modules.
PyMem_MALLOC, PyMem_REALLOC, PyMem_NEW and PyMem_RESIZE have all been
updated to perform better checks and places in the code that would
previously leak memory on the error path when such an allocation failed have
been fixed.

..

.. bpo: 3612
.. date: 7099
.. nonce: RX3nFS
.. section: Library

Added some missing basic types in ctypes.wintypes.

..

.. bpo: 0
.. date: 7098
.. nonce: 6arfb-
.. section: Library

The methods ``is_in_tuple()``, ``is_vararg()``, and ``is_keywordarg()`` of
symtable.Symbol have been deprecated for removal in 3.0 and the next
release.

..

.. bpo: 2234
.. date: 7097
.. nonce: ZY7qAp
.. section: Library

distutils failed for some versions of the cygwin compiler. The version
reported by these tools does not necessarily follow the python version
numbering scheme, so the module is less strict when parsing it.

..

.. bpo: 2235
.. date: 7096
.. nonce: lZ4uDf
.. section: Library

Added Py3k warnings for types which will become unhashable under the
stricter __hash__ inheritance rules in 3.0. Several types which did not meet
the rules for hash invariants and were already unhashable in 3.0 have now
been explicitly flagged as unhashable in 2.6 as well (collections.Mapping,
collections.Set, unittest.TestSuite, xml.dom.minidom.NamedNodeMap,
numbers.Number, UserList.UserList)

..

.. bpo: 0
.. date: 7095
.. nonce: njv0Yv
.. section: Library

Update __all__ for cookielib, csv, os, urllib2, and weakref to include
things imported into the module but exposed as part of the module's API.

..

.. bpo: 0
.. date: 7094
.. nonce: IOULx3
.. section: Library

Remove an unneeded import of abc.ABCMeta from 'inspect'.

..

.. bpo: 0
.. date: 7093
.. nonce: ui1bpi
.. section: Library

Remove unneeded imports of 'sys' and 'warnings' from 'io'.

..

.. bpo: 0
.. date: 7092
.. nonce: 5UlHtd
.. section: Library

Remove unneeded imports of 'warnings' from shelve, filecmp, and
dummy_thread.

..

.. bpo: 3575
.. date: 7091
.. nonce: f0B44V
.. section: Library

Incremental decoder's decode function now takes bytearray by using 's*'
instead of 't#'.

..

.. bpo: 2222
.. date: 7090
.. nonce: 76LS-7
.. section: Library

Fixed reference leak when occurred os.rename() fails unicode conversion on
2nd parameter. (windows only)

..

.. bpo: 2464
.. date: 7089
.. nonce: Hm7gBN
.. section: Library

urllib2 now supports a malformation in the URL received in a redirect.

..

.. bpo: 0
.. date: 7088
.. nonce: 1-8Grp
.. section: Library

Silence the DeprecationWarning raised when importing mimetools in
BaseHTTPServer, cgi (and rfc822), httplib.

..

.. bpo: 2776
.. date: 7087
.. nonce: pcfDP0
.. section: Library

fixed small issue when handling a URL with double slash after a 302 response
in the case of not going through a proxy.

..

.. bpo: 2676
.. date: 7086
.. nonce: muz1Bh
.. section: Library

in the email package, content-type parsing was hanging on pathological input
because of quadratic or exponential behaviour of a regular expression.

..

.. bpo: 3476
.. date: 7085
.. nonce: Gdp5Hg
.. section: Library

binary buffered reading through the new "io" library is now thread-safe.

..

.. bpo: 0
.. date: 7084
.. nonce: 4jao1V
.. section: Library

Silence the DeprecationWarning of rfc822 when it is imported by mimetools
since mimetools itself is deprecated. Because modules are cached, all
subsequent imports of rfc822 will not raise a visible DeprecationWarning.

..

.. bpo: 3134
.. date: 7083
.. nonce: sGPHeo
.. section: Library

shutil referenced undefined WindowsError symbol.

..

.. bpo: 1342811
.. date: 7082
.. nonce: Mf5TLp
.. section: Library

Fix leak in Tkinter.Menu.delete. Commands associated to menu entries were
not deleted.

..

.. bpo: 0
.. date: 7081
.. nonce: XIC5LX
.. section: Library

Copied the implementation of reduce() to _functools.reduce() to have a
version that did not raise a DeprecationWarning under -3.

..

.. bpo: 3205
.. date: 7080
.. nonce: RcrD2G
.. section: Library

When iterating over a BZ2File fails allocating memory, raise a MemoryError
rather than silently stop the iteration.

..

.. bpo: 3487
.. date: 7079
.. nonce: LoL0Xp
.. section: Library

sre "bytecode" validator.  Passing invalid "re-bytecode" to _sre.compile()
will now be rejected.  This should not affect anybody since the re.compile()
function never generates invalid re-bytecode.

..

.. bpo: 3436
.. date: 7078
.. nonce: H10Gz5
.. section: Library

Make csv.DictReader's fieldnames attribute a property so that upon first
access it can be automatically initialized from the csv file if it wasn't
initialized during instantiation.

..

.. bpo: 2338
.. date: 7077
.. nonce: jB97v8
.. section: Library

Create imp.reload() to help with transitioning to Python 3.0 as the reload()
built-in has been removed.

..

.. bpo: 0
.. date: 7076
.. nonce: YAmZW-
.. section: Library

Changed code in the following modules/packages to remove warnings raised
while running under the ``-3`` flag: aifc, asynchat, asyncore, bdb, bsddb,
ConfigParser, cookielib, csv, difflib, distutils, DocXMLRPCServer, email,
filecmp, fileinput, inspect, logging, modulefinder, pdb, pickle, profile,
pstats, pydoc, re, rlcompleter, SimpleXMLRPCServer, shelve, socket,
subprocess, sqlite3, tarfile, Tkinter, test.test_support, textwrap,
threading, tokenize, traceback, urlparse, wsgiref, xml, xmlrpclib.

..

.. bpo: 3039
.. date: 7075
.. nonce: 6106lp
.. section: Library

Fix tarfile.TarFileCompat.writestr() which always raised an AttributeError.

..

.. bpo: 2523
.. date: 7074
.. nonce: F9osM5
.. section: Library

Fix quadratic behaviour when read()ing a binary file without asking for a
specific length. This problem only affected files opened using the new "io"
module, not the built-in open() function.

..

.. bpo: 3449
.. date: 7073
.. nonce: HIJRJS
.. section: Library

Update decimal module to use most recent specification (v. 1.68) and tests
(v. 2.58) from IBM.

..

.. bpo: 3437
.. date: 7072
.. nonce: mFS0ML
.. section: Library

Bug fix in robotparser parsing of Allow: lines.

..

.. bpo: 1592
.. date: 7071
.. nonce: zq1SOI
.. section: Library

Improve error reporting when operations are attempted on a closed shelf.

..

.. bpo: 0
.. date: 7070
.. nonce: q6AI_C
.. section: Library

Deprecate the "ast" parser function aliases.

..

.. bpo: 3120
.. date: 7069
.. nonce: x-kAFj
.. section: Library

On 64-bit Windows the subprocess module was truncating handles.

..

.. bpo: 3303
.. date: 7068
.. nonce: MGj8zT
.. section: Library

Fix a crash in locale.strcoll() when calling it with invalid arguments.

..

.. bpo: 3302
.. date: 7067
.. nonce: qnZ5Ic
.. section: Library

Fix several crashes when calling locale's gettext functions with None
arguments.

..

.. bpo: 3389
.. date: 7066
.. nonce: Dhf3EA
.. section: Library

Allow resolving dotted names for handlers in logging configuration files.

..

.. bpo: 0
.. date: 7065
.. nonce: wtYP5i
.. section: Library

Deprecate the sunaudio module for removal in Python 3.0.

..

.. bpo: 3394
.. date: 7064
.. nonce: PDdapW
.. section: Library

zipfile.writestr sets external attributes when passed a file name rather
than a ZipInfo instance, so files are extracted with mode 0600 rather than
000 under Unix.

..

.. bpo: 1857
.. date: 7063
.. nonce: VLu5_h
.. section: Library

subprocess.Popen.poll gained an additional _deadstate keyword argument in
python 2.5, this broke code that subclassed Popen to include its own poll
method.  Fixed my moving _deadstate to an _internal_poll method.

..

.. bpo: 0
.. date: 7062
.. nonce: y_hE4z
.. section: Build

Generate the PatternGrammar pickle during "make install".

..

.. bpo: 2235
.. date: 7061
.. nonce: BMunQV
.. section: Documentation

the C API function PyObject_HashNotImplemented and its interaction with the
tp_hash slot (added in 2.6b2) are now documented

..

.. bpo: 643841
.. date: 7060
.. nonce: Dc77Ec
.. section: Documentation

The language reference now provides more detailed coverage of the lookup
process for special methods. The disclaimers regarding lack of coverage of
new-style classes have also been removed, since the coverage is now fairly
reasonable.