Add various items

Doc/whatsnew/2.6.rst

@@ -1383,6 +1383,11 @@ Here are all of the changes that Python 2.6 makes to the core Python language.
 Optimizations
 -------------
 
+* The :mod:`warnings` module has been rewritten in C.  This makes
+  it possible to invoke warnings from the parser, and may also
+  make the interpreter's startup faster.
+  (Contributed by Neal Norwitz and Brett Cannon; :issue:`1631171`.)
+
 * Type objects now have a cache of methods that can reduce
   the amount of work required to find the correct method implementation
   for a particular class; once cached, the interpreter doesn't need to
@@ -1401,7 +1406,7 @@ Optimizations
   built-in types.  This speeds up checking if an object is a subclass of one of
   these types.  (Contributed by Neal Norwitz.)
 
-* Unicode strings now uses faster code for detecting
+* Unicode strings now use faster code for detecting
   whitespace and line breaks; this speeds up the :meth:`split` method 
   by about 25% and :meth:`splitlines` by 35%.
   (Contributed by Antoine Pitrou.)  Memory usage is reduced
@@ -1801,6 +1806,24 @@ complete list of changes, or look through the CVS logs for all the details.
   opcodes, returning a shorter pickle that contains the same data structure.
   (Contributed by Raymond Hettinger.)
 
+* A :func:`get_data` function was added to the :mod:`pkgutil`
+  module that returns the contents of resource files included
+  with an installed Python package.  For example::
+
+  >>> import pkgutil
+  >>> pkgutil.get_data('test', 'exception_hierarchy.txt')
+  'BaseException
+   +-- SystemExit
+   +-- KeyboardInterrupt
+   +-- GeneratorExit
+   +-- Exception
+        +-- StopIteration
+        +-- StandardError
+   ...'
+  >>> 
+
+  (Contributed by Paul Moore; :issue:`2439`.)
+
 * New functions in the :mod:`posix` module: :func:`chflags` and :func:`lchflags`
   are wrappers for the corresponding system calls (where they're available).
   Constants for the flag values are defined in the :mod:`stat` module; some
@@ -1934,6 +1957,13 @@ complete list of changes, or look through the CVS logs for all the details.
 * The :mod:`struct` module now supports the C99 :ctype:`_Bool` type,
   using the format character ``'?'``. 
   (Contributed by David Remahl.)
+
+* The :class:`Popen` objects provided by the :mod:`subprocess` module
+  now have :meth:`terminate`, :meth:`kill`, and :meth:`send_signal` methods.
+  On Windows, :meth:`send_signal` only supports the :const:`SIGTERM`
+  signal, and all these methods are aliases for the Win32 API function
+  :cfunc:`TerminateProcess`.  
+  (Contributed by Christian Heimes.)
  
 * A new variable in the :mod:`sys` module,
   :attr:`float_info`, is an object
@@ -2088,6 +2118,14 @@ complete list of changes, or look through the CVS logs for all the details.
   information.  (Contributed by Alan McIntyre as part of his 
   project for Google's Summer of Code 2007.)
 
+* The :mod:`xmlrpclib` module no longer automatically converts
+  :class:`datetime.date` and :class:`datetime.time` to the 
+  :class:`xmlrpclib.DateTime` type; the conversion semantics were
+  not necessarily correct for all applications.  Code using
+  :mod:`xmlrpclib` should convert :class:`date` and :class:`time` 
+  instances. (:issue:`1330538`)  The code can also handle 
+  dates before 1900.  (Contributed by Ralf Schmitt; :issue:`2014`.)
+
 * The :mod:`zipfile` module's :class:`ZipFile` class now has 
   :meth:`extract` and :meth:`extractall` methods that will unpack 
   a single file or all the files in the archive to the current directory, or 
@@ -2271,6 +2309,13 @@ Changes to Python's build process and to the C API include:
   have been updated.
   (Contributed by Brett Cannon.)
 
+  Another new target, "make profile-opt", compiles a Python binary
+  using GCC's profile-guided optimization.  It compiles Python with
+  profiling enabled, runs the test suite to obtain a set of profiling
+  results, and then compiles using these results for optimization.
+  (Contributed by Gregory P. Smith.)
+
+
 .. ======================================================================