Python History

--------------

This file contains the release messages for previous Python releases.

As you read on you go back to the dark ages of Python's history.

(Note: news about 2.5c2 and later 2.5 releases is in the Misc/NEWS

file of the release25-maint branch.)

======================================================================

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

-------

- Fix #1693149.  Now you can pass several modules separated by

  comma to trace.py in the same --ignore-module option.

- 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*=<blah>) and non-encoded

  (name*0=<blah>) 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.