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Python News

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(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)

What's New in Python 2.5.2?

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

*Release date: 21-Feb-2008*

Extension Modules

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

- Fix deallocation of array objects when allocation ran out of memory.

  Remove array test case that was incorrect on 64-bit systems.

- Bug #2137: Remove test_struct.test_crasher, which was meaningful

  only on 32-bit systems.

What's New in Python 2.5.2c1?

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

*Release date: 14-Feb-2008*

Core and builtins

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

- Added checks for integer overflows, contributed by Google. Some are

  only available if asserts are left in the code, in cases where they

  can't be triggered from Python code.

- Issue #2045: Fix an infinite recursion triggered when printing a subclass of

  collections.defaultdict, if its default_factory is set to a bound method.

- Issue #1920: "while 0" statements were completely removed by the compiler,

  even in the presence of an "else" clause, which is supposed to be run when 

  the condition is false. Now the compiler correctly emits bytecode for the

  "else" suite.

- A few crashers fixed: weakref_in_del.py (issue #1377858);

  loosing_dict_ref.py (issue #1303614, test67.py);

  borrowed_ref_[34].py (not in tracker).

- Fix for #1303614 and #1174712 backported from the trunk:

  __dict__ descriptor abuse for subclasses of built-in types;

  subclassing from both ModuleType and another built-in types.

- Bug #1915: Python compiles with --enable-unicode=no again. However

  several extension methods and modules do not work without unicode

  support.

- Issue #1678380: distinction between 0.0 and -0.0 was lost during constant

  folding optimization.  This was a regression from Python 2.4.

- Issue #1882: when compiling code from a string, encoding cookies in the

  second line of code were not always recognized correctly.

- Bug #1517: Possible segfault in lookup().

- Issue #1638: %zd configure test fails on Linux.

- Issue #1553: An erroneous __length_hint__ can make list() raise a

  SystemError.

- Issue #1521: On 64bit platforms, using PyArgs_ParseTuple with the t# of w#

  format code incorrectly truncated the length to an int, even when

  PY_SSIZE_T_CLEAN is set.  The str.decode method used to return incorrect

  results with huge strings.

- Issue #1445: Fix a SystemError when accessing the ``cell_contents`` 

  attribute of an empty cell object.

- Issue #1265: Fix a problem with sys.settrace, if the tracing function uses a

  generator expression when at the same time the executed code is closing a

  paused generator.

- Issue 1704621: Fix segfaults in list_repeat() and list_inplace_repeat().

- Issue #1147: Generators were not raising a DeprecationWarning when a string

  was passed into throw().

- Patch #1031213: Decode source line in SyntaxErrors back to its original source

  encoding.

- Patch #1673759: add a missing overflow check when formatting floats

  with %G.

- Patch #1733960: Allow T_LONGLONG to accept ints.

- Prevent expandtabs() on string and unicode objects from causing a segfault

  when a large width is passed on 32-bit platforms.

- Bug #1733488: Fix compilation of bufferobject.c on AIX.

- Fix Issue #1703448: A joined thread could show up in the

  threading.enumerate() list after the join() for a brief period until

  it actually exited.

Library

-------

- Patch #1966: Break infinite loop in httplib when the servers

  implements the chunked encoding incorrectly.

- tarfile.py: Fix reading of xstar archives.

- #2021: Allow tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile to be used in with statements

  by correctly supporting the context management protocol.

- Fixed _ctypes.COMError so that it must be called with exactly three

  arguments, instances now have the hresult, text, and details

  instance variables.

- #1507247, #2004: tarfile.py: Use mode 0700 for temporary directories and

  default permissions for missing directories.

- #175006: The debugger used to skip the condition of a "while" statement

  after the first iteration. Now it correctly steps on the expression, and

  breakpoints on the "while" statement are honored on each loop.

- The ctypes int types did not accept objects implementing

  __int__() in the constructor.

- #1189216: Fix the zipfile module to work on archives with headers

  past the 2**31 byte boundary.

- Issue #1336: fix a race condition in subprocess.Popen if the garbage

  collector kicked in at the wrong time that would cause the process

  to hang when the child wrote to stderr.

- Bug #1687: Fixed plistlib.py restricts <integer> to Python int when writing.

- Issue #1182: many arithmetic bugs in the decimal module have been

  fixed, and the decimal module has been updated to comply with the

  latest IBM Decimal Arithmetic specification (version 1.66) and

  testsuite (version 2.57).  (Backported from Python 2.6a0.)

- Patch #1637: fix urlparse for URLs like 'http://x.com?arg=/foo'.

- Issue #1735: TarFile.extractall() now correctly sets directory permissions

  and times.

- Bug #1713: posixpath.ismount() claims symlink to a mountpoint is a mountpoint.

- Issue #1700: Regular expression inline flags incorrectly handle certain

  unicode characters.

- Change ctypes version number to 1.0.3 (when Python 2.5.2 is released,

  ctypes 1.0.3 will be also be released).

- Issue #1695: Fixed typo in the docstrings for time.localtime() and gmtime().

- Issue #1642: Fix segfault in ctypes when trying to delete attributes.

- os.access now returns True on Windows for any existing directory.

- Issue #1531: tarfile.py: Read fileobj from the current offset, do not

  seek to the start.

- Issue 1429818: patch for trace and doctest modules so they play nicely

  together.

- doctest mis-used __loader__.get_data(), assuming universal newlines was used.

- Issue #1705170: contextlib.contextmanager was still swallowing

  StopIteration in some cases. This should no longer happen.

- Bug #1307: Fix smtpd so it doesn't raise an exception when there is no arg.

- ctypes will now work correctly on 32-bit systems when Python is

  configured with --with-system-ffi.

- Bug #1777530: ctypes.util.find_library uses dump(1) instead of

  objdump(1) on Solaris.

- Bug #1153: repr.repr() now doesn't require set and dictionary items

  to be orderable to properly represent them.

- Bug #1709599: Run test_1565150 only if the file system is NTFS.

- When encountering a password-protected robots.txt file the RobotFileParser

  no longer prompts interactively for a username and password (bug 813986).

- TarFile.__init__() no longer fails if no name argument is passed and

  the fileobj argument has no usable name attribute (e.g. StringIO).

- Reverted the fix for bug #1548891 because it broke compatibility with

  arbitrary read buffers. Added a note in the documentation.

- GB18030 codec now can encode additional two-byte characters that

  are missing in GBK.

- Bug #1704793: Raise KeyError if unicodedata.lookup cannot

  represent the result in a single character.

- Change location of the package index to pypi.python.org/pypi

- Bug #1701409: Fix a segfault in printing ctypes.c_char_p and

  ctypes.c_wchar_p when they point to an invalid location.  As a

  sideeffect the representation of these instances has changed.

- Bug #1734723: Fix repr.Repr() so it doesn't ignore the maxtuple attribute.

- Bug #1728403: Fix a bug that CJKCodecs StreamReader hangs when it

  reads a file that ends with incomplete sequence and sizehint argument

  for .read() is specified.

- Bug #1730389: Have time.strptime() match spaces in a format argument with

  ``\s+`` instead of ``\s*``.

- SF 1668596/1720897: distutils now copies data files

  even if package_dir is empty.

- Fix bug in marshal where bad data would cause a segfault due to

  lack of an infinite recursion check.

- mailbox.py: Ignore stray directories found in Maildir's cur/new/tmp

  subdirectories.

- HTML-escape the plain traceback in cgitb's HTML output, to prevent

  the traceback inadvertently or maliciously closing the comment and

  injecting HTML into the error page.

- Bug #1290505: Properly clear time.strptime's locale cache when the locale

  changes between calls.  Backport of r54646 and r54647.

- Bug #1706381: Specifying the SWIG option "-c++" in the setup.py file

  (as opposed to the command line) will now write file names ending in

  ".cpp" too.

- Patch #1695229: Fix a regression with tarfile.open() and a missing name

  argument.

- tarfile.py: Fix directory names to have only one trailing slash.

- Fix test_pty.py to not hang on OS X (and theoretically other *nixes) when

  run in verbose mode.

- Bug #1693258: IDLE would show two "Preferences" menu's with some versions

  of Tcl/Tk

- Issue1385: The hmac module now computes the correct hmac when using hashes

  with a block size other than 64 bytes (such as sha384 and sha512).

- Issue829951: In the smtplib module, SMTP.starttls() now complies with 

  RFC 3207 and forgets any knowledge obtained from the server not obtained

  from the TLS negotiation itself.  Patch contributed by Bill Fenner.

Extension Modules

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

- Patch #1736: Fix file name handling of _msi.FCICreate.

- Backport r59862 (issue #712900): make long regexp matches interruptable.

- #1940: make it possible to use curses.filter() before curses.initscr()

  as the documentation says.

- Fix a potential 'SystemError: NULL result without error' in _ctypes.

- Bug #1301: Bad assert in _tkinter fixed.

- Patch #1114: fix curses module compilation on 64-bit AIX, & possibly

  other 64-bit LP64 platforms where attr_t is not the same size as a long.  

  (Contributed by Luke Mewburn.)

- Bug #1649098: Avoid declaration of zero-sized array declaration in

  structure.

- Bug #1703286: ctypes no longer truncates 64-bit pointers.

- Bug #1721309: prevent bsddb module from freeing random memory.

- Bug #1233: fix bsddb.dbshelve.DBShelf append method to work as

  intended for RECNO databases.

- Bug #1726026: Correct the field names of WIN32_FIND_DATAA and

  WIN32_FIND_DATAW structures in the ctypes.wintypes module.

- Added support for linking the bsddb module against BerkeleyDB 4.6.x.

- Fix libffi configure for hppa*-*-linux* | parisc*-*-linux*.

- Build using system ffi library on arm*-linux*.

- Bug #1372: zlibmodule.c: int overflow in PyZlib_decompress

- bsddb module: Fix memory leak when using database cursors on

  databases without a DBEnv.

Documentation

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

- Bug #1637365: add subsection about "__name__ == __main__" to the

  Python tutorial.

- Bug #1569057: Document that calling file.next() on a file open for writing

  has undefined behaviour.  Backport of r54712.

Build

-----

- Have the search path for building extensions follow the declared order in

  $CPPFLAGS and $LDFLAGS.

- Bug #1234: Fixed semaphore errors on AIX 5.2

- Bug #1699: Define _BSD_SOURCE only on OpenBSD.

- Bug #1608: use -fwrapv when GCC supports it.  This is important,

  newer GCC versions may optimize away overflow buffer overflow checks

  without this option!

- Allow simultaneous installation of 32-bit and 64-bit versions

  on 64-bit Windows systems.

- Patch #786737: Allow building in a tree of symlinks pointing to

  a readonly source.

- Bug #1737210: Change Manufacturer of Windows installer to PSF.

- Bug #1746880: Correctly install DLLs into system32 folder on Win64.

- Define _BSD_SOURCE, to get access to POSIX extensions on OpenBSD 4.1+.

- Patch #1673122: Use an explicit path to libtool when building a framework. 

  This avoids picking up GNU libtool from a users PATH.

- Allow Emacs 22 for building the documentation in info format.

- Makefile.pre.in(buildbottest): Run an optional script pybuildbot.identify

  to include some information about the build environment.

Windows

-------

- Bug #1216: Restore support for Visual Studio 2002.

What's New in Python 2.5.1?

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

*Release date: 18-APR-2007*

Core and builtins

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

- Bug #1722485: remove docstrings again when running with -OO.

- Revert SF #1615701: dict.update() does *not* call __getitem__() or keys()

  if subclassed.  This is to remain consistent with 2.5.

  Also revert revision 53667 with made a similar change to set.update().

What's New in Python 2.5.1c1?

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

*Release date: 05-APR-2007*

Core and builtins

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

- Patch #1682205: a TypeError while unpacking an iterable is no longer

  masked by a generic one with the message "unpack non-sequence".

- Patch #1642547: Fix an error/crash when encountering syntax errors in

  complex if statements.

- Patch #1462488: Python no longer segfaults when ``object.__reduce_ex__()``

  is called with an object that is faking its type.

- Patch #1680015: Don't modify __slots__ tuple if it contains an unicode

  name.

- Patch #922167: Python no longer segfaults when faced with infinitely

  self-recursive reload() calls (as reported by bug #742342).

- Patch #1675981: remove unreachable code from ``type.__new__()`` method.

- Patch #1638879: don't accept strings with embedded NUL bytes in long().

- Bug #1674503: close the file opened by execfile() in an error condition.

- Patch #1674228: when assigning a slice (old-style), check for the

  sq_ass_slice instead of the sq_slice slot.

- Bug #1669182: prevent crash when trying to print an unraisable error

  from a string exception.

- The peephole optimizer left None as a global in functions with a docstring

  and an explicit return value.

- Bug #1653736: Properly discard third argument to slot_nb_inplace_power.

- SF #151204:  enumerate() now raises an Overflow error at sys.maxint items.

- Bug #1377858: Fix the segfaulting of the interpreter when an object created

  a weakref on itself during a __del__ call for new-style classes (classic

  classes still have the bug).

- Bug #1648179:  set.update() did not recognize an overridden __iter__ 

  method in subclasses of dict.

- Bug #1579370: Make PyTraceBack_Here use the current thread, not the

  frame's thread state.

- patch #1630975: Fix crash when replacing sys.stdout in sitecustomize.py

- Bug #1637022: Prefix AST symbols with _Py_.

- Prevent seg fault on shutdown which could occur if an object

  raised a warning.

- Bug #1566280: Explicitly invoke threading._shutdown from Py_Main,

  to avoid relying on atexit.

- Bug #1590891: random.randrange don't return correct value for big number

- Bug #1456209: In some obscure cases it was possible for a class with a

  custom ``__eq__()`` method to confuse set internals when class instances

  were used as a set's elements and the ``__eq__()`` method mutated the set.

- The repr for self-referential sets and fronzensets now shows "..." instead

  of falling into infinite recursion.

- Eliminated unnecessary repeated calls to hash() by set.intersection() and

  set.symmetric_difference_update().

- Bug #1591996: Correctly forward exception in instance_contains().

- Bug #1588287: fix invalid assertion for `1,2` in debug builds.

- Bug #1576657: when setting a KeyError for a tuple key, make sure that

  the tuple isn't used as the "exception arguments tuple".  Applied to

  both sets and dictionaries.

- Bug #1565514, SystemError not raised on too many nested blocks.

- Bug #1576174: WindowsError now displays the windows error code

  again, no longer the posix error code.

- Patch #1549049: Support long values in structmember.

- Bug #1542016: make sys.callstats() match its docstring and return an

  11-tuple (only relevant when Python is compiled with -DCALL_PROFILE).

- Bug #1545497: when given an explicit base, int() did ignore NULs

  embedded in the string to convert.

- Bug #1569998: break inside a try statement (outside a loop) is now

  recognized and rejected.

- Patch #1542451: disallow continue anywhere under a finally.

- list.pop(x) accepts any object x following the __index__ protocol.

- Fix some leftovers from the conversion from int to Py_ssize_t

  (relevant to strings and sequences of more than 2**31 items).

- A number of places, including integer negation and absolute value,

  were fixed to not rely on undefined behaviour of the C compiler

  anymore.

- Bug #1566800: make sure that EnvironmentError can be called with any

  number of arguments, as was the case in Python 2.4.

- Patch #1567691: super() and new.instancemethod() now don't accept

  keyword arguments any more (previously they accepted them, but didn't

  use them).

- Fix a bug in the parser's future statement handling that led to "with"

  not being recognized as a keyword after, e.g., this statement:

  from __future__ import division, with_statement

- Bug #1557232: fix seg fault with def f((((x)))) and def f(((x),)).

- Fix %zd string formatting on Mac OS X so it prints negative numbers.

- Allow exception instances to be directly sliced again.

Extension Modules

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

- Patch #1643738: Problem with signals in a single-threaded application.

- Bug #1563759: struct.unpack doens't support buffer protocol objects.

- Bug #1686475: Support stat'ing open files on Windows again.

- Bug #1647541: Array module's buffer interface can now handle empty arrays.

- Bug #1693079: The array module can now successfully pickle empty arrays.

- Bug #1688393: Prevent crash in socket.recvfrom if length is negative.

- Bug #1622896: fix a rare corner case where the bz2 module raised an

  error in spite of a succesful compression.

- Patch #1654417: make operator.{get,set,del}slice use the full range

  of Py_ssize_t.

- Patch #1646728: datetime.fromtimestamp fails with negative

  fractional times.  With unittest.

- Patch #1494140: Add documentation for the new struct.Struct object.

- Patch #1657276: Make NETLINK_DNRTMSG conditional.

- Bug #1653736: Fix signature of time_isoformat.

- Issue #1698398 Zipfile.printdir() crashed because the format string

  expected a tuple type of length six instead of time.struct_time object.

- operator.count() now raises an OverflowError when the count reaches sys.maxint.

- Bug #1575169: operator.isSequenceType() now returns False for subclasses of dict.

- collections.defaultdict() now verifies that the factory function is callable.

- Bug #1486663: don't reject keyword arguments for subclasses of builtin

  types.

- The version number of the ctypes package was changed to "1.0.2".