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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 3.2 Alpha 1?

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

*Release date: XX-XXX-XXX*

Core and Builtins

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

=======

- Issue #6902: Fix problem with built-in types format incorrectly with

0 padding.

- Issue #7988: Fix default alignment to be right aligned for

complex.__format__. Now it matches other numeric types.

- Issue #5988: Remove deprecated functions PyOS_ascii_formatd,

PyOS_ascii_strtod, and PyOS_ascii_atof. Use PyOS_double_to_string

and PyOS_string_to_double instead. See issue #5835 for the original

deprecations.

- Issue #7385: Fix a crash in `MemoryView_FromObject` when

`PyObject_GetBuffer` fails. Patch by Florent Xicluna.

- Issue #7788: Fix an interpreter crash produced by deleting a list

slice with very large step value.

- Issue #7766: Change sys.getwindowsversion() return value to a named

tuple and add the additional members returned in an OSVERSIONINFOEX

structure. The new members are service_pack_major, service_pack_minor,

suite_mask, and product_type.

- Issue #7561: Operations on empty bytearrays (such as `int(bytearray())`)

could crash in many places because of the PyByteArray_AS_STRING() macro

returning NULL. The macro now returns a statically allocated empty

string instead.

- Issue #6690: Optimize the bytecode for expressions such as `x in {1, 2, 3}`,

where the right hand operand is a set of constants, by turning the set into

a frozenset and pre-building it as a constant. The comparison operation

is made against the constant instead of building a new set each time it is

executed (a similar optimization already existed which turned a list of

constants into a pre-built tuple). Patch and additional tests by Dave

Malcolm.

- Issue #7622: Improve the split(), rsplit(), splitlines() and replace()

methods of bytes, bytearray and unicode objects by using a common

implementation based on stringlib's fast search. Patch by Florent Xicluna.

- Issue #7632: Fix various str -> float conversion bugs present in 2.7

alpha 2, including: (1) a serious 'wrong output' bug that could

occur for long (> 40 digit) input strings, (2) a crash in dtoa.c

that occurred in debug builds when parsing certain long numeric

strings corresponding to subnormal values, (3) a memory leak for

some values large enough to cause overflow, and (4) a number of

flaws that could lead to incorrectly rounded results.

- The __complex__ method is now looked up on the class of instances to make it

consistent with other special methods.

- Issue #7462: Implement the stringlib fast search algorithm for the `rfind`,

`rindex`, `rsplit` and `rpartition` methods. Patch by Florent Xicluna.

- Issue #7604: Deleting an unset slotted attribute did not raise an

AttributeError.

- Issue #7534: Fix handling of IEEE specials (infinities, nans,

negative zero) in ** operator. The behaviour now conforms to that

described in C99 Annex F.

- Issue #1811: improve accuracy and cross-platform consistency for

true division of integers: the result of a/b is now correctly

rounded for ints a and b (at least on IEEE 754 platforms), and in

particular does not depend on the internal representation of an int.

- Issue #6834: replace the implementation for the 'python' and 'pythonw'

executables on OSX.

These executables now work properly with the arch(1) command:

``arch -ppc python`` will start a universal binary version of python

in PPC mode (unlike previous releases).

- Issue #7466: segmentation fault when the garbage collector is called

in the middle of populating a tuple. Patch by Florent Xicluna.

- 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 #1757126: Fix the cyrillic-asian alias for the ptcp154 encoding.

- Issue #6970: Remove redundant calls when comparing objects that don't

implement the relevant rich comparison methods.

- 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.

- Remove length limitation when constructing a complex number from a string.

- Issue #1087418: Boost performance of bitwise operations for longs.

- Support for AtheOS has been completely removed from the code base. It was

disabled since Python 3.0.

- Support for several legacy threading libraries has been disabled. These

libraries are: Mach C threads, SunOS LWP, GNU pth, Irix threads. Support code

will be entirely removed in 3.3.

- Peephole constant folding had missed UNARY_POSITIVE.

- 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 #7147: Remove support for compiling Python without complex number

support.

- Issue #7120: logging: Removed import of multiprocessing which is causing

crash in GAE.

- Issue #1754094: Improve the stack depth calculation in the compiler.

There should be no other effect than a small decrease in memory use.

Patch by Christopher Tur Lesniewski-Laas.

- Issue #7065: Fix a crash in bytes.maketrans and bytearray.maketrans when

using byte values greater than 127. Patch by Derk Drukker.

- Issue #1571184: The Unicode database contains properties for more characters.

The tables for code points representing numeric values, white spaces or line

breaks are now generated from the official Unicode Character Database files,

and include information from the Unihan.txt file.

- 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 #5460: Fix an ambiguity in the grammar.

- Issue #1766304: Improve performance of membership tests on range objects.

- Issue #6713: Improve performance of integer -> string conversions.

- 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.

- 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 #1616979: Added the cp720 (Arabic DOS) encoding.

- 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.

- The deprecated PyCObject has been removed.

- 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.

- Issue #4856: Remove checks for win NT.

- Issue #6687: PyBytes_FromObject() no longer accepts an integer as its

argument to construct a null-initialized bytes object.

- Issue #1023290: Add from_bytes() and to_bytes() methods to integers.

These methods allow the conversion of integers to bytes, and vice-versa.

- Issue #7382: Fix bug in bytes.__getnewargs__ that prevented bytes

instances from being copied with copy.copy(), and bytes subclasses

from being pickled properly.

C-API

-----

- Issue #7767: New function PyLong_AsLongLongAndOverflow added,

analogous to PyLong_AsLongAndOverflow.

- Make PyUnicode_CompareWithASCIIString return not equal if the Python string

has '\0' at the end.

- Issue #5080: The argument parsing functions PyArg_ParseTuple,

PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords, PyArg_VaParse,

PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords and PyArg_Parse now raise a

DeprecationWarning for float arguments passed with the 'L' format

code. This will become a TypeError in a future version of Python,

to match the behaviour of the other integer format codes.

- Issue #7033: function ``PyErr_NewExceptionWithDoc()`` added.

- Issue #7414: 'C' code wasn't being skipped properly (for keyword arguments)

in PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords.

- Issue #7228: Add '%lld' and '%llu' support to PyString_FromFormat(V)

and PyErr_Format, on machines with HAVE_LONG_LONG defined.

- Issue #6151: Made PyDescr_COMMON conform to standard C (like PyObject_HEAD

in PEP 3123). The PyDescr_TYPE and PyDescr_NAME macros should be

should used for accessing the d_type and d_name members of structures

using PyDescr_COMMON.

- Issue #6405: Remove duplicate type declarations in descrobject.h.

- The code flags for old __future__ features are now available again.

- Issue #5954: Add a PyFrame_GetLineNumber() function to replace most uses of

PyCode_Addr2Line().

- Issue #5959: Add a PyCode_NewEmpty() function to create a new empty code

object at a specified file, function, and line number.

- Issue #1419652: Change the first argument to PyImport_AppendInittab() to

``const char *`` as the string is stored beyond the call.

- Issue #2422: When compiled with the ``--with-valgrind`` option, the

pymalloc allocator will be automatically disabled when running under

Valgrind. This gives improved memory leak detection when running

under Valgrind, while taking advantage of pymalloc at other times.

Library

-------

- Issue #1537721: Add a writeheader() method to csv.DictWriter.

- Issue #7959: ctypes callback functions are now registered correctly

with the cylce garbage collector.

- Issue #5801: removed spurious empty lines in wsgiref.

- Issue #6666: fix bug in trace.py that applied the list of directories

to be ignored only to the first file. Noted by Bogdan Opanchuk.

- Issue #7597: curses.use_env() can now be called before initscr().

Noted by Kan-Ru Chen.

- Issue #7310: fix the __repr__ of os.environ to show the environment variables.

- Issue #7970: email.Generator.flatten now correctly flattens message/rfc822

messages parsed by email.Parser.HeaderParser.

- Issue #7361: Importlib was not properly checking the number of bytes in

bytecode file when it was less then 8 bytes.

- Issue #7633: In the decimal module, Context class methods (with the

exception of canonical and is_canonical) now accept instances of int

and long wherever a Decimal instance is accepted, and implicitly

convert that argument to Decimal. Previously only some arguments

were converted.

- Issue #7835: shelve should no longer produce mysterious warnings during

interpreter shutdown.

- Issue #2746: Don't escape ampersands and angle brackets ("&", "<", ">")

in XML processing instructions and comments. These raw characters are

allowed by the XML specification, and are necessary when outputting e.g.

PHP code in a processing instruction. Patch by Neil Muller.

- Issue #6233: ElementTree failed converting unicode characters to XML

entities when they could't be represented in the requested output

encoding. Patch by Jerry Chen.

- Issue #6003: add an argument to ``zipfile.Zipfile.writestr`` to

specify the compression type.

- Issue #4772: Raise a ValueError when an unknown Bluetooth protocol is

specified, rather than fall through to AF_PACKET (in the `socket` module).

Also, raise ValueError rather than TypeError when an unknown TIPC address

type is specified. Patch by Brian Curtin.

- Issue #6939: Fix file I/O objects in the `io` module to keep the original

file position when calling `truncate()`. It would previously change the

file position to the given argument, which goes against the tradition of

ftruncate() and other truncation APIs. Patch by Pascal Chambon.

- Issue #7610: Reworked implementation of the internal

:class:`zipfile.ZipExtFile` class used to represent files stored inside

an archive. The new implementation is significantly faster and can

be wrapped in a :class:`io.BufferedReader` object for more speedups.

It also solves an issue where interleaved calls to `read()` and

`readline()` give wrong results. Patch by Nir Aides.

- Issue #6963: Added "maxtasksperchild" argument to multiprocessing.Pool,

allowing for a maximum number of tasks within the pool to be completed by

the worker before that worker is terminated, and a new one created to

replace it.

- Issue #7792: Registering non-classes to ABCs raised an obscure error.

- Issue #7785: Don't accept bytes in FileIO.write().

- Removed the functions 'verify' and 'vereq' from Lib/test/support.py.

- Issue #7773: Fix an UnboundLocalError in platform.linux_distribution() when

the release file is empty.

- Issue #7561: Fix crashes when using bytearray objects with the posix

module.

- Issue #1670765: Prevent email.generator.Generator from re-wrapping

headers in multipart/signed MIME parts, which fixes one of the sources of

invalid modifications to such parts by Generator.

- Issue #7703: Add support for the new buffer API to `binascii.a2bhqx`.

Patch by Florent Xicluna, along with some additional tests.

- Issue #7701: Fix crash in binascii.b2a_uu() in debug mode when given a

1-byte argument. Patch by Victor Stinner.

- Issue #3299: Fix possible crash in the _sre module when given bad

argument values in debug mode. Patch by Victor Stinner.

- Issue #2846: Add support for gzip.GzipFile reading zero-padded files.

Patch by Brian Curtin.

- Issue #7681: Use floor division in appropiate places in the wave module.

- Issue #5372: Drop the reuse of .o files in Distutils' ccompiler (since

Extension extra options may change the output without changing the .c

file). Initial patch by Collin Winter.

- Issue #7617: Make sure distutils.unixccompiler.UnixCCompiler recognizes

gcc when it has a fully qualified configuration prefix. Initial patch

by Arfrever.

- Issue #7105: Make WeakKeyDictionary and WeakValueDictionary robust against

the destruction of weakref'ed objects while iterating.

- Issue #7455: Fix possible crash in cPickle on invalid input. Patch by

Victor Stinner.

- Issue #1628205: Socket file objects returned by socket.socket.makefile() now

properly handles EINTR within the read, readline, write & flush methods.

The socket.sendall() method now properly handles interrupted system calls.

- Issue #7471: Improve the performance of GzipFile's buffering mechanism,

and make it implement the `io.BufferedIOBase` ABC to allow for further

speedups by wrapping it in an `io.BufferedReader`. Patch by Nir Aides.

- Issue #3972: http.client.HTTPConnection now accepts an optional source_address

parameter to allow specifying where your connections come from.

- socket.create_connection now accepts an optional source_address parameter.

- Issue #5511: now zipfile.ZipFile can be used as a context manager.

Initial patch by Brian Curtin.

- Issue #7556: Make sure Distutils' msvc9compile reads and writes the

MSVC XML Manifest file in text mode so string patterns can be used

in regular expressions.

- Issue #7552: Removed line feed in the base64 Authorization header in

the Distutils upload command to avoid an error when PyPI reads it.

This occurs on long passwords. Initial patch by JP St. Pierre.

- Issue #7231: urllib2 cannot handle https with proxy requiring auth. Patch by

Tatsuhiro Tsujikawa.

- Issue #4757: `zlib.compress` and other methods in the zlib module now

raise a TypeError when given an `str` object (rather than a `bytes`-like

object). Patch by Victor Stinner and Florent Xicluna.

- Issue #7349: Make methods of file objects in the io module accept None as an

argument where file-like objects (ie StringIO and BytesIO) accept them to mean

the same as passing no argument.

- Issue #7357: tarfile no longer suppresses fatal extraction errors by

default.

- Issue #5949: added check for correct lineends in input from IMAP server

in imaplib.

- Add a reverse() method to collections.deque().

- Fix variations of extending deques: d.extend(d) d.extendleft(d) d+=d

- Issue #6986: Fix crash in the JSON C accelerator when called with the

wrong parameter types. Patch by Victor Stinner.

- Issue #7457: added a read_pkg_file method to

distutils.dist.DistributionMetadata.

- logging: Added optional `secure` parameter to SMTPHandler, to enable use of

TLS with authentication credentials.

- Issue #1923: Fixed the removal of meaningful spaces when PKG-INFO is

generated in Distutils. Patch by Stephen Emslie.

- Issue #4120: Drop reference to CRT from manifest when building extensions with

msvc9compiler.

- Issue #7333: The `posix` module gains an `initgroups()` function providing

access to the initgroups(3) C library call on Unix systems which implement

it. Patch by Jean-Paul Calderone.

- Issue #7408: Fixed distutils.tests.sdist so it doesn't check for group

ownership when the group is not forced, because the group may be different

from the user's group and inherit from its container when the test is run.

- 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 #1515: Enable use of deepcopy() with instance methods. Patch by

Robert Collins.

- Issue #7403: logging: Fixed possible race condition in lock creation.

- Issue #6845: Add restart support for binary upload in ftplib. The

`storbinary()` method of FTP and FTP_TLS objects gains an optional `rest`

argument. Patch by Pablo Mouzo.

- Issue #5788: `datetime.timedelta` objects get a new `total_seconds()`

method returning the total number of seconds in the duration. Patch by

Brian Quinlan.

- Issue #7133: SSL objects now support the new buffer API.

- Issue #1488943: difflib.Differ() doesn't always add hints for tab characters

- Issue #6123: tarfile now opens empty archives correctly and consistently

raises ReadError on empty files.

- Issue #7354: distutils.tests.test_msvc9compiler - dragfullwindows can

be 2.

- 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 #2054: ftplib now provides an FTP_TLS class to do secure FTP using

TLS or SSL. Patch by Giampaolo Rodola'.

- Issue #7328: pydoc no longer corrupts sys.path when run with the '-m' switch

- Issue #4969: The mimetypes module now reads the MIME database from

the registry under Windows. Patch by Gabriel Genellina.

- Issue #6816: runpy now provides a run_path function that allows Python code

to execute file paths that refer to source or compiled Python files as well

as zipfiles, directories and other valid sys.path entries that contain a

__main__.py file. This allows applications that run other Python scripts to

support the same flexibility as the CPython command line itself.

- 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 #7197: Allow unittest.TextTestRunner objects to be pickled and

unpickled. This fixes crashes under Windows when trying to run

test_multiprocessing in verbose mode.

- Issue #7893: ``unittest.TextTestResult`` is made public and a ``resultclass``

argument added to the TextTestRunner constructor allowing a different result

class to be used without having to subclass.

- Issue 7588: ``unittest.TextTestResult.getDescription`` now includes the test

name in failure reports even if the test has a docstring.

- Issue #3001: Add a C implementation of recursive locks which is used by

default when instantiating a `threading.RLock` object. This makes

recursive locks as fast as regular non-recursive locks (previously,

they were slower by 10x to 15x).

- 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 #7211: Allow 64-bit values for the `ident` and `data` fields of kevent

objects on 64-bit systems. Patch by Michael Broghton.

- 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 #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 #4750: Store the basename of the original filename in the gzip FNAME

header as required by RFC 1952.

- Issue #1180: Added a new global option to ignore ~/.pydistutils.cfg in

Distutils.

- Issue #7218: Fix test_site for win32, the directory comparison was done with

an uppercase.

- Issue #7205: Fix a possible deadlock when using a BZ2File object from

several threads at once.

- Issue #7077: logging: SysLogHandler now treats Unicode as per RFC 5424.

- 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 #7086: Added TCP support to SysLogHandler, and tidied up some

anachronisms in the code which were a relic of 1.5.2 compatibility.

- 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 #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 #6856: Add a filter keyword argument to TarFile.add().

- Issue #6888: pdb's alias command was broken when no arguments were given.

- Issue #6857: Default format() alignment should be '>' for Decimal

instances.

- 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'.

- Trying to import a submodule from a module that is not a package, ImportError

should be raised, not AttributeError.

- When the globals past to importlib.__import__() has __package__ set to None,

fall back to computing what __package__ should be instead of giving up.

- Raise a TypeError when the name of a module to be imported for

importlib.__import__ is not a string (was raising an

AttributeError before).

- Allow the fromlist passed into importlib.__import__ to be any iterable.

- Have importlib raise ImportError if None is found in sys.modules.

- Issue #6054: Do not normalize stored pathnames in tarfile.

- Issue #6794: Fix Decimal.compare_total and Decimal.compare_total_mag: NaN

payloads are now ordered by integer value rather than lexicographically.

- Issue #1356969: Add missing info methods in tix.HList.

- Issue #1522587: New constants and methods for the tix.Grid widget.

- Issue #1250469: Fix the return value of tix.PanedWindow.panes.

- Issue #1119673: Do not override tkinter.Text methods when creating a

ScrolledText.

- Issue #6665: Fix fnmatch to properly match filenames with newlines in them.

- Issue #1135: Add the XView and YView mix-ins to avoid duplicating

the xview* and yview* methods.

- 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 #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].

- Issue #6106: telnetlib.Telnet.process_rawq doesn't handle default WILL/WONT

DO/DONT correctly.

- 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

- Add importlib.abc.ExecutionLoader to represent the PEP 302 protocol for

loaders that allow for modules to be executed. Both importlib.abc.PyLoader

and PyPycLoader inherit from this class and provide implementations in

relation to other methods required by the ABCs.

- 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.

- The deprecated function string.maketrans has been removed.

- Issue #4005: Fixed a crash of pydoc when there was a zip file present in

sys.path.

- Issue #6218: io.StringIO and io.BytesIO instances are now picklable.

Extension Modules

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

- Stop providing crtassem.h symbols when compiling with Visual Studio 2010, as

msvcr100.dll is not a platform assembly anymore.

- Issue #6508: Add posix.{getresuid,getresgid,setresuid,setresgid}.

- Issue #7078: Set struct.__doc__ from _struct.__doc__.

- Issue #3366: Add erf, erfc, expm1, gamma, lgamma functions to math module.

- Issue #6877: It is now possible to link the readline extension to the

libedit readline emulation on OSX 10.5 or later.

- Issue #6848: Fix curses module build failure on OS X 10.6.

- Fix a segfault that could be triggered by expat with specially formed input.

- Issue #6561: '\d' in a regex now matches only characters with

Unicode category 'Nd' (Number, Decimal Digit). Previously it also

matched characters with category 'No'.

- Issue #4509: Array objects are no longer modified after an operation

failing due to the resize restriction in-place when the object has exported

buffers.

- Issue #2389: Array objects are now pickled in a portable manner.

- Expat: Fix DoS via XML document with malformed UTF-8 sequences

(CVE_2009_3560).

Build

-----

- Issue #3920, #7903: Define _BSD_SOURCE on OpenBSD 4.4 through 4.9.

- Issue #7632: When Py_USING_MEMORY_DEBUGGER is defined, disable the

private memory allocation scheme in dtoa.c and use PyMem_Malloc and

PyMem_Free instead. Also disable caching of powers of 5.

- Issue #6491: Allow --with-dbmliborder to specify that no dbms will be built.

- Issue #6943: Use pkg-config to find the libffi headers when the

--with-system-ffi flag is used.

- Issue #7609: Add a --with-system-expat option that causes the system's expat

library to be used for the pyexpat module instead of the one included with

Python.

- Issue #7589: Only build the nis module when the correct header files are

found.

- Switch to OpenSSL 0.9.8l and sqlite 3.6.21 on Windows.

- Issue #5792: Extend the short float repr support to x86 systems using

icc or suncc.

- 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 #6244: Allow detect_tkinter to look for Tcl/Tk 8.6.

- Issue 4601: 'make install' did not set the appropriate permissions on

directories.

- Issue 5390: Add uninstall icon independent of whether file

extensions are installed.

- Issue #7541: when using ``python-config`` with a framework install the compiler might

use the wrong library.

Documentation

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

- Updating `Using Python` documentation to include description of CPython's

-J and -X options.

- Document that importing a module that has None in sys.modules triggers an

ImportError.

- Issue #6556: Fixed the Distutils configuration files location explanation

for Windows.

- Update python manual page (options -B, -O0, -s, environment variables

PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE, PYTHONNOUSERSITE).

Tests

-----

- Issue #7712: test.support gained a new `temp_cwd` context manager which is

now also used by regrtest to run all the tests in a temporary directory.

The original CWD is saved in `support.SAVEDCWD`.

Thanks to Florent Xicluna who helped with the patch.

- Issue #7924: Fix an intermittent 'XXX undetected error' failure in

test_capi (only seen so far on platforms where the curses module

wasn't built), due to an uncleared exception.

- issue #7728: test_timeout was changed to use test_support.bind_port

instead of a hard coded port.

- Issue #7376: instead of running a self-test (which was failing) when called

with no arguments, doctest.py now gives a usage message.

- Issue #7396: fix regrtest -s, which was broken by the -j enhancement.

- Issue #7498: test_multiprocessing now uses test.support.find_unused_port

instead of a hardcoded port number in test_rapid_restart.

- Issue #7431: use TESTFN in test_linecache instead of trying to create a

file in the Lib/test directory, which might be read-only for the

user running the tests.

- Issue #7324: add a sanity check to regrtest argument parsing to

catch the case of an option with no handler.

- Issue #7312: Add a -F flag to run the selected tests in a loop until

a test fails. Can be combined with -j.

- 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 #7222: Make thread "reaping" more reliable so that reference

leak-chasing test runs give sensible results. The previous method of

reaping threads could return successfully while some Thread objects were

still referenced. This also introduces a new private function:

:func:`_thread._count()`.

- Issue #7151: fixed regrtest -j so that output to stderr from a test no

longer runs the risk of causing the worker thread to fail.

- 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 things like sys.argv and cwd to

runtest_inner in regrtest, with warnings if the called test modifies them,

and a new section in the summary report at the end.

- Issue #7042: Fix test_signal (test_itimer_virtual) failure on OS X 10.6.

- Fixed tests in importlib.test.source.test_abc_loader that were masking

the proper exceptions that should be raised for missing or improper code

object bytecode.

- Removed importlib's custom test discovery code and switched to

unittest.TestLoader.discover().

Tools/Demos

-----------

- iobench (a file I/O benchmark) and ccbench (a concurrency benchmark) were

added to the `Tools/` directory. They were previously living in the

sandbox.

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 #6126: Fixed pdb command-line usage.

- Issue #6314: logging: 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.