+++++++++++

Python News

+++++++++++

What's New in Python 3.1.3?

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

*Release date: 2010-11-27*

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #10391: Don't dereference invalid memory in error messages in the ast

module.

Library

-------

- Issue #10459: Update CJK character names to Unicode 5.1.

- Issue #10092: Properly reset locale in calendar.Locale*Calendar classes.

- Issue #6098: Don't claim DOM level 3 conformance in minidom.

- Issue #5762: Fix AttributeError raised by ``xml.dom.minidom`` when an empty

XML namespace attribute is encountered.

- Issue #1710703: Write structures for an empty ZIP archive when a ZipFile is

created in modes 'a' or 'w' and then closed without adding any files. Raise

BadZipfile (rather than IOError) when opening small non-ZIP files.

- Issue #4493: urllib.request adds '/' in front of path components which does not

start with '/. Common behavior exhibited by browsers and other clients.

- Issue #6378: idle.bat now runs with the appropriate Python version rather than

the system default. Patch by Sridhar Ratnakumar.

- Issue #10407: Fix two NameErrors in distutils.

- Issue #10198: fix duplicate header written to wave files when writeframes()

is called without data.

- Issue #10467: Fix BytesIO.readinto() after seeking into a position after the

end of the file.

- Issue #1682942: configparser supports alternative option/value delimiters.

Build

-----

- Backport r83399 to allow test_distutils to pass on installed versions.

- Issue #1303434: Generate ZIP file containing all PDBs (already done for rc1).

- Stop packaging versioncheck tool (already done for rc1).

- Accept Oracle Berkeley DB 4.8, 5.0 and 5.1 as backend for the dbm extension.

Tests

-----

- Issue #9424: Replace deprecated assert* methods in the Python test suite.

Documentation

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

- Issue #10299: List the built-in functions in a table in functions.rst.

What's New in Python 3.1.3 release candidate 1?

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

*Release date: 2010-11-13*

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #10221: dict.pop(k) now has a key error message that includes the

missing key (same message d[k] returns for missing keys).

- Issue #5437: A preallocated MemoryError instance should not hold traceback

data (including local variables caught in the stack trace) alive infinitely.

- Issue #10077: Fix logging of site module errors at startup.

- Issue #10186: Fix the SyntaxError caret when the offset is equal to the length

of the offending line.

- Issue #9713, #10114: Parser functions (eg. PyParser_ASTFromFile) expects

filenames encoded to the filesystem encoding with surrogateescape error

handler (to support undecodable bytes), instead of UTF-8 in strict mode.

- Issue #10006: type.__abstractmethods__ now raises an AttributeError. As a

result metaclasses can now be ABCs (see #9533).

- Issue #9997: Don't let the name "top" have special significance in scope

resolution.

- Issue #9930: Remove bogus subtype check that was causing (e.g.)

float.__rdiv__(2.0, 3) to return NotImplemented instead of the

expected 1.5.

- Issue #9804: ascii() now always represents unicode surrogate pairs as

a single ``\UXXXXXXXX``, regardless of whether the character is printable

or not. Also, the "backslashreplace" error handler now joins surrogate

pairs into a single character on UCS-2 builds.

- Issue #9797: pystate.c wrongly assumed that zero couldn't be a valid

thread-local storage key.

- Issue #9737: Fix a crash when trying to delete a slice or an item from

a memoryview object.

- Issue #7415: PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now uses the new buffer API

properly. Patch by Stefan Behnel.

- Restore GIL in nis_cat in case of error.

- Issue #9712: Fix tokenize on identifiers that start with non-ascii names.

- Issue #9688: __basicsize__ and __itemsize__ must be accessed as Py_ssize_t.

- Issue #5319: Print an error if flushing stdout fails at interpreter

shutdown.

- Issue #8814: function annotations (the ``__annotations__`` attribute)

are now included in the set of attributes copied by default by

functools.wraps and functools.update_wrapper. Patch by Terrence Cole.

- Issue #83755: Implicit set-to-frozenset conversion was not thread-safe.

- Issue #10068: Global objects which have reference cycles with their module's

dict are now cleared again. This causes issue #7140 to appear again.

- Issue #9416: Fix some issues with complex formatting where the

output with no type specifier failed to match the str output:

- format(complex(-0.0, 2.0), '-') omitted the real part from the output,

- format(complex(0.0, 2.0), '-') included a sign and parentheses.

- Issue #7616: Fix copying of overlapping memoryview slices with the Intel

compiler.

- Issue #8271: during the decoding of an invalid UTF-8 byte sequence, only the

start byte and the continuation byte(s) are now considered invalid, instead

of the number of bytes specified by the start byte.

E.g.: '\xf1\x80AB'.decode('utf-8', 'replace') now returns u'\ufffdAB' and

replaces with U+FFFD only the start byte ('\xf1') and the continuation byte

('\x80') even if '\xf1' is the start byte of a 4-bytes sequence.

Previous versions returned a single u'\ufffd'.

- Issue #6543: Write the traceback in the terminal encoding instead of utf-8.

Fix the encoding of the modules filename. Patch written by Amaury Forgeot

d'Arc.

- Issue #9058: Remove assertions about INT_MAX in UnicodeDecodeError.

- Issue #8941: decoding big endian UTF-32 data in UCS-2 builds could crash

the interpreter with characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane

(higher than 0x10000).

- In the str.format(), raise a ValueError when indexes to arguments are too

large.

- Issue #8766: Initialize _warnings module before importing the first module.

Fix a crash if an empty directory called "encodings" exists in sys.path.

- PyObject_Dump() encodes unicode objects to utf8 with backslashreplace

(instead of strict) error handler to escape surrogates

- Issue #8124: PySys_WriteStdout() and PySys_WriteStderr() don't execute

indirectly Python signal handlers anymore because mywrite() ignores

exceptions (KeyboardInterrupt)

- Issue #8092: Fix PyUnicode_EncodeUTF8() to support error handler producing

unicode string (eg. backslashreplace)

- Issue #8014: Setting a T_UINT or T_PYSSIZET attribute of an object with

PyMemberDefs could produce an internal error; raise TypeError instead.

- Issue #8417: Raise an OverflowError when an integer larger than sys.maxsize is

passed to bytes or bytearray.

- Issue #8329: Don't return the same lists from select.select when no fds are

changed.

- Raise a TypeError when trying to delete a T_STRING_INPLACE struct member.

- Issue #8226: sys.setfilesystemencoding() raises a LookupError if the encoding

is unknown

- Issue #1583863: An str subclass can now override the __str__ method

- Issue #7072: isspace(0xa0) is true on Mac OS X

C-API

-----

- Issue #9834: Don't segfault in PySequence_GetSlice, PySequence_SetSlice, or

PySequence_DelSlice when the object doesn't have any mapping operations

defined.

- Issue #5753: A new C API function, :cfunc:`PySys_SetArgvEx`, allows

embedders of the interpreter to set sys.argv without also modifying

sys.path. This helps fix `CVE-2008-5983

<http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2008-5983>`_.

Library

-------

- Issue #5111: IPv6 Host in the Header is wrapped inside [ ]. Patch by Chandru.

- Issue #4471: Properly shutdown socket in IMAP.shutdown(). Patch by

Lorenzo M. Catucci.

- Fix IMAP.login() to work properly.

- Issue #10126: Fix distutils' test_build when Python was built with

--enable-shared.

- Fix typo in one sdist option (medata-check).

- Issue #9199: Fix incorrect use of distutils.cmd.Command.announce.

- Issue #1718574: Fix options that were supposed to accept arguments but did

not in build_clib.

- Issue #9281: Prevent race condition with mkdir in distutils. Patch by

Arfrever.

- Issue #10229: Fix caching error in gettext.

- Issue #10252: Close file objects in a timely manner in distutils code and

tests. Patch by Brian Brazil, completed by Éric Araujo.

- Issue #10311: The signal module now restores errno before returning from

its low-level signal handler. Patch by Hallvard B Furuseth.

- The keyword only restriction for the places argument in

unittest.TestCase.assert[Not]AlmostEqual methods has been removed.

- Issue 6706: asyncore accept() method no longer raises EWOULDBLOCK/ECONNABORTED

on incomplete connection attempt but returns None instead.

- Issue #10266: uu.decode didn't close in_file explicitly when it was given

as a filename. Patch by Brian Brazil.

- Issue #10246: uu.encode didn't close file objects explicitly when filenames

were given to it. Patch by Brian Brazil.

- Issue #10253: FileIO leaks a file descriptor when trying to open a file

for append that isn't seekable. Patch by Brian Brazil.

- Issue #5027: The standard ``xml`` namespace is now understood by

xml.sax.saxutils.XMLGenerator as being bound to

http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace. Patch by Troy J. Farrell.

- #7761: telnetlib.interact failures on Windows fixed.

- Issue #5117: Case normalization was needed on ntpath.relpath(). And

fixed root directory issue on posixpath.relpath(). (Ported working fixes

from ntpath)

- Issue #10041: The signature of optional arguments in socket.makefile()

didn't match that of io.open(), and they also didn't get forwarded

properly to TextIOWrapper in text mode. Patch by Kai Zhu.

- Issue #6612: Fix site and sysconfig to catch os.getcwd() error, eg. if the

current directory was deleted. Patch written by W. Trevor King.

- Issue #9759: GzipFile now raises ValueError when an operation is attempted

after the file is closed. Patch by Jeffrey Finkelstein.

- Issue #9042: Fix interaction of custom translation classes and caching in

gettext.

- Issue #9065: tarfile no longer uses "root" as the default for the uname and

gname field.

- Issue #8980: Fixed a failure in distutils.command check that was shadowed

by an environment that does not have docutils. Patch by Arfrever.

- Issue #1050268: parseaddr now correctly quotes double quote and backslash

characters that appear inside quoted strings in email addresses.

- Issue #10004: quoprimime no longer generates a traceback when confronted

with invalid characters after '=' in a Q-encoded word.

- Issue #9950: Fix socket.sendall() crash or misbehaviour when a signal is

received. Now sendall() properly calls signal handlers if necessary,

and retries sending if these returned successfully, including on sockets

with a timeout.

- Issue #9936: Fixed executable lines' search in the trace module.

- Issue #9928: Properly initialize the types exported by the bz2 module.

- Issue #9854: The default read() implementation in io.RawIOBase now

handles non-blocking readinto() returning None correctly.

- Issue #9853: Fix the signature of SSLSocket.recvfrom() and

SSLSocket.sendto() to match the corresponding socket methods.

- Issue #9792: In case of connection failure, socket.create_connection()

would swallow the exception and raise a new one, making it impossible

to fetch the original errno, or to filter timeout errors. Now the

original error is re-raised.

- Issue #9826: OrderedDict.__repr__ can now handle self-referential

values: d['x'] = d.

- Issue #9758: When fcntl.ioctl() was called with mutable_flag set to True,

and the passed buffer was exactly 1024 bytes long, the buffer wouldn't

be updated back after the system call. Original patch by Brian Brazil.

- Issue #6656: fix locale.format_string to handle escaped percents

and mappings.

- Issue #1100562: Fix deep-copying of objects derived from the list and

dict types. Patch by Michele Orrù and Björn Lindqvist.

- Issue #9753: Fixed socket.dup, which did not always work correctly

on Windows.

- Issue #1868: Eliminate subtle timing issues in thread-local objects by

getting rid of the cached copy of thread-local attribute dictionary.

- Issue #8797: urllib2 does a retry for Basic Authentication failure instead of

falling into recursion.

- Issue #1194222: email.utils.parsedate now returns RFC2822 compliant four

character years even if the message contains RFC822 two character years.

- Issue #8750: Fixed MutableSet's methods to correctly handle

reflexive operations, namely x -= x and x ^= x.

- Issue #9129: smtpd.py is vulnerable to DoS attacks deriving from missing

error handling when accepting a new connection.

- Issue #658749: asyncore's connect() method now correctly interprets winsock

errors.

- Issue #9214: Set operations on KeysView or ItemsView in the collections

module now correctly return a set. (Patch by Eli Bendersky.)

- Issue #9617: Signals received during a low-level write operation aren't

ignored by the buffered IO layer anymore.

- Issue #9605: posix.getlogin() decodes the username with file filesystem

encoding and surrogateescape error handler. Patch written by David Watson.

- Issue #9603: posix.ttyname() and posix.ctermid() decode the terminal name

using the filesystem encoding and surrogateescape error handler. Patch

written by David Watson.

- Issue #8688: MANIFEST files created by distutils now include a magic

comment indicating they are generated. Manually maintained MANIFESTs

without this marker will not be overwritten or removed.

- Issue #7467: when reading a file from a ZIP archive, its CRC is checked

and a BadZipfile error is raised if it doesn't match (as used to be the

case in Python 2.5 and earlier).

- Issue #9550: a BufferedReader could issue an additional read when the

original read request had been satisfied, which could block indefinitely

when the underlying raw IO channel was e.g. a socket. Report and original

patch by Jason V. Miller.

- Issue #6915: Under Windows, os.listdir() didn't release the Global

Interpreter Lock around all system calls. Original patch by Ryan Kelly.

- Issue #3757: thread-local objects now support cyclic garbage collection.

Thread-local objects involved in reference cycles will be deallocated

timely by the cyclic GC, even if the underlying thread is still running.

- Fix Issue8280 - urllib2's Request method will remove fragements in the url.

This is how it is supposed to work, wget and curl do the same. Previous

behavior was wrong.

- Issue #2944: asyncore doesn't handle connection refused correctly.

- Issue #3196: email header decoding is now forgiving if an RFC2047

encoded word encoded in base64 is lacking padding.

- Issue #8447: Make distutils.sysconfig follow symlinks in the path to

the interpreter executable. This fixes a failure of test_httpservers

on OS X.

- Issue #7372: Fix pstats regression when stripping paths from profile

data generated with the profile module.

- Issue #4108: In urllib.robotparser, if there are multiple 'User-agent: *'

entries, consider the first one.

- Issue #8397: Raise an error when attempting to mix iteration and regular

reads on a BZ2File object, rather than returning incorrect results.

- Issue #7909: Do not touch paths with the special prefixes ``\\.\``

or ``\\?\`` in ntpath.normpath().

- Issue #5294: Fix the behavior of pdb's "continue" command when called

in the top-level debugged frame.

- Issue #5727: Restore the ability to use readline when calling into pdb

in doctests.

- Issue #6719: In pdb, do not stop somewhere in the encodings machinery

if the source file to be debugged is in a non-builtin encoding.

- Issue #8048: Prevent doctests from failing when sys.displayhook has

been reassigned.

- Issue #8015: In pdb, do not crash when an empty line is entered as

a breakpoint command.

- Issue #5146: Handle UID THREAD command correctly in imaplib.

- Issue #5147: Fix the header generated for cookie files written by

http.cookiejar.MozillaCookieJar.

- Issue #8198: In pydoc, output all help text to the correct stream

when sys.stdout is reassigned.

- Issue #8230: Fix Lib/test/sortperf.py.

- Issue #7395: Fix tracebacks in pstats interactive browser.

- Issue #1713: Fix os.path.ismount(), which returned true for symbolic links

across devices.

- Issue #8826: Properly load old-style "expires" attribute in http.cookies.

- Issue #1690103: Fix initial namespace for code run with trace.main().

- Issue #9354: Provide getsockopt() in asyncore's file_wrapper.

- Issue #9448: Fix a leak of OS resources (mutexes or semaphores) when

re-initializing a buffered IO object by calling its ``__init__`` method.

- Issue #8620: when a Cmd is fed input that reaches EOF without a final

newline, it no longer truncates the last character of the last command line.

- Issue #3704: http.cookiejar was not properly handling URLs with a / in the

parameters.

- Issue #4629: getopt raises an error if an argument ends with = whereas getopt

doesn't except a value (eg. --help= is rejected if getopt uses ['help='] long

options).

- Issue #7895: platform.mac_ver() no longer crashes after calling os.fork()

- Issue #9323: Fixed a bug in trace.py that resulted in loosing the

name of the script being traced. Patch by Eli Bendersky.

- Issue #9282: Fixed --listfuncs option of trace.py. Thanks Eli

Bendersky for the patch.

- Issue #1555570: email no longer inserts extra blank lines when a \r\n

combo crosses an 8192 byte boundary.

- Issue #9243: Fix sndhdr module and add unit tests, contributed by James Lee.

- Issue #9137: Fix issue in MutableMapping.update, which incorrectly

treated keyword arguments called 'self' or 'other' specially.

- Issue #7646: The fnmatch pattern cache no longer grows without bound.

- Issue #9136: Fix 'dictionary changed size during iteration'

RuntimeError produced when profiling the decimal module. This was

due to a dangerous iteration over 'locals()' in Context.__init__.

- Fix extreme speed issue in Decimal.pow when the base is an exact

power of 10 and the exponent is tiny (for example,

Decimal(10) ** Decimal('1e-999999999')).

- Issue #9130: Fix validation of relative imports in parser module.

- Issue #9128: Fix validation of class decorators in parser module.

- Issue #5468: urlencode to handle bytes type and other encodings in its query

parameter. Patch by Dan Mahn.

- Issue #7673: Fix security vulnerability (CVE-2010-2089) in the audioop

module, ensure that the input string length is a multiple of the frame size

- Issue #6589: cleanup asyncore.socket_map in case smtpd.SMTPServer constructor

raises an exception.

- Issue #9075: In the ssl module, remove the setting of a ``debug`` flag

on an OpenSSL structure.

- Issue #8682: The ssl module now temporary increments the reference count of

a socket object got through ``PyWeakref_GetObject``, so as to avoid possible

deallocation while the object is still being used.

- Issue #1368368: FancyURLOpener class changed to throw an Exception on wrong

password instead of presenting an interactive prompt. Older behavior can be

obtained by passing retry=True to http_error_xxx methods of FancyURLOpener.

- Issue #8203: Fix IDLE Credits dialog: view_file() uses its encoding argument.

- Issue #8720: fix regression caused by fix for #4050 by making getsourcefile

smart enough to find source files in the linecache.

- Issue #5610: feedparser no longer eats extra characters at the end of

a body part if the body part ends with a \r\n.

- Fix codecs.escape_encode to return the correct consumed size.

- Issue #8897: Fix sunau module, use bytes to write the header. Patch written

by Thomas Jollans.

- Issue #6470: Drop UNC prefix in FixTk.

- Issue #4768: base64 encoded email body parts were incorrectly stored as

binary strings. They are now correctly converted to strings.

- Issue #8833: tarfile created hard link entries with a size field != 0 by

mistake.

- Charset.body_encode now correctly handles base64 encoding by encoding

with the output_charset before calling base64mime.encode. Passes the

tests from 2.x issue #1368247.

- Issue #7150: Raise OverflowError if the result of adding or subtracting

timedelta from date or datetime falls outside of the MINYEAR:MAXYEAR range.

- Issue #4769: Fix main() function of the base64 module, use sys.stdin.buffer

and sys.stdout.buffer (instead of sys.stdin and sys.stdout) to use the bytes

API

- Issue #6662: Fix parsing of malformatted charref (&#bad;), patch written by

Fredrik Håård

- Issue #6268: Fix seek() method of codecs.open(), don't read or write the BOM

twice after seek(0). Fix also reset() method of codecs, UTF-16, UTF-32 and

StreamWriter classes.

- Issue #8782: Add a trailing newline in linecache.updatecache to the last line

of files without one.

- Issue #8729: Return NotImplemented from collections.Mapping.__eq__ when

comparing to a non-mapping.

- Issue #8774: tabnanny uses the encoding cookie (#coding:...) to use the

correct encoding

- Issue #7507: Quote "!" in pipes.quote(); it is special to some shells.

- Issue #8663: distutils.log emulates backslashreplace error handler. Fix

compilation in a non-ASCII directory if stdout encoding is ASCII (eg. if

stdout is not a TTY).

- Issue #1285086: Speed up urllib.parse functions: quote, quote_from_bytes,

unquote, unquote_to_bytes.

- Issue #8688: Distutils now recalculates MANIFEST everytime.

- Issue #5099: subprocess.Popen.__del__ no longer references global objects

to prevent issues during interpreter shutdown.

- Issue #8681: Make the zlib module's error messages more informative when

the zlib itself doesn't give any detailed explanation.

- Issue #8674: Fixed a number of incorrect or undefined-behaviour-inducing

overflow checks in the audioop module.

- Issue #8571: Fix an internal error when compressing or decompressing a

chunk larger than 1GB with the zlib module's compressor and decompressor

objects.

- Issue #8573: asyncore _strerror() function might throw ValueError.

- Issue #8483: asyncore.dispatcher's __getattr__ method produced confusing

error messages when accessing undefined class attributes because of the cheap

inheritance with the underlying socket object.

- Issue #7472: Fixed typo in email.encoders module; messages using ISO-2022

character sets will now consistently use a Content-Transfer-Encoding of

7bit rather than sometimes being marked as 8bit.

- Issue #4265: shutil.copyfile() was leaking file descriptors when disk fills.

Patch by Tres Seaver.

- Issue #7755: Use an unencumbered audio file for tests.

- Issue #8621: uuid.uuid4() returned the same sequence of values in the

parent and any children created using ``os.fork`` on MacOS X 10.6.

- Issue #8567: Fix precedence of signals in Decimal module: when a

Decimal operation raises multiple signals and more than one of those

signals is trapped, the specification determines the order in which

the signals should be handled. In many cases this order wasn't

being followed, leading to the wrong Python exception being raised.

- Issue #7865: The close() method of :mod:`io` objects should not swallow

exceptions raised by the implicit flush(). Also ensure that calling

close() several times is supported. Patch by Pascal Chambon.

- Issue #4687: Fix accuracy of garbage collection runtimes displayed with

gc.DEBUG_STATS.

- Issue #8354: The siginterrupt setting is now preserved for all signals,

not just SIGCHLD.

- Issue #8464: tarfile no longer creates files with execute permissions set

when mode="w|" is used.

- Issue #7834: Fix connect() of Bluetooth L2CAP sockets with recent versions

of the Linux kernel. Patch by Yaniv Aknin.

- Issue #6312: Fixed http HEAD request when the transfer encoding is chunked.

It should correctly return an empty response now.

- Issue #8549: Fix compiling the _ssl extension under AIX. Patch by

Sridhar Ratnakumar.

- Issue #8391: os.execvpe() and os.getenv() supports unicode with surrogates

and bytes strings for environment keys and values, and use

sys.getfilesystemencoding() instead of sys.getdefautltencoding()

- Issue #2302: Fix a race condition in SocketServer.BaseServer.shutdown,

where the method could block indefinitely if called just before the

event loop started running. This also fixes the occasional freezes

witnessed in test_httpservers.

- Issue #8524: When creating an SSL socket, the timeout value of the

original socket wasn't retained (instead, a socket with a positive timeout

would be turned into a non-blocking SSL socket).

- Issue #5103: SSL handshake would ignore the socket timeout and block

indefinitely if the other end didn't respond.

- The do_handshake() method of SSL objects now adjusts the blocking mode of

the SSL structure if necessary (as other methods already do).

- Issue #8108: Fix the unwrap() method of SSL objects when the socket has

a non-infinite timeout. Also make that method friendlier with applications

wanting to continue using the socket in clear-text mode, by disabling

OpenSSL's internal readahead. Thanks to Darryl Miles for guidance.

- Issue #8468: bz2.BZ2File() accepts str with surrogates and bytes filenames

- Issue #8496: make mailcap.lookup() always return a list, rather than an

iterator. Patch by Gregory Nofi.

- Issue #8195: Fix a crash in sqlite Connection.create_collation() if the

collation name contains a surrogate character.

- Issue #8484: Load all ciphers and digest algorithms when initializing

the _ssl extension, such that verification of some SSL certificates

doesn't fail because of an "unknown algorithm".

- Issue #4814: timeout parameter is now applied also for connections resulting

from PORT/EPRT commands.

- Issue #3817: ftplib.FTP.abort() method now considers 225 a valid response

code as stated in RFC-959 at chapter 5.4.

- Issue #8394: _ctypes.dlopen() accepts bytes, bytearray and str with

surrogates.

- Issue #7606: XML-RPC traceback stored in X-traceback is now encoded to ASCII

using backslashreplace error handler

- Issue #5277: Fix quote counting when parsing RFC 2231 encoded parameters.

- Issue #8383: pickle and pickletools use surrogatepass error handler when

encoding unicode as utf8 to support lone surrogates and stay compatible with

Python 2.x and 3.0

- Issue #8179: Fix macpath.realpath() on a non-existing path.

- Issue #8139: ossaudiodev didn't initialize its types properly, therefore

some methods (such as oss_mixer_device.fileno()) were not available.

Initial patch by Bertrand Janin.

- Issue #7512: shutil.copystat() could raise an OSError when the filesystem

didn't support chflags() (for example ZFS under FreeBSD). The error is

now silenced.

- Issue #3890, #8222: Fix recv() and recv_into() on non-blocking SSL sockets.

Also, enable the SSL_MODE_AUTO_RETRY flag on SSL sockets, so that blocking

reads and writes are always retried by OpenSSL itself.

- Issue #6716/2: Backslash-replace error output in compilall.

Extension Modules

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

- Issue #6317: Now winsound.PlaySound can accept non ascii filename.

- Issue #9054: Fix a crash occurring when using the pyexpat module

with expat version 2.0.1.

- Issue #10003: Allow handling of SIGBREAK on Windows. Fixes a regression

introduced by issue #9324.

- Issue #8734: Avoid crash in msvcrt.get_osfhandle() when an invalid file

descriptor is provided. Patch by Pascal Chambon.

- Issue #7736: Release the GIL around calls to opendir() and closedir()

in the posix module. Patch by Marcin Bachry.

- Issue #4835: make PyLong_FromSocket_t() and PyLong_AsSocket_t() private

to the socket module, and fix the width of socket descriptors to be

correctly detected under 64-bit Windows.

- Issue #665761: ``functools.reduce()`` will no longer mask exceptions

other than ``TypeError`` raised by the iterator argument.

- Issue #9570: Use PEP 383 decoding in os.mknod and os.mkfifo.

- Issue #9324: Add parameter validation to signal.signal on Windows in order

to prevent crashes.

- Issue #9526: Remove some outdated (int) casts that were preventing

the array module from working correctly with arrays of more than

2**31 elements.

- Fix memory leak in ssl._ssl._test_decode_cert.

- Issue #8065: Fix memory leak in readline module (from failure to

free the result of history_get_history_state()).

- Issue #9450: Fix memory leak in readline.replace_history_item and

readline.remove_history_item for readline version >= 5.0.

- Issue #8105: Validate file descriptor passed to mmap.mmap on Windows.

- Issue #9422: Fix memory leak when re-initializing a struct.Struct object.

- Issue #7900: The getgroups(2) system call on MacOSX behaves rather oddly

compared to other unix systems. In particular, os.getgroups() does

not reflect any changes made using os.setgroups() but basicly always

returns the same information as the id command.

os.getgroups() can now return more than 16 groups on MacOSX.

- Issue #7384: If the system readline library is linked against

ncurses, do not link the readline module against ncursesw. The

additional restriction of linking the readline and curses modules

against the same curses library is currently not enabled.

- Issue #8973: Add __all__ to struct module; this ensures that

help(struct) includes documentation for the struct.Struct class.

- Issue #2810: Fix cases where the Windows registry API returns

ERROR_MORE_DATA, requiring a re-try in order to get the complete result.

Build

-----

- Issue #8852: Allow the socket module to build on OpenSolaris.

- Issue #10054: Some platforms provide uintptr_t in inttypes.h. Patch by

Akira Kitada.

- Issue #10055: Make json C89-compliant in UCS4 mode.

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

- Issue #1633863: Don't ignore $CC under AIX.

- Issue #9810: Compile bzip2 source files in python's project file

directly. It used to be built with bzip2's makefile.

- Issue #941346: Improve the build process under AIX and allow Python to

be built as a shared library. Patch by Sébastien Sablé.

- Issue #4026: Make the fcntl extension build under AIX. Patch by Sébastien

Sablé.

- Issue #3101: Helper functions _add_one_to_index_C() and

_add_one_to_index_F() become _Py_add_one_to_index_C() and

_Py_add_one_to_index_F(), respectively.

- Issue #9700: define HAVE_BROKEN_POSIX_SEMAPHORES under AIX 6.x. Patch by

Sébastien Sablé.

- Issue #3928: os.mknod() now available in Solaris, also.

- Issue #6716: Quote -x arguments of compileall in MSI installer.

Exclude 2to3 tests from compileall.

- Issue #1628484: The Makefile doesn't ignore the CFLAGS environment

variable anymore. It also forwards the LDFLAGS settings to the linker

when building a shared library.

- Issue #9701: The MacOSX installer can patch the shell profile to ensure that

the "bin" directory inside the framework is on the shell's search path. This

feature now also supports the ZSH shell.

- Issue #7473: avoid link errors when building a framework with a different

set of architectures than the one that is currently installed.

Tests

-----

- Issue #3699: Fix test_bigaddrspace and extend it to test bytestrings

as well as unicode strings. Initial patch by Sandro Tosi.

- Issue #9628: fix runtests.sh -x option so more than one test can be excluded.

- Issue #9894: Do not hardcode ENOENT in test_subprocess.

- Issue #9315: Added tests for the trace module. Patch by Eli Bendersky.

- Issue #7564: Skip test_ioctl if another process is attached to /dev/tty.

- Issue #8857: Provide a test case for socket.getaddrinfo.

- Issue #8433: Fix test_curses failure with newer versions of ncurses.

- Issue #9496: Provide a test suite for the rlcompleter module. Patch by

Michele Orrù.

- Issue #9251: test_threaded_import didn't fail when run through regrtest

if the import lock was disabled.

- Issue #7449: Skip test_socketserver if threading support is disabled

- Issue #8672: Add a zlib test ensuring that an incomplete stream can be

handled by a decompressor object without errors (it returns incomplete

uncompressed data).

- Issue #8629: Disable some test_ssl tests, since they give different

results with OpenSSL 1.0.0 and higher.

- Issue #8533: regrtest uses backslashreplace error handler for stdout to avoid

UnicodeEncodeError (write non-ASCII character to stdout using ASCII encoding)

- Issue #8576: Remove use of find_unused_port() in test_smtplib and

test_multiprocessing. Patch by Paul Moore.

- Issue #8531: Skip test_ascii_formatd if ctypes module is missing

- Issue #3864: Skip three test_signal tests on freebsd6 because they fail

if any thread was previously started, most likely due to a platform bug.

- Issue #8193: Fix test_zlib failure with zlib 1.2.4.

- Issue #9568: Fix test_urllib2_localnet on OS X 10.3.

Documentation

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

- Issue #9817: Add expat COPYING file; add expat, libffi and expat licenses

to Doc/license.rst.

- Issue #9255: Document that the 'test' package is meant for interal Python use

only.

- Issue #7829: Document in dis that bytecode is an implementation detail.

Tools/Demos

-----------

- Issue #7287: Demo/imputil/knee.py was removed.

What's New in Python 3.1.2?

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

*Release date: 2010-03-20*

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #7173: Generator finalization could invalidate sys.exc_info().

Library

-------

- Issue #2698: The --compiler ignored was ignored for distutils' build_ext.

- Issue #4961: Inconsistent/wrong result of askyesno function in tkMessageBox

with Tcl/Tk-8.5.

- Issue #7356: ctypes.util: Make parsing of ldconfig output independent of

the locale.

What's New in Python 3.1.2 release candidate 1?

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

*Release date: 2010-03-06*

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #7544: Preallocate thread memory before creating the thread to avoid

a fatal error in low memory condition.

- Issue #7820: The parser tokenizer restores all bytes in the right if

the BOM check fails.

- Handle errors from looking up __prepare__ correctly.

- Issue #5939: Add additional runtime checking to ensure a valid capsule

in Modules/_ctypes/callproc.c.

- Issue #7309: Fix unchecked attribute access when converting

UnicodeEncodeError, UnicodeDecodeError, and UnicodeTranslateError to

strings.

- 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 #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 #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 #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.

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

AttributeError.

- 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 #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.

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

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

- 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 #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.

Library

-------

- Issue #7154: urllib.request can now detect the proxy settings on OSX 10.6

(as long as the user didn't specify 'automatic proxy configuration').

- Issue #8412: os.system() now accepts bytes, bytearray and str with

surrogates.

- Issue #4282: Fix the main function of the profile module for a non-ASCII

script, open the file in binary mode and not in text mode with the default

(utf8) encoding.

- Issue #7774: Set sys.executable to an empty string if argv[0] has been set to

an non existent program name and Python is unable to retrieve the real

program name

- Issue #6509: fix re.sub to work properly when the pattern, the string, and

the replacement were all bytes. Patch by Antoine Pitrou.

- Issue #1054943: Fix unicodedata.normalize('NFC', text) for the Public Review

Issue #29