+++++++++++

Python News
+++++++++++

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

What's New in Python 2.5 (final)

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

*Release date: 19-SEP-2006*

No changes since release candidate 2.

What's New in Python 2.5 release candidate 2?

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

*Release date: 12-SEP-2006*

Core and builtins

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

- Make _PyGILState_NoteThreadState() static, it was not used anywhere

outside of pystate.c and should not be necessary.

- Bug #1551432: Exceptions do not define an explicit __unicode__ method. This

allows calling unicode() on exceptions classes directly to succeed.

- Bug #1542051: Exceptions now correctly call PyObject_GC_UnTrack.

Also make sure that every exception class has __module__ set to
'exceptions'.

- Bug #1550983: emit better error messages for erroneous relative

imports (if not in package and if beyond toplevel package).

- Overflow checking code in integer division ran afoul of new gcc

optimizations. Changed to be more standard-conforming.

- Patch #1541585: fix buffer overrun when performing repr() on

a unicode string in a build with wide unicode (UCS-4) support.

- Patch #1546288: fix seg fault in dict_equal due to ref counting bug.

- The return tuple from str.rpartition(sep) is (tail, sep, head) where

head is the original string if sep was not found.

- Bug #1520864: unpacking singleton tuples in list comprehensions and

generator expressions (x for x, in ... ) works again. Fixing this problem
required changing the .pyc magic number. This means that .pyc files
generated before 2.5c2 will be regenerated.

Library
-------

- Reverted patch #1504333 because it introduced an infinite loop.

- Patch #1553314: Fix the inspect.py slowdown that was hurting IPython & SAGE
by adding smarter caching in inspect.getmodule().
- Fix missing import of the types module in logging.config.

- Patch #1550886: Fix decimal module context management implementation

to match the localcontext() example from PEP 343.

- Bug #1541863: uuid.uuid1 failed to generate unique identifiers

on systems with low clock resolution.

- Bug #1543303, patch #1543897: remove NUL padding from tarfiles.

- Bug #1531862: Do not close standard file descriptors in subprocess.

Extension Modules
-----------------

- Fix bugs in ctypes:

- anonymous structure fields that have a bit-width specified did not work
- cast function did not accept c_char_p or c_wchar_p instances as first arg

- Bug #1551427: fix a wrong NULL pointer check in the win32 version
of os.urandom().

- Bug #1548092: fix curses.tparm seg fault on invalid input.

- Bug #1550714: fix SystemError from itertools.tee on negative value for n.

- Fixed a few bugs on cjkcodecs:

- gbk and gb18030 codec now handle U+30FB KATAKANA MIDDLE DOT correctly.
- iso2022_jp_2 codec now encodes into G0 for KS X 1001, GB2312
codepoints to conform the standard.
- iso2022_jp_3 and iso2022_jp_2004 codec can encode JIS X 0213:2
codepoints now.

Tests
-----

- Fix bsddb test_basics.test06_Transactions to check the version

number properly.

Documentation
-------------

- Bug #1541682: Fix example in the "Refcount details" API docs.

Additionally, remove a faulty example showing PySequence_SetItem applied
to a newly created list object and add notes that this isn't a good idea.

Tools
-----

- Bug #1546372: Fixed small bugglet in pybench that caused a missing

file not to get reported properly.

Build
-----
- Patch #1540470, for OpenBSD 4.0.

- Patch #1545507: Exclude ctypes package in Win64 MSI file.

- Fix OpenSSL debug build process.

C API
-----

- Bug #1542693: remove semi-colon at end of PyImport_ImportModuleEx macro

so it can be used as an expression.

What's New in Python 2.5 release candidate 1?

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

*Release date: 17-AUG-2006*

Core and builtins

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

- Fix infinite recursion when subclassing long and overriding __hash__.

- Fix concatenation (+=) of long strings.

- Unicode objects will no longer raise an exception when being

compared equal or unequal to a string and a UnicodeDecodeError
exception occurs, e.g. as result of a decoding failure.

Instead, the equal (==) and unequal (!=) comparison operators will
now issue a UnicodeWarning and interpret the two objects as
unequal. The UnicodeWarning can be filtered as desired using
the warning framework, e.g. silenced completely, turned into an
exception, logged, etc.

Note that compare operators other than equal and unequal will still
raise UnicodeDecodeError exceptions as they've always done.

- Fix segfault when doing string formatting on subclasses of long.

- Fix bug related to __len__ functions using values > 2**32 on 64-bit machines
with new-style classes.

- Fix bug related to __len__ functions returning negative values with

classic classes.

- Patch #1538606, Fix __index__() clipping. There were some problems

discovered with the API and how integers that didn't fit into Py_ssize_t
were handled. This patch attempts to provide enough alternatives
to effectively use __index__.

- Bug #1536021: __hash__ may now return long int; the final hash
value is obtained by invoking hash on the long int.

- Bug #1536786: buffer comparison could emit a RuntimeWarning.

- Bug #1535165: fixed a segfault in input() and raw_input() when

sys.stdin is closed.
- On Windows, the PyErr_Warn function is now exported from
the Python dll again.

- Bug #1191458: tracing over for loops now produces a line event
on each iteration. Fixing this problem required changing the .pyc
magic number. This means that .pyc files generated before 2.5c1
will be regenerated.

- Bug #1333982: string/number constants were inappropriately stored

in the byte code and co_consts even if they were not used, ie
immediately popped off the stack.

- Fixed a reference-counting problem in property().

Library
-------

- Fix a bug in the ``compiler`` package that caused invalid code to be

generated for generator expressions.

- The distutils version has been changed to 2.5.0. The change to

keep it programmatically in sync with the Python version running
the code (introduced in 2.5b3) has been reverted. It will continue
to be maintained manually as static string literal.

- If the Python part of a ctypes callback function returns None,

and this cannot be converted to the required C type, an exception is
printed with PyErr_WriteUnraisable. Before this change, the C
callback returned arbitrary values to the calling code.

- The __repr__ method of a NULL ctypes.py_object() no longer raises

an exception.

- uuid.UUID now has a bytes_le attribute. This returns the UUID in

little-endian byte order for Windows. In addition, uuid.py gained some
workarounds for clocks with low resolution, to stop the code yielding
duplicate UUIDs.

- Patch #1540892: site.py Quitter() class attempts to close sys.stdin

before raising SystemExit, allowing IDLE to honor quit() and exit().

- Bug #1224621: make tabnanny recognize IndentationErrors raised by tokenize.

- Patch #1536071: trace.py should now find the full module name of a
file correctly even on Windows.

- logging's atexit hook now runs even if the rest of the module has
already been cleaned up.

- Bug #1112549, fix DoS attack on cgi.FieldStorage.

- Bug #1531405, format_exception no longer raises an exception if

str(exception) raised an exception.

- Fix a bug in the ``compiler`` package that caused invalid code to be

generated for nested functions.
Extension Modules
-----------------

- Ignore data that arrives before the opening start tag in C etree.

- Patch #1511317: don't crash on invalid hostname (alias) info.

- Patch #1535500: fix segfault in BZ2File.writelines and make sure it

raises the correct exceptions.

- Patch # 1536908: enable building ctypes on OpenBSD/AMD64. The

'-no-stack-protector' compiler flag for OpenBSD has been removed.

- Patch #1532975 was applied, which fixes Bug #1533481: ctypes now
uses the _as_parameter_ attribute when objects are passed to foreign
function calls. The ctypes version number was changed to 1.0.1.

- Bug #1530559, struct.pack raises TypeError where it used to convert.

Passing float arguments to struct.pack when integers are expected
now triggers a DeprecationWarning.

Tests
-----

- test_socketserver should now work on cygwin and not fail sporadically

on other platforms.

- test_mailbox should now work on cygwin versions 2006-08-10 and later.

- Bug #1535182: really test the xreadlines() method of bz2 objects.

- test_threading now skips testing alternate thread stack sizes on

platforms that don't support changing thread stack size.

Documentation
-------------

- Patch #1534922: unittest docs were corrected and enhanced.

Build
-----

- Bug #1535502, build _hashlib on Windows, and use masm assembler

code in OpenSSL.

- Bug #1534738, win32 debug version of _msi should be _msi_d.pyd.

- Bug #1530448, ctypes build failure on Solaris 10 was fixed.

C API
-----

- New API for Unicode rich comparisons: PyUnicode_RichCompare()

- Bug #1069160. Internal correctness changes were made to
``PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc()``. A test case was added, and
the documentation was changed to state that the return value
is always 1 (normal) or 0 (if the specified thread wasn't found).

What's New in Python 2.5 beta 3?

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

*Release date: 03-AUG-2006*

Core and builtins

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

- _PyWeakref_GetWeakrefCount() now returns a Py_ssize_t; it previously

returned a long (see PEP 353).

- Bug #1515471: string.replace() accepts character buffers again.

- Add PyErr_WarnEx() so C code can pass the stacklevel to warnings.warn().

This provides the proper warning for struct.pack().
PyErr_Warn() is now deprecated in favor of PyErr_WarnEx().

- Patch #1531113: Fix augmented assignment with yield expressions.

Also fix a SystemError when trying to assign to yield expressions.

- Bug #1529871: The speed enhancement patch #921466 broke Python's compliance
with PEP 302. This was fixed by adding an ``imp.NullImporter`` type that is
used in ``sys.path_importer_cache`` to cache non-directory paths and avoid
excessive filesystem operations during imports.

- Bug #1521947: When checking for overflow, ``PyOS_strtol()`` used some

operations on signed longs that are formally undefined by C.
Unfortunately, at least one compiler now cares about that, so complicated
the code to make that compiler happy again.

- Bug #1524310: Properly report errors from FindNextFile in os.listdir.

- Patch #1232023: Stop including current directory in search

path on Windows.

- Fix some potential crashes found with failmalloc.

- Fix warnings reported by Klocwork's static analysis tool.

- Bug #1512814, Fix incorrect lineno's when code within a function

had more than 255 blank lines.

- Patch #1521179: Python now accepts the standard options ``--help`` and
``--version`` as well as ``/?`` on Windows.

- Bug #1520864: unpacking singleton tuples in a 'for' loop (for x, in) works
again. Fixing this problem required changing the .pyc magic number.
This means that .pyc files generated before 2.5b3 will be regenerated.

- Bug #1524317: Compiling Python ``--without-threads`` failed.

The Python core compiles again, and, in a build without threads, the
new ``sys._current_frames()`` returns a dictionary with one entry,
mapping the faux "thread id" 0 to the current frame.
- Bug #1525447: build on MacOS X on a case-sensitive filesystem.

Library
-------

- Correction of patch #1455898: In the mbcs decoder, set final=False

for stream decoder, but final=True for the decode function.

- os.urandom no longer masks unrelated exceptions like SystemExit or

KeyboardInterrupt.

- Bug #1525866: Don't copy directory stat times in

shutil.copytree on Windows

- Bug #1002398: The documentation for os.path.sameopenfile now correctly

refers to file descriptors, not file objects.

- The renaming of the xml package to xmlcore, and the import hackery done
to make it appear at both names, has been removed. Bug #1511497,
#1513611, and probably others.

- Bug #1441397: The compiler module now recognizes module and function
docstrings correctly as it did in Python 2.4.

- Bug #1529297: The rewrite of doctest for Python 2.4 unintentionally

lost that tests are sorted by name before being run. This rarely
matters for well-written tests, but can create baffling symptoms if
side effects from one test to the next affect outcomes. ``DocTestFinder``
has been changed to sort the list of tests it returns.

- The distutils version has been changed to 2.5.0, and is now kept
in sync with sys.version_info[:3].

- Bug #978833: Really close underlying socket in _socketobject.close.

- Bug #1459963: urllib and urllib2 now normalize HTTP header names with
title().

- Patch #1525766: In pkgutil.walk_packages, correctly pass the onerror callback

to recursive calls and call it with the failing package name.

- Bug #1525817: Don't truncate short lines in IDLE's tool tips.

- Patch #1515343: Fix printing of deprecated string exceptions with a

value in the traceback module.

- Resync optparse with Optik 1.5.3: minor tweaks for/to tests.

- Patch #1524429: Use repr() instead of backticks in Tkinter again.

- Bug #1520914: Change time.strftime() to accept a zero for any position in its
argument tuple. For arguments where zero is illegal, the value is forced to
the minimum value that is correct. This is to support an undocumented but
common way people used to fill in inconsequential information in the time
tuple pre-2.4.

- Patch #1220874: Update the binhex module for Mach-O.

- The email package has improved RFC 2231 support, specifically for
recognizing the difference between encoded (name*0*=<blah>) and non-encoded
(name*0=<blah>) parameter continuations. This may change the types of
values returned from email.message.Message.get_param() and friends.
Specifically in some cases where non-encoded continuations were used,
get_param() used to return a 3-tuple of (None, None, string) whereas now it
will just return the string (since non-encoded continuations don't have
charset and language parts).

Also, whereas % values were decoded in all parameter continuations, they are
now only decoded in encoded parameter parts.

- Bug #1517990: IDLE keybindings on MacOS X now work correctly

- Bug #1517996: IDLE now longer shows the default Tk menu when a
path browser, class browser or debugger is the frontmost window on MacOS X

- Patch #1520294: Support for getset and member descriptors in types.py,

inspect.py, and pydoc.py. Specifically, this allows for querying the type
of an object against these built-in types and more importantly, for getting
their docstrings printed in the interactive interpreter's help() function.

Extension Modules
-----------------

- Patch #1519025 and bug #926423: If a KeyboardInterrupt occurs during

a socket operation on a socket with a timeout, the exception will be
caught correctly. Previously, the exception was not caught.

- Patch #1529514: The _ctypes extension is now compiled on more

openbsd target platforms.

- The ``__reduce__()`` method of the new ``collections.defaultdict`` had

a memory leak, affecting pickles and deep copies.

- Bug #1471938: Fix curses module build problem on Solaris 8; patch by

Paul Eggert.

- Patch #1448199: Release interpreter lock in _winreg.ConnectRegistry.

- Patch #1521817: Index range checking on ctypes arrays containing

exactly one element enabled again. This allows iterating over these
arrays, without the need to check the array size before.

- Bug #1521375: When the code in ctypes.util.find_library was

run with root privileges, it could overwrite or delete
/dev/null in certain cases; this is now fixed.

- Bug #1467450: On Mac OS X 10.3, RTLD_GLOBAL is now used as the

default mode for loading shared libraries in ctypes.

- Because of a misspelled preprocessor symbol, ctypes was always

compiled without thread support; this is now fixed.

- pybsddb Bug #1527939: bsddb module DBEnv dbremove and dbrename

methods now allow their database parameter to be None as the
sleepycat API allows.
- Bug #1526460: Fix socketmodule compile on NetBSD as it has a different
bluetooth API compared with Linux and FreeBSD.

Tests
-----

- Bug #1501330: Change test_ossaudiodev to be much more tolerant in terms of

how long the test file should take to play. Now accepts taking 2.93 secs
(exact time) +/- 10% instead of the hard-coded 3.1 sec.

- Patch #1529686: The standard tests ``test_defaultdict``, ``test_iterlen``,

``test_uuid`` and ``test_email_codecs`` didn't actually run any tests when
run via ``regrtest.py``. Now they do.

Build
-----

- Bug #1439538: Drop usage of test -e in configure as it is not portable.

Mac
---

- PythonLauncher now works correctly when the path to the script contains
characters that are treated specially by the shell (such as quotes).

- Bug #1527397: PythonLauncher now launches scripts with the working directory
set to the directory that contains the script instead of the user home
directory. That latter was an implementation accident and not what users
expect.

What's New in Python 2.5 beta 2?

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

*Release date: 11-JUL-2006*

Core and builtins

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

- Bug #1441486: The literal representation of -(sys.maxint - 1)

again evaluates to a int object, not a long.

- Bug #1501934: The scope of global variables that are locally assigned
using augmented assignment is now correctly determined.

- Bug #927248: Recursive method-wrapper objects can now safely

be released.

- Bug #1417699: Reject locale-specific decimal point in float()

and atof().

- Bug #1511381: codec_getstreamcodec() in codec.c is corrected to

omit a default "error" argument for NULL pointer. This allows
the parser to take a codec from cjkcodecs again.

- Bug #1519018: 'as' is now validated properly in import statements.

- On 64 bit systems, int literals that use less than 64 bits are
 now ints rather than longs.

- Bug #1512814, Fix incorrect lineno's when code at module scope

started after line 256.

- New function ``sys._current_frames()`` returns a dict mapping thread

id to topmost thread stack frame. This is for expert use, and is
especially useful for debugging application deadlocks. The functionality
was previously available in Fazal Majid's ``threadframe`` extension
module, but it wasn't possible to do this in a wholly threadsafe way from
an extension.

Library
-------

- Bug #1257728: Mention Cygwin in distutils error message about a missing

VS 2003.

- Patch #1519566: Update turtle demo, make begin_fill idempotent.

- Bug #1508010: msvccompiler now requires the DISTUTILS_USE_SDK

environment variable to be set in order to the SDK environment
for finding the compiler, include files, etc.

- Bug #1515998: Properly generate logical ids for files in bdist_msi.

- warnings.py now ignores ImportWarning by default

- string.Template() now correctly handles tuple-values. Previously,

multi-value tuples would raise an exception and single-value tuples would
be treated as the value they contain, instead.

- Bug #822974: Honor timeout in telnetlib.{expect,read_until}

even if some data are received.

- Bug #1267547: Put proper recursive setup.py call into the

spec file generated by bdist_rpm.

- Bug #1514693: Update turtle's heading when switching between

degrees and radians.

- Reimplement turtle.circle using a polyline, to allow correct

filling of arcs.

- Bug #1514703: Only setup canvas window in turtle when the canvas
is created.

- Bug #1513223: .close() of a _socketobj now releases the underlying

socket again, which then gets closed as it becomes unreferenced.

- Bug #1504333: Make sgmllib support angle brackets in quoted

attribute values.

- Bug #853506: Fix IPv6 address parsing in unquoted attributes in

sgmllib ('[' and ']' were not accepted).

- Fix a bug in the turtle module's end_fill function.

- Bug #1510580: The 'warnings' module improperly required that a Warning

 category be either a types.ClassType and a subclass of Warning. The proper
check is just that it is a subclass with Warning as the documentation states.

- The compiler module now correctly compiles the new try-except-finally

statement (bug #1509132).

- The wsgiref package is now installed properly on Unix.

- A bug was fixed in logging.config.fileConfig() which caused a crash on

shutdown when fileConfig() was called multiple times.

- The sqlite3 module did cut off data from the SQLite database at the first
null character before sending it to a custom converter. This has been fixed
now.

Extension Modules
-----------------

- #1494314: Fix a regression with high-numbered sockets in 2.4.3. This

means that select() on sockets > FD_SETSIZE (typically 1024) work again.
The patch makes sockets use poll() internally where available.

- Assigning None to pointer type fields in ctypes structures possible

overwrote the wrong fields, this is fixed now.

- Fixed a segfault in _ctypes when ctypes.wintypes were imported

on non-Windows platforms.

- Bug #1518190: The ctypes.c_void_p constructor now accepts any

integer or long, without range checking.

- Patch #1517790: It is now possible to use custom objects in the ctypes

foreign function argtypes sequence as long as they provide a from_param
method, no longer is it required that the object is a ctypes type.

- The '_ctypes' extension module now works when Python is configured

with the --without-threads option.

- Bug #1513646: os.access on Windows now correctly determines write

access, again.

- Bug #1512695: cPickle.loads could crash if it was interrupted with

a KeyboardInterrupt.

- Bug #1296433: parsing XML with a non-default encoding and

a CharacterDataHandler could crash the interpreter in pyexpat.

- Patch #1516912: improve Modules support for OpenVMS.

Build
-----

- Automate Windows build process for the Win64 SSL module.

- 'configure' now detects the zlib library the same way as distutils.
Previously, the slight difference could cause compilation errors of the
'zlib' module on systems with more than one version of zlib.

- The MSI compileall step was fixed to also support a TARGETDIR

 with spaces in it.

- Bug #1517388: sqlite3.dll is now installed on Windows independent

of Tcl/Tk.

- Bug #1513032: 'make install' failed on FreeBSD 5.3 due to lib-old

trying to be installed even though it's empty.

Tests
-----

- Call os.waitpid() at the end of tests that spawn child processes in order
to minimize resources (zombies).

Documentation
-------------

- Cover ImportWarning, PendingDeprecationWarning and simplefilter() in the

documentation for the warnings module.

- Patch #1509163: MS Toolkit Compiler no longer available.

- Patch #1504046: Add documentation for xml.etree.

What's New in Python 2.5 beta 1?

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

*Release date: 20-JUN-2006*

Core and builtins

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

- Patch #1507676: Error messages returned by invalid abstract object operations

(such as iterating over an integer) have been improved and now include the
type of the offending object to help with debugging.

- Bug #992017: A classic class that defined a __coerce__() method that returned
its arguments swapped would infinitely recurse and segfault the interpreter.

- Fix the socket tests so they can be run concurrently.

- Removed 5 integers from C frame objects (PyFrameObject).

f_nlocals, f_ncells, f_nfreevars, f_stack_size, f_restricted.

- Bug #532646: object.__call__() will continue looking for the __call__

attribute on objects until one without one is found. This leads to recursion
when you take a class and set its __call__ attribute to an instance of the
class. Originally fixed for classic classes, but this fix is for new-style.
Removes the infinite_rec_3 crasher.

- The string and unicode methods startswith() and endswith() now accept
a tuple of prefixes/suffixes to look for. Implements RFE #1491485.

- Buffer objects, at the C level, never used the char buffer

implementation even when the char buffer for the wrapped object was
explicitly requested (originally returned the read or write buffer).
Now a TypeError is raised if the char buffer is not present but is
requested.
- Patch #1346214: Statements like "if 0: suite" are now again optimized
away like they were in Python 2.4.

- Builtin exceptions are now full-blown new-style classes instead of

instances pretending to be classes, which speeds up exception handling
by about 80% in comparison to 2.5a2.

- Patch #1494554: Update unicodedata.numeric and unicode.isnumeric to

Unicode 4.1.

- Patch #921466: sys.path_importer_cache is now used to cache valid and

invalid file paths for the built-in import machinery which leads to
fewer open calls on startup.

- Patch #1442927: ``long(str, base)`` is now up to 6x faster for non-power-

of-2 bases. The largest speedup is for inputs with about 1000 decimal
digits. Conversion from non-power-of-2 bases remains quadratic-time in
the number of input digits (it was and remains linear-time for bases
2, 4, 8, 16 and 32).

- Bug #1334662: ``int(string, base)`` could deliver a wrong answer

when ``base`` was not 2, 4, 8, 10, 16 or 32, and ``string`` represented
an integer close to ``sys.maxint``. This was repaired by patch
#1335972, which also gives a nice speedup.

- Patch #1337051: reduced size of frame objects.

- PyErr_NewException now accepts a tuple of base classes as its

"base" parameter.

- Patch #876206: function call speedup by retaining allocated frame

objects.

- Bug #1462152: file() now checks more thoroughly for invalid mode
strings and removes a possible "U" before passing the mode to the
C library function.

- Patch #1488312, Fix memory alignment problem on SPARC in unicode

- Bug #1487966: Fix SystemError with conditional expression in assignment

- WindowsError now has two error code attributes: errno, which carries
the error values from errno.h, and winerror, which carries the error
values from winerror.h. Previous versions put the winerror.h values
(from GetLastError()) into the errno attribute.

- Patch #1475845: Raise IndentationError for unexpected indent.

- Patch #1479181: split open() and file() from being aliases for each other.

- Patch #1497053 & bug #1275608: Exceptions occurring in ``__eq__()``

methods were always silently ignored by dictionaries when comparing keys.
They are now passed through (except when using the C API function
``PyDict_GetItem()``, whose semantics did not change).

- Bug #1456209: In some obscure cases it was possible for a class with a
custom ``__eq__()`` method to confuse dict internals when class instances
were used as a dict's keys and the ``__eq__()`` method mutated the dict.
 No, you don't have any code that did this ;-)

Extension Modules
-----------------

- Bug #1295808: expat symbols should be namespaced in pyexpat

- Patch #1462338: Upgrade pyexpat to expat 2.0.0

- Change binascii.hexlify to accept a read-only buffer instead of only a char

buffer and actually follow its documentation.

- Fixed a potentially invalid memory access of CJKCodecs' shift-jis decoder.

- Patch #1478788 (modified version): The functional extension module has

been renamed to _functools and a functools Python wrapper module added.
This provides a home for additional function related utilities that are
not specifically about functional programming. See PEP 309.

- Patch #1493701: performance enhancements for struct module.

- Patch #1490224: time.altzone is now set correctly on Cygwin.

- Patch #1435422: zlib's compress and decompress objects now have a

copy() method.

- Patch #1454481: thread stack size is now tunable at runtime for thread
enabled builds on Windows and systems with Posix threads support.

- On Win32, os.listdir now supports arbitrarily-long Unicode path names

(up to the system limit of 32K characters).

- Use Win32 API to implement os.

{access,chdir,chmod,mkdir,remove,rename,rmdir,utime}.
As a result, these functions now raise WindowsError instead of OSError.

- ``time.clock()`` on Win64 should use the high-performance Windows

``QueryPerformanceCounter()`` now (as was already the case on 32-bit
Windows platforms).

- Calling Tk_Init twice is refused if the first call failed as that

may deadlock.

- bsddb: added the DB_ARCH_REMOVE flag and fixed db.DBEnv.log_archive() to

accept it without potentially using an uninitialized pointer.

- bsddb: added support for the DBEnv.log_stat() and DBEnv.lsn_reset() methods

assuming BerkeleyDB >= 4.0 and 4.4 respectively. [pybsddb project SF
patch numbers 1494885 and 1494902]

- bsddb: added an interface for the BerkeleyDB >= 4.3 DBSequence class.
[pybsddb project SF patch number 1466734]

- bsddb: fix DBCursor.pget() bug with keyword argument names when no data
parameter is supplied. [SF pybsddb bug #1477863]

- bsddb: the __len__ method of a DB object has been fixed to return correct
results. It could previously incorrectly return 0 in some cases.
Fixes SF bug 1493322 (pybsddb bug 1184012).
- bsddb: the bsddb.dbtables Modify method now raises the proper error and
aborts the db transaction safely when a modifier callback fails.
Fixes SF python patch/bug #1408584.

- bsddb: multithreaded DB access using the simple bsddb module interface

now works reliably. It has been updated to use automatic BerkeleyDB
deadlock detection and the bsddb.dbutils.DeadlockWrap wrapper to retry
database calls that would previously deadlock. [SF python bug #775414]

- Patch #1446489: add support for the ZIP64 extensions to zipfile.

- Patch #1506645: add Python wrappers for the curses functions

is_term_resized, resize_term and resizeterm.

Library
-------

- Patch #815924: Restore ability to pass type= and icon= in tkMessageBox

functions.

- Patch #812986: Update turtle output even if not tracing.

- Patch #1494750: Destroy master after deleting children in

Tkinter.BaseWidget.

- Patch #1096231: Add ``default`` argument to Tkinter.Wm.wm_iconbitmap.

- Patch #763580: Add name and value arguments to Tkinter variable

classes.

- Bug #1117556: SimpleHTTPServer now tries to find and use the system's
mime.types file for determining MIME types.

- Bug #1339007: Shelf objects now don't raise an exception in their

__del__ method when initialization failed.

- Patch #1455898: The MBCS codec now supports the incremental mode for
double-byte encodings.

- ``difflib``'s ``SequenceMatcher.get_matching_blocks()`` was changed to

guarantee that adjacent triples in the return list always describe
non-adjacent blocks. Previously, a pair of matching blocks could end
up being described by multiple adjacent triples that formed a partition
of the matching pair.

- Bug #1498146: fix optparse to handle Unicode strings in option help,

description, and epilog.

- Bug #1366250: minor optparse documentation error.

- Bug #1361643: fix textwrap.dedent() so it handles tabs appropriately;

clarify docs.

- The wsgiref package has been added to the standard library.

- The functions update_wrapper() and wraps() have been added to the functools
module. These make it easier to copy relevant metadata from the original
function when writing wrapper functions.
- The optional ``isprivate`` argument to ``doctest.testmod()``, and the
``doctest.is_private()`` function, both deprecated in 2.4, were removed.

- Patch #1359618: Speed up charmap encoder by using a trie structure

for lookup.

- The functions in the ``pprint`` module now sort dictionaries by key

before computing the display. Before 2.5, ``pprint`` sorted a dictionary
if and only if its display required more than one line, although that
wasn't documented. The new behavior increases predictability; e.g.,
using ``pprint.pprint(a_dict)`` in a doctest is now reliable.

- Patch #1497027: try HTTP digest auth before basic auth in urllib2
(thanks for J. J. Lee).

- Patch #1496206: improve urllib2 handling of passwords with respect to

default HTTP and HTTPS ports.

- Patch #1080727: add "encoding" parameter to doctest.DocFileSuite.

- Patch #1281707: speed up gzip.readline.

- Patch #1180296: Two new functions were added to the locale module:
format_string() to get the effect of "format % items" but locale-aware,
and currency() to format a monetary number with currency sign.

- Patch #1486962: Several bugs in the turtle Tk demo module were fixed
and several features added, such as speed and geometry control.

- Patch #1488881: add support for external file objects in bz2 compressed
tarfiles.

- Patch #721464: pdb.Pdb instances can now be given explicit stdin and
stdout arguments, making it possible to redirect input and output
for remote debugging.

- Patch #1484695: Update the tarfile module to version 0.8. This fixes
a couple of issues, notably handling of long file names using the
GNU LONGNAME extension.

- Patch #1478292. ``doctest.register_optionflag(name)`` shouldn't create a

new flag when ``name`` is already the name of an option flag.

- Bug #1385040: don't allow "def foo(a=1, b): pass" in the compiler
package.

- Patch #1472854: make the rlcompleter.Completer class usable on non-

UNIX platforms.

- Patch #1470846: fix urllib2 ProxyBasicAuthHandler.

- Bug #1472827: correctly escape newlines and tabs in attribute values in

the saxutils.XMLGenerator class.

Build
-----
- Bug #1502728: Correctly link against librt library on HP-UX.

- OpenBSD 3.9 is supported now.

- Patch #1492356: Port to Windows CE.

- Bug/Patch #1481770: Use .so extension for shared libraries on HP-UX for ia64.

- Patch #1471883: Add --enable-universalsdk.

C API
-----

Tests
-----

Tools
-----

Documentation
-------------

What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 2?

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

*Release date: 27-APR-2006*

Core and builtins

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

- Bug #1465834: 'bdist_wininst preinstall script support' was fixed

by converting these apis from macros into exported functions again:

PyParser_SimpleParseFile PyParser_SimpleParseString PyRun_AnyFile

PyRun_AnyFileEx PyRun_AnyFileFlags PyRun_File PyRun_FileEx
PyRun_FileFlags PyRun_InteractiveLoop PyRun_InteractiveOne
PyRun_SimpleFile PyRun_SimpleFileEx PyRun_SimpleString
PyRun_String Py_CompileString

- Under COUNT_ALLOCS, types are not necessarily immortal anymore.

- All uses of PyStructSequence_InitType have been changed to initialize

the type objects only once, even if the interpreter is initialized
multiple times.

- Bug #1454485, array.array('u') could crash the interpreter. This was

due to PyArgs_ParseTuple(args, 'u#', ...) trying to convert buffers (strings)
to unicode when it didn't make sense. 'u#' now requires a unicode string.

- Py_UNICODE is unsigned. It was always documented as unsigned, but

due to a bug had a signed value in previous versions.

- Patch #837242: ``id()`` of any Python object always gives a positive

number now, which might be a long integer. ``PyLong_FromVoidPtr`` and
``PyLong_AsVoidPtr`` have been changed accordingly. Note that it has
never been correct to implement a ``__hash()__`` method that returns the
``id()`` of an object:
 def __hash__(self):
return id(self) # WRONG

because a hash result must be a (short) Python int but it was always
possible for ``id()`` to return a Python long. However, because ``id()``
could return negative values before, on a 32-bit box an ``id()`` result
was always usable as a hash value before this patch. That's no longer
necessarily so.

- Python on OS X 10.3 and above now uses dlopen() (via dynload_shlib.c)

to load extension modules and now provides the dl module. As a result,
sys.setdlopenflags() now works correctly on these systems. (SF patch
#1454844)

- Patch #1463867: enhanced garbage collection to allow cleanup of cycles

involving generators that have paused outside of any ``try`` or ``with``
blocks. (In 2.5a1, a paused generator that was part of a reference
cycle could not be garbage collected, regardless of whether it was
paused in a ``try`` or ``with`` block.)

Extension Modules
-----------------

- Patch #1191065: Fix preprocessor problems on systems where recvfrom

is a macro.

- Bug #1467952: os.listdir() now correctly raises an error if readdir()

fails with an error condition.

- Fixed bsddb.db.DBError derived exceptions so they can be unpickled.

- Bug #1117761: bsddb.*open() no longer raises an exception when using

the cachesize parameter.

- Bug #1149413: bsddb.*open() no longer raises an exception when using

a temporary db (file=None) with the 'n' flag to truncate on open.

- Bug #1332852: bsddb module minimum BerkeleyDB version raised to 3.3

as older versions cause excessive test failures.

- Patch #1062014: AF_UNIX sockets under Linux have a special

abstract namespace that is now fully supported.

Library
-------

- Bug #1223937: subprocess.CalledProcessError reports the exit status

of the process using the returncode attribute, instead of
abusing errno.

- Patch #1475231: ``doctest`` has a new ``SKIP`` option, which causes

a doctest to be skipped (the code is not run, and the expected output
or exception is ignored).

- Fixed contextlib.nested to cope with exceptions being raised and

caught inside exit handlers.

- Updated optparse module to Optik 1.5.1 (allow numeric constants in

 hex, octal, or binary; add ``append_const`` action; keep going if
gettext cannot be imported; added ``OptionParser.destroy()`` method;
added ``epilog`` for better help generation).

- Bug #1473760: ``tempfile.TemporaryFile()`` could hang on Windows, when

called from a thread spawned as a side effect of importing a module.

- The pydoc module now supports documenting packages contained in

.zip or .egg files.

- The pkgutil module now has several new utility functions, such
as ``walk_packages()`` to support working with packages that are either
in the filesystem or zip files.

- The mailbox module can now modify and delete messages from
mailboxes, in addition to simply reading them. Thanks to Gregory
K. Johnson for writing the code, and to the 2005 Google Summer of
Code for funding his work.

- The ``__del__`` method of class ``local`` in module ``_threading_local``

returned before accomplishing any of its intended cleanup.

- Patch #790710: Add breakpoint command lists in pdb.

- Patch #1063914: Add Tkinter.Misc.clipboard_get().

- Patch #1191700: Adjust column alignment in bdb breakpoint lists.

- SimpleXMLRPCServer relied on the fcntl module, which is unavailable on

Windows. Bug #1469163.

- The warnings, linecache, inspect, traceback, site, and doctest modules

were updated to work correctly with modules imported from zipfiles or
via other PEP 302 __loader__ objects.

- Patch #1467770: Reduce usage of subprocess._active to processes which

the application hasn't waited on.

- Patch #1462222: Fix Tix.Grid.

- Fix exception when doing glob.glob('anything*/')

- The pstats.Stats class accepts an optional stream keyword argument to

direct output to an alternate file-like object.

Build
-----

- The Makefile now has a reindent target, which runs reindent.py on

the library.

- Patch #1470875: Building Python with MS Free Compiler

- Patch #1161914: Add a python-config script.

- Patch #1324762:Remove ccpython.cc; replace --with-cxx with

--with-cxx-main. Link with C++ compiler only if --with-cxx-main was
specified. (Can be overridden by explicitly setting LINKCC.) Decouple
CXX from --with-cxx-main, see description in README.
- Patch #1429775: Link extension modules with the shared libpython.

- Fixed a libffi build problem on MIPS systems.

- ``PyString_FromFormat``, ``PyErr_Format``, and ``PyString_FromFormatV``

now accept formats "%u" for unsigned ints, "%lu" for unsigned longs,
and "%zu" for unsigned integers of type ``size_t``.

Tests
-----

- test_contextlib now checks contextlib.nested can cope with exceptions

being raised and caught inside exit handlers.

- test_cmd_line now checks operation of the -m and -c command switches

- The test_contextlib test in 2.5a1 wasn't actually run unless you ran
it separately and by hand. It also wasn't cleaning up its changes to
the current Decimal context.

- regrtest.py now has a -M option to run tests that test the new limits of
containers, on 64-bit architectures. Running these tests is only sensible
on 64-bit machines with more than two gigabytes of memory. The argument
passed is the maximum amount of memory for the tests to use.

Tools
-----

- Added the Python benchmark suite pybench to the Tools/ directory;

contributed by Marc-Andre Lemburg.

Documentation
-------------

- Patch #1473132: Improve docs for ``tp_clear`` and ``tp_traverse``.

- PEP 343: Added Context Types section to the library reference

and attempted to bring other PEP 343 related documentation into
line with the implementation and/or python-dev discussions.

- Bug #1337990: clarified that ``doctest`` does not support examples

requiring both expected output and an exception.

What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?

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

*Release date: 05-APR-2006*

Core and builtins

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

- PEP 338: -m command line switch now delegates to runpy.run_module

allowing it to support modules in packages and zipfiles

- On Windows, .DLL is not an accepted file name extension for

extension modules anymore; extensions are only found if they
end in .PYD.
- Bug #1421664: sys.stderr.encoding is now set to the same value as
sys.stdout.encoding.

- __import__ accepts keyword arguments.

- Patch #1460496: round() now accepts keyword arguments.

- Fixed bug #1459029 - unicode reprs were double-escaped.

- Patch #1396919: The system scope threads are reenabled on FreeBSD

5.4 and later versions.

- Bug #1115379: Compiling a Unicode string with an encoding declaration

now gives a SyntaxError.

- Previously, Python code had no easy way to access the contents of a

cell object. Now, a ``cell_contents`` attribute has been added
(closes patch #1170323).

- Patch #1123430: Python's small-object allocator now returns an arena to

the system ``free()`` when all memory within an arena becomes unused
again. Prior to Python 2.5, arenas (256KB chunks of memory) were never
freed. Some applications will see a drop in virtual memory size now,
especially long-running applications that, from time to time, temporarily
use a large number of small objects. Note that when Python returns an
arena to the platform C's ``free()``, there's no guarantee that the
platform C library will in turn return that memory to the operating system.
The effect of the patch is to stop making that impossible, and in tests it
appears to be effective at least on Microsoft C and gcc-based systems.
Thanks to Evan Jones for hard work and patience.

- Patch #1434038: property() now uses the getter's docstring if there is

no "doc" argument given. This makes it possible to legitimately use
property() as a decorator to produce a read-only property.

- PEP 357, patch 1436368: add an __index__ method to int/long and a matching
nb_index slot to the PyNumberMethods struct. The slot is consulted instead
of requiring an int or long in slicing and a few other contexts, enabling
other objects (e.g. Numeric Python's integers) to be used as slice indices.

- Fixed various bugs reported by Coverity's Prevent tool.

- PEP 352, patch #1104669: Make exceptions new-style objects. Introduced the
new exception base class, BaseException, which has a new message attribute.
KeyboardInterrupt and SystemExit to directly inherit from BaseException now.
Raising a string exception now raises a DeprecationWarning.

- Patch #1438387, PEP 328: relative and absolute imports. Imports can now be
explicitly relative, using 'from .module import name' to mean 'from the same
package as this module is in. Imports without dots still default to the
old relative-then-absolute, unless 'from __future__ import
absolute_import' is used.

- Properly check if 'warnings' raises an exception (usually when a filter set

to "error" is triggered) when raising a warning for raising string
exceptions.

- CO_GENERATOR_ALLOWED is no longer defined. This behavior is the default.

 The name was removed from Include/code.h.

- PEP 308: conditional expressions were added: (x if cond else y).

- Patch 1433928:
- The copy module now "copies" function objects (as atomic objects).
- dict.__getitem__ now looks for a __missing__ hook before raising
KeyError.

- PEP 343: with statement implemented. Needs ``from __future__ import

with_statement``. Use of 'with' as a variable will generate a warning.
Use of 'as' as a variable will also generate a warning (unless it's
part of an import statement).
The following objects have __context__ methods:
- The built-in file type.
- The thread.LockType type.
- The following types defined by the threading module:
Lock, RLock, Condition, Semaphore, BoundedSemaphore.
- The decimal.Context class.

- Fix the encodings package codec search function to only search

inside its own package. Fixes problem reported in patch #1433198.

Note: Codec packages should implement and register their own

codec search function. PEP 100 has the details.

- PEP 353: Using ``Py_ssize_t`` as the index type.

- ``PYMALLOC_DEBUG`` builds now add ``4*sizeof(size_t)`` bytes of debugging

info to each allocated block, since the ``Py_ssize_t`` changes (PEP 353)
now allow Python to make use of memory blocks exceeding 2**32 bytes for
some purposes on 64-bit boxes. A ``PYMALLOC_DEBUG`` build was limited
to 4-byte allocations before.

- Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.

- Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
configure would break checking curses.h.

- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.

- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.

- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.

- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.

- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.

This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.

- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API

function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.subversion. Build number
is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.

- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.

"except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.

- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec

now encodes backslash correctly.

- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.

- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correctly even with unsigned longs
and long longs.

- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"

It was possible for dlerror() to return a NULL pointer, so
it will now use a default error message in this case.

- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)

- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings

- Sped up some Unicode operations.

- A new AST parser implementation was completed. The abstract

syntax tree is available for read-only (non-compile) access
to Python code; an _ast module was added.

- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being produced for generator expressions.
The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))

- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.

- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.

Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.

- Fix segfault with invalid coding.

- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.

- All iterators now have a Boolean value of True. Formerly, some iterators
supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
was empty.

- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be

represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.

- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is

present).

- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
codes.

- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3

with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).

- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on

Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
(fixes bug #1119418).

- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.

- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
exceptions that cause a function to exit.

- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its

own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.

- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().

- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some

reference counts in some error exit cases.

- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over

a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so there's no
portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
realloc.

- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when

attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().

- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
like their int counterparts.

- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
for a longer write-up of the problem).

- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when

serializing floats.

- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,

the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
of floats now simply copy bytes around.

- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
278.

- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
PyNumber_*().
Thanks Walter D�rwald.

- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is

NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.

- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before

PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).

- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads

disabled caused a crash.

- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method

with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.

- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this

fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761

- Added two new builtins, any() and all().

- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed

(e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
(thanks to logistix for that added support).

- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.

- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
returning None.

- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character

('\') with a specific error message.

- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.

- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was

inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.

- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and

an ferror() call.

- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
list.sort().

- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:

(2+3) --> (5).

- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.

- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption

in calls to os.read().

- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal

positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.

- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a

unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
- Patch #1413181: changed ``PyThreadState_Delete()`` to forget about the
current thread state when the auto-GIL-state machinery knows about
it (since the thread state is being deleted, continuing to remember it
can't help, but can hurt if another thread happens to get created with
the same thread id).

Extension Modules
-----------------

- Patch #1380952: fix SSL objects timing out on consecutive read()s

- Patch #1309579: wait3 and wait4 were added to the posix module.

- Patch #1231053: The audioop module now supports encoding/decoding of alaw.

In addition, the existing ulaw code was updated.

- RFE #567972: Socket objects' family, type and proto properties are
now exposed via new attributes.

- Everything under lib-old was removed. This includes the following modules:
Para, addpack, cmp, cmpcache, codehack, dircmp, dump, find, fmt, grep,
lockfile, newdir, ni, packmail, poly, rand, statcache, tb, tzparse,
util, whatsound, whrandom, zmod

- The following modules were removed: regsub, reconvert, regex, regex_syntax.

- re and sre were swapped, so help(re) provides full help. importing sre
is deprecated. The undocumented re.engine variable no longer exists.

- Bug #1448490: Fixed a bug that ISO-2022 codecs could not handle
SS2 (single-shift 2) escape sequences correctly.

- The unicodedata module was updated to the 4.1 version of the Unicode
database. The 3.2 version is still available as unicodedata.db_3_2_0
for applications that require this specific version (such as IDNA).

- The timing module is no longer built by default. It was deprecated

in PEP 4 in Python 2.0 or earlier.

- Patch 1433928: Added a new type, defaultdict, to the collections module.

This uses the new __missing__ hook behavior added to dict (see above).

- Bug #854823: socketmodule now builds on Sun platforms even when

INET_ADDRSTRLEN is not defined.

- Patch #1393157: os.startfile() now has an optional argument to specify

a "command verb" to invoke on the file.

- Bug #876637, prevent stack corruption when socket descriptor

is larger than FD_SETSIZE.

- Patch #1407135, bug #1424041: harmonize mmap behavior of anonymous memory.

mmap.mmap(-1, size) now returns anonymous memory in both Unix and Windows.
mmap.mmap(0, size) should not be used on Windows for anonymous memory.

- Patch #1422385: The nis module now supports access to domains other
than the system default domain.
- Use Win32 API to implement os.stat/fstat. As a result, subsecond timestamps
are reported, the limit on path name lengths is removed, and stat reports
WindowsError now (instead of OSError).

- Add bsddb.db.DBEnv.set_tx_timestamp allowing time based database recovery.

- Bug #1413192, fix seg fault in bsddb if a transaction was deleted

before the env.

- Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.

- Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)

- Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.

Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
The code now conforms to the documented signature.

- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()

without prior setting of the userptr.

- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.

- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.

- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build

problem on AIX.

- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments

- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint

- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors

- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract

REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.

- Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using

BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1.

- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4

- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2

- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format

- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.

- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on

FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).

- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
returns in cStringIO.c.

- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,

MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter

- Fix memory leak in posix.access().

- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.

- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in

the file system encoding.

- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for

platforms that don't have inet_aton().

- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.

- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one

line without newlines.

- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did

on Windows.

- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,

st_birthtime for FreeBSD.

- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
for large or negative values.

- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows

implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.

- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.

- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute

if available on the platform.

- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if

available on the platform.

- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions

were set in a different thread than that which called readline.

- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.

- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving

multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
keys (primary, secondary, etc).

- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.

- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
in pyexpat.GetInputContext.

- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current

file size.

- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.

- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.

{remove_history,replace_history}

- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
database.
- stat_float_times is now True.

- array.array objects are now picklable.

- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
args tuple returned by __reduce__().

- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)

- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to

create datetime object using a string and format.

- Patch #1117961: Replace the MD5 implementation from RSA Data Security Inc
with the implementation from http://sourceforge.net/projects/libmd5-rfc/.

Library
-------

- Patch #1388073: Numerous __-prefixed attributes of unittest.TestCase have

been renamed to have only a single underscore prefix. This was done to
make subclassing easier.

- PEP 338: new module runpy defines a run_module function to support

executing modules which provide access to source code or a code object
via the PEP 302 import mechanisms.

- The email module's parsedate_tz function now sets the daylight savings
flag to -1 (unknown) since it can't tell from the date whether it should
be set.

- Patch #624325: urlparse.urlparse() and urlparse.urlsplit() results

now sport attributes that provide access to the parts of the result.

- Patch #1462498: sgmllib now handles entity and character references

in attribute values.

- Added the sqlite3 package. This is based on pysqlite2.1.3, and provides

a DB-API interface in the standard library. You'll need sqlite 3.0.8 or
later to build this - if you have an earlier version, the C extension
module will not be built.

- Bug #1460340: ``random.sample(dict)`` failed in various ways. Dicts

aren't officially supported here, and trying to use them will probably
raise an exception some day. But dicts have been allowed, and "mostly
worked", so support for them won't go away without warning.

- Bug #1445068: getpass.getpass() can now be given an explicit stream

argument to specify where to write the prompt.

- Patch #1462313, bug #1443328: the pickle modules now can handle classes
that have __private names in their __slots__.

- Bug #1250170: mimetools now handles socket.gethostname() failures gracefully.

- patch #1457316: "setup.py upload" now supports --identity to select the

key to be used for signing the uploaded code.
- Queue.Queue objects now support .task_done() and .join() methods
to make it easier to monitor when daemon threads have completed
processing all enqueued tasks. Patch #1455676.

- popen2.Popen objects now preserve the command in a .cmd attribute.

- Added the ctypes ffi package.

- email 4.0 package now integrated. This is largely the same as the email 3.0
package that was included in Python 2.3, except that PEP 8 module names are
now used (e.g. mail.message instead of email.Message). The MIME classes
have been moved to a subpackage (e.g. email.mime.text instead of
email.MIMEText). The old names are still supported for now. Several
deprecated Message methods have been removed and lots of bugs have been
fixed. More details can be found in the email package documentation.

- Patches #1436130/#1443155: codecs.lookup() now returns a CodecInfo object

(a subclass of tuple) that provides incremental decoders and encoders
(a way to use stateful codecs without the stream API). Python functions
codecs.getincrementaldecoder() and codecs.getincrementalencoder() as well
as C functions PyCodec_IncrementalEncoder() and PyCodec_IncrementalDecoder()
have been added.

- Patch #1359365: Calling next() on a closed StringIO.String object raises

a ValueError instead of a StopIteration now (like file and cString.String do).
cStringIO.StringIO.isatty() will raise a ValueError now if close() has been
called before (like file and StringIO.StringIO do).

- A regrtest option -w was added to re-run failed tests in verbose mode.

- Patch #1446372: quit and exit can now be called from the interactive
interpreter to exit.

- The function get_count() has been added to the gc module, and gc.collect()
grew an optional 'generation' argument.

- A library msilib to generate Windows Installer files, and a distutils

command bdist_msi have been added.

- PEP 343: new module contextlib.py defines decorator @contextmanager

and helpful context managers nested() and closing().

- The compiler package now supports future imports after the module docstring.

- Bug #1413790: zipfile now sanitizes absolute archive names that are
not allowed by the specs.

- Patch #1215184: FileInput now can be given an opening hook which can
be used to control how files are opened.

- Patch #1212287: fileinput.input() now has a mode parameter for

specifying the file mode input files should be opened with.

- Patch #1215184: fileinput now has a fileno() function for getting the
current file number.

- Patch #1349274: gettext.install() now optionally installs additional

translation functions other than _() in the builtin namespace.
- Patch #1337756: fileinput now accepts Unicode filenames.

- Patch #1373643: The chunk module can now read chunks larger than
two gigabytes.

- Patch #1417555: SimpleHTTPServer now returns Last-Modified headers.

- Bug #1430298: It is now possible to send a mail with an empty

return address using smtplib.

- Bug #1432260: The names of lambda functions are now properly displayed
in pydoc.

- Patch #1412872: zipfile now sets the creator system to 3 (Unix)

unless the system is Win32.

- Patch #1349118: urllib now supports user:pass@ style proxy

specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols
are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections.

- Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications.

- Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.

- Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.

- Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters

any more.

- Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused

when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.

- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.

- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode

- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise

LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
LoadError subclasses IOError.

- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:

"The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as

expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
that research should continue, and other alternatives may
arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."

- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available

modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.

- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.

- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.

- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
illegal argument)

- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there

is an error in the format string.

- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).

- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional

"parent" argument.

- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes

for padding.

- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.

- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
to get the correct encoding.

- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of

languages.

- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.

- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().

- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.

- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook

functionality.

- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.

- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
separator and do not output trailing semicolon.

- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named

ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
match the Content-Length header.

- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.

- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers

even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.

- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.

- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.

- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath

to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.

- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus

__hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
Tkdnd.
- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".

- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a

parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".

- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).

Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).

- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.

- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.

- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module;

it can be missing in embedded interpreters

- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.

- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via

error messages.

- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.

- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.

Bug #1224621.

- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full

roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python source code. In addition,
the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
terminates by raising StopIteration.

- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.

- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
component of the path.

- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,

support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
class at all.

- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution

files to PyPI.

- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting

them to PyPI.

- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented

instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
work as expected.

- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to

hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.

- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.

- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.

- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing

to build.

- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring

symbolic links on Windows.

- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in

profile.py if available.

- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.

- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values

in LWPCookieJar.

- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.

- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.

- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.

- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.

- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.

- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.

- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.

- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.

- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This

disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
be exploited in various ways.

- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec

flags on the HTTP listening socket.

- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().

- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to

constructors of SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.

- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.

- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.

- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.

- Enhancements to the csv module:

+ Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better

reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
PEP 305.
+ Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
 reporting.
+ quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
dictates.
+ the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
+ when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
types, rather than any object that can be represented as a numeric.
+ when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
to floats.
+ reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
\n to be quoted).
+ writer doublequote handling improved.
+ Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
+ The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
+ the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
+ register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
without first creating a dialect class.
+ a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
+ A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
limit is 128kB.
+ A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
multiple lines.
+ reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
This has been fixed.

- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is

inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.

- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.

- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.

(Bug #951915).

- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using

Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
encoding alias table.

- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.

- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
args tuple returned by __reduce__().

- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.

- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.

- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.

- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.

- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.

- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully

extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).

- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with

the same meaning as in list.sort().

- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only

once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
tokenizer with very long source lines.

- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called

immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
``.decompress()`` calls.

- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The

reconvert module now has some simple documentation.

- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in

``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``

- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")

correctly.

- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by

``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
between two lines.

- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
handlers.

- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads

from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
encoding instead of a unicode string.

- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
considering it exactly like a '*'.

- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to

``encodings.aliases``.

- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.

- Patch #1413711: Certain patterns of differences were making difflib

touch the recursion limit.

- Bug #947906: An object oriented interface has been added to the calendar
module. It's possible to generate HTML calendar now and the module can be
called as a script (e.g. via ``python -mcalendar``). Localized month and
weekday names can be ouput (even if an exotic encoding is used) using
special classes that use unicode.
Build
-----

- Fix test_float, test_long, and test_struct failures on Tru64 with gcc

by using -mieee gcc option.

- Patch #1432345: Make python compile on DragonFly.

- Build support for Win64-AMD64 was added.

- Patch #1428494: Prefer linking against ncursesw over ncurses library.

- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.

- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.

- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.

- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary

value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.

- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security

vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.

- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler

flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.

- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.

- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.

- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is

defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.

- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).

- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone

to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.

C API
-----

- ``PyMem_{Del, DEL}`` and ``PyMem_{Free, FREE}`` no longer map to

``PyObject_{Free, FREE}``. They map to the system ``free()`` now. If memory
is obtained via the ``PyObject_`` family, it must be released via the
 ``PyObject_`` family, and likewise for the ``PyMem_`` family. This has
always been officially true, but when Python's small-object allocator was
introduced, an attempt was made to cater to a few extension modules
discovered at the time that obtained memory via ``PyObject_New`` but
released it via ``PyMem_DEL``. It's years later, and if such code still
exists it will fail now (probably with segfaults, but calling wrong
low-level memory management functions can yield many symptoms).

- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.

- Removed PyRange_New().

- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the

mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
mappings.

Tests
-----

- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.

- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables

even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.

Documentation
-------------

- Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.

- Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid

values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.

- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().

- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.

- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.

- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.

- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.

- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library

reference.

- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.

- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.

- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().

- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.

Closes bug #1166582.

- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.

Mac
---

New platforms
-------------

- FreeBSD 7 support is added.

Tools/Demos
-----------

- Created Misc/Vim/vim_syntax.py to auto-generate a python.vim file in that

directory for syntax highlighting in Vim. Vim directory was added and placed
vimrc to it (was previous up a level).

- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively

finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
source files that need an encoding declaration.
Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.

- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.

- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.

- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
wiggle over by a pixel.

----

**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**