Python History

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

This file contains the release messages for previous Python releases.

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

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

file of the release25-maint branch.)

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

What's New in Python 2.5 release candidate 1?

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

*Release date: 17-AUG-2006*

Core and builtins

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

- Unicode objects will no longer raise an exception when being

compared equal or unequal to a string and a UnicodeDecodeError

exception occurs, e.g. as result of a decoding failure.

Instead, the equal (==) and unequal (!=) comparison operators will

now issue a UnicodeWarning and interpret the two objects as

unequal. The UnicodeWarning can be filtered as desired using

the warning framework, e.g. silenced completely, turned into an

exception, logged, etc.

Note that compare operators other than equal and unequal will still

raise UnicodeDecodeError exceptions as they've always done.

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

- Fix bug related to __len__ functions using values > 2**32 on 64-bit machines

with new-style classes.

- Fix bug related to __len__ functions returning negative values with

classic classes.

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

discovered with the API and how integers that didn't fit into Py_ssize_t

were handled. This patch attempts to provide enough alternatives

to effectively use __index__.

- Bug #1536021: __hash__ may now return long int; the final hash

value is obtained by invoking hash on the long int.

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

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

sys.stdin is closed.

- On Windows, the PyErr_Warn function is now exported from

the Python dll again.

- Bug #1191458: tracing over for loops now produces a line event

on each iteration. Fixing this problem required changing the .pyc

magic number. This means that .pyc files generated before 2.5c1

will be regenerated.

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

in the byte code and co_consts even if they were not used, ie

immediately popped off the stack.

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

Library

-------

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

generated for generator expressions.

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

keep it programmatically in sync with the Python version running

the code (introduced in 2.5b3) has been reverted. It will continue

to be maintained manually as static string literal.

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

and this cannot be converted to the required C type, an exception is

printed with PyErr_WriteUnraisable. Before this change, the C

callback returned arbitrary values to the calling code.

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

an exception.

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

little-endian byte order for Windows. In addition, uuid.py gained some

workarounds for clocks with low resolution, to stop the code yielding

duplicate UUIDs.

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

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

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

- Patch #1536071: trace.py should now find the full module name of a

file correctly even on Windows.

- logging's atexit hook now runs even if the rest of the module has

already been cleaned up.

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

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

str(exception) raised an exception.

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

generated for nested functions.

Extension Modules

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

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

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

raises the correct exceptions.

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

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

- Patch #1532975 was applied, which fixes Bug #1533481: ctypes now

uses the _as_parameter_ attribute when objects are passed to foreign

function calls. The ctypes version number was changed to 1.0.1.

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

Passing float arguments to struct.pack when integers are expected

now triggers a DeprecationWarning.

Tests

-----

- test_socketserver should now work on cygwin and not fail sporadically

on other platforms.

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

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

- test_threading now skips testing alternate thread stack sizes on

platforms that don't support changing thread stack size.

Documentation

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

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

Build

-----

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

code in OpenSSL.

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

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

C API

-----

- New API for Unicode rich comparisons: PyUnicode_RichCompare()

- Bug #1069160. Internal correctness changes were made to

``PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc()``. A test case was added, and

the documentation was changed to state that the return value

is always 1 (normal) or 0 (if the specified thread wasn't found).

What's New in Python 2.5 beta 3?

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

*Release date: 03-AUG-2006*

Core and builtins

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

- _PyWeakref_GetWeakrefCount() now returns a Py_ssize_t; it previously

returned a long (see PEP 353).

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

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

This provides the proper warning for struct.pack().

PyErr_Warn() is now deprecated in favor of PyErr_WarnEx().

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

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

- Bug #1529871: The speed enhancement patch #921466 broke Python's compliance

with PEP 302. This was fixed by adding an ``imp.NullImporter`` type that is

used in ``sys.path_importer_cache`` to cache non-directory paths and avoid

excessive filesystem operations during imports.

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

operations on signed longs that are formally undefined by C.

Unfortunately, at least one compiler now cares about that, so complicated

the code to make that compiler happy again.

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

- Patch #1232023: Stop including current directory in search

path on Windows.

- Fix some potential crashes found with failmalloc.

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

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

had more than 255 blank lines.

- Patch #1521179: Python now accepts the standard options ``--help`` and

``--version`` as well as ``/?`` on Windows.

- Bug #1520864: unpacking singleton tuples in a 'for' loop (for x, in) works

again. Fixing this problem required changing the .pyc magic number.

This means that .pyc files generated before 2.5b3 will be regenerated.

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

The Python core compiles again, and, in a build without threads, the

new ``sys._current_frames()`` returns a dictionary with one entry,

mapping the faux "thread id" 0 to the current frame.

- Bug #1525447: build on MacOS X on a case-sensitive filesystem.

Library

-------

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

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

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

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

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

KeyboardInterrupt.

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

shutil.copytree on Windows

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

refers to file descriptors, not file objects.

- The renaming of the xml package to xmlcore, and the import hackery done

to make it appear at both names, has been removed. Bug #1511497,

#1513611, and probably others.

- Bug #1441397: The compiler module now recognizes module and function

docstrings correctly as it did in Python 2.4.

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

lost that tests are sorted by name before being run. This rarely

matters for well-written tests, but can create baffling symptoms if

side effects from one test to the next affect outcomes. ``DocTestFinder``

has been changed to sort the list of tests it returns.

- The distutils version has been changed to 2.5.0, and is now kept

in sync with sys.version_info[:3].

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

- Bug #1459963: urllib and urllib2 now normalize HTTP header names with

title().

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

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

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

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

value in the traceback module.

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

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

- Bug #1520914: Change time.strftime() to accept a zero for any position in its

argument tuple. For arguments where zero is illegal, the value is forced to

the minimum value that is correct. This is to support an undocumented but

common way people used to fill in inconsequential information in the time

tuple pre-2.4.

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

- The email package has improved RFC 2231 support, specifically for

recognizing the difference between encoded (name*0*=<blah>) and non-encoded

(name*0=<blah>) parameter continuations. This may change the types of

values returned from email.message.Message.get_param() and friends.

Specifically in some cases where non-encoded continuations were used,

get_param() used to return a 3-tuple of (None, None, string) whereas now it

will just return the string (since non-encoded continuations don't have

charset and language parts).

Also, whereas % values were decoded in all parameter continuations, they are

now only decoded in encoded parameter parts.

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

- Bug #1517996: IDLE now longer shows the default Tk menu when a

path browser, class browser or debugger is the frontmost window on MacOS X

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

inspect.py, and pydoc.py. Specifically, this allows for querying the type

of an object against these built-in types and more importantly, for getting

their docstrings printed in the interactive interpreter's help() function.

Extension Modules

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

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

a socket operation on a socket with a timeout, the exception will be

caught correctly. Previously, the exception was not caught.

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

openbsd target platforms.

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

a memory leak, affecting pickles and deep copies.

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

Paul Eggert.

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

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

exactly one element enabled again. This allows iterating over these

arrays, without the need to check the array size before.

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

run with root privileges, it could overwrite or delete

/dev/null in certain cases; this is now fixed.

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

default mode for loading shared libraries in ctypes.

- Because of a misspelled preprocessor symbol, ctypes was always

compiled without thread support; this is now fixed.

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

methods now allow their database parameter to be None as the

sleepycat API allows.

- Bug #1526460: Fix socketmodule compile on NetBSD as it has a different

bluetooth API compared with Linux and FreeBSD.

Tests

-----

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

how long the test file should take to play. Now accepts taking 2.93 secs

(exact time) +/- 10% instead of the hard-coded 3.1 sec.

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

``test_uuid`` and ``test_email_codecs`` didn't actually run any tests when

run via ``regrtest.py``. Now they do.

Build

-----

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

Mac

---

- PythonLauncher now works correctly when the path to the script contains

characters that are treated specially by the shell (such as quotes).

- Bug #1527397: PythonLauncher now launches scripts with the working directory

set to the directory that contains the script instead of the user home

directory. That latter was an implementation accident and not what users

expect.

What's New in Python 2.5 beta 2?

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

*Release date: 11-JUL-2006*

Core and builtins

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

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

again evaluates to a int object, not a long.

- Bug #1501934: The scope of global variables that are locally assigned

using augmented assignment is now correctly determined.

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

be released.

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

and atof().

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

omit a default "error" argument for NULL pointer. This allows

the parser to take a codec from cjkcodecs again.

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

- On 64 bit systems, int literals that use less than 64 bits are

now ints rather than longs.

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

started after line 256.

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

id to topmost thread stack frame. This is for expert use, and is

especially useful for debugging application deadlocks. The functionality

was previously available in Fazal Majid's ``threadframe`` extension

module, but it wasn't possible to do this in a wholly threadsafe way from

an extension.

Library

-------

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

VS 2003.

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

- Bug #1508010: msvccompiler now requires the DISTUTILS_USE_SDK

environment variable to be set in order to the SDK environment

for finding the compiler, include files, etc.

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

- warnings.py now ignores ImportWarning by default

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

multi-value tuples would raise an exception and single-value tuples would

be treated as the value they contain, instead.

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

even if some data are received.

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

spec file generated by bdist_rpm.

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

degrees and radians.

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

filling of arcs.

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

is created.

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

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

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

attribute values.

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

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

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

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

category be either a types.ClassType and a subclass of Warning. The proper

check is just that it is a subclass with Warning as the documentation states.

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

statement (bug #1509132).

- The wsgiref package is now installed properly on Unix.

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

shutdown when fileConfig() was called multiple times.

- The sqlite3 module did cut off data from the SQLite database at the first

null character before sending it to a custom converter. This has been fixed

now.

Extension Modules

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

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

means that select() on sockets > FD_SETSIZE (typically 1024) work again.

The patch makes sockets use poll() internally where available.

- Assigning None to pointer type fields in ctypes structures possible

overwrote the wrong fields, this is fixed now.

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

on non-Windows platforms.

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

integer or long, without range checking.

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

foreign function argtypes sequence as long as they provide a from_param

method, no longer is it required that the object is a ctypes type.

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

with the --without-threads option.

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

access, again.

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

a KeyboardInterrupt.

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

a CharacterDataHandler could crash the interpreter in pyexpat.

- Patch #1516912: improve Modules support for OpenVMS.

Build

-----

- Automate Windows build process for the Win64 SSL module.

- 'configure' now detects the zlib library the same way as distutils.

Previously, the slight difference could cause compilation errors of the

'zlib' module on systems with more than one version of zlib.

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

with spaces in it.

- 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.