+++++++++++

Python News

+++++++++++

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

hat's New in Python 2.4.7?

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

*Release date: XX-XXX-2009*

What's New in Python 2.4.6?

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

*Release date: 19-Dec-2008*

What's New in Python 2.4.6c1?

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

*Release date: 13-Dec-2008*

Core and builtins

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

- Issue #4469: Prevent expandtabs() on string and unicode

objects from causing a segfault when a large width is passed

on 32-bit platforms. CVE-2008-5031.

- Issue #4317: Fixed a crash in the imageop.rgb2rgb8() function.

- Issue #4230: Fix a crash when a class has a custom __getattr__ and an

__getattribute__ method that deletes the __getattr__ attribute.

- Apply security patches from Apple. CVE-2008-2315.

- Issue #2620: Overflow checking when allocating or reallocating memory

was not always being done properly in some python types and extension

modules. PyMem_MALLOC, PyMem_REALLOC, PyMem_NEW and PyMem_RESIZE have

all been updated to perform better checks and places in the code that

would previously leak memory on the error path when such an allocation

failed have been fixed.

- Issue #1179: Fix CVE-2007-4965 and CVE-2008-1679, multiple integer

overflows in the imageop and rgbimgmodule modules.

- Issue #2586: Fix CVE-2008-1721, zlib crash from

zlib.decompressobj().flush(val) when val is not positive.

- Issues #2588, #2589: Fix potential integer underflow and overflow

conditions in the PyOS_vsnprintf C API function. CVE-2008-3144.

- Issue #2587: In the C API, PyString_FromStringAndSize() takes a signed size

parameter but was not verifying that it was greater than zero. Values

less than zero will now raise a SystemError and return NULL to indicate a

bug in the calling C code. CVE-2008-1887.

- Security Issue #2: imageop did not validate arguments correctly and could

segfault as a result. CVE-2008-4864.

Extension Modules

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

Library

-------

Tests

-----

Build

-----

Tools/Demos

-----------

- Tools/faqwiz/move-faqwiz.sh: Fix unsecure use of temporary files.

What's New in Python 2.4.5?

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

*Release date: 11-Mar-2008*

What's New in Python 2.4.5c1?

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

*Release date: 02-Mar-2008*

Core and builtins

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

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

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

can't be triggered from Python code.

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

Extension Modules

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

Library

-------

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

the traceback inadvertently or maliciously closing the comment and

injecting HTML into the error page.

Tests

-----

Build

-----

What's New in Python 2.4.4?

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

*Release date: 18-OCT-2006*

Build

-----

- Bug #1578513: Cross compilation was broken by a change to configure.

Repair so that it's back to how it was in 2.4.3.

What's New in Python 2.4.4c1?

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

*Release date: 11-OCT-2006*

Core and builtins

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

- 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 ;-)

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

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

anymore.

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

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

use them).

- staticmethod() and classmethod() also now complain about keyword args

instead of silently ignoring them.

- Bug #1331062: Fix error in UTF-7 codec.

- Bug #1365916: Fix an int/long mismatch in the sorted() built-in.

- Fix memory leak of coding spec in Parser/tokenizer.c.

- Fix memory leak in file_init.

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

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

optimizations. Changed to be more standard-conforming.

- Fix some potential crashes found with failmalloc.

- Fix warnings reported by the Coverity and Klocwork static analysis tools.

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

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

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

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

sys.stdin is closed.

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

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

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

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

be released.

- Bug #992017: A classic class that defined a __coerce__() method that returned

its arguments swapped would infinitely recurse and segfault the interpreter.

- Bug #532646: The object set to the __call__ attribute has its own __call__

attribute checked; this continues until the attribute can no longer be found

or segfaulting. Recursion limit is now followed.

- Bug #1454485: Don't crash on Unicode characters <0.

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

- fixed a bug with bsddb.DB.stat: the flags and txn keyword arguments

were transposed.

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.

- Fix buffer handling in posix.confstr.

- Bug #1572832: fix a bug in ISO-2022 codecs which may cause segfault

when encoding non-BMP unicode characters.

- Fixed a few bugs in 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 2013:2

codepoints now.

- Bug #1556784: allow format strings longer than 127 characters in

datetime's strftime function.

- gcmodule: add a missing incref.

- threadmodule: add a missing incref.

- Bug #1551427: fix a wrong NULL pointer check in the win32 version

of os.urandom().

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

raises the correct exceptions.

- Make regex engine raise MemoryError if allocating memory fails.

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

Paul Eggert.

- Bug #1548092: fix curses.tparm() segfault on invalid input.

- cursesmodule: fix a number of reference leaks with 'python -v'; handle

failure from PyModule_GetDict (Klocwork 208).

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

a KeyboardInterrupt.

- Change binascii.hexlify() to accept any read-only buffer and not just a char

buffer.

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

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

may deadlock.

- 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.

- Fix 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 #1493322: 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).

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

methods now allow their database parameter to be None as the

sleepycat API allows.

Library

-------

- Bug #1545341: The 'classifier' keyword argument to the Distutils setup()

function now accepts tuples as well as lists.

- Bug #1560617: in pyclbr, return full module name not only for classes,

but also for functions.

- Bug #1566602: correct failure of posixpath unittest when $HOME ends

with a slash.

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

- Fix missing import of the types module in logging.config.

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

- Bug #1257728: Complain about missing VS 2003 in the error message

of msvccompiler, and mention Cygwin as an alternative.

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

refers to file descriptors, not file objects.

- 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 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 #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 #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).

- 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.

- Bug #1501223: Possible overflow in _PySys_Init() when reading the code page

under Windows.

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

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

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

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

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

returned before accomplishing any of its intended cleanup.

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

- 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.

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

the saxutils.XMLGenerator class.

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

Tools/Demos

-----------

Build

-----

- The Windows binaries for the _ssl module are now linked with

OpenSSL 0.9.7l.

- On Windows, there are no longer linker warnings when building the

``_bsddb`` project.

- Bug #1568842: Fix test for uintptr_t.

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

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

- OpenBSD 3.9 and 4.0 are now supported.

- Test for sys/statvfs.h before including it, as statvfs is present

on some OSX installation, but its header file is not.

- Fix test_long failure on Tru64 with gcc by using -mieee gcc option.

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.

- Clarified documentation for tp_as_buffer->bf_getcharbuffer.

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

requiring both expected output and an exception.

Tests

-----

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

- Patch #1529686: test_iterlen and test_email_codecs are now actually

run by regrtest.py.

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

What's New in Python 2.4.3?

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

*Release date: 29-MAR-2006*

Core and builtins

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

- A few reference leaks were squished.

- A threading issue that caused random segfaults on some platforms from

the testsuite was fixed in test_capi.

- Reverted fix for Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and

raw_unicode_escape codec now encodes backslash correctly.

This caused another issue for unicode repr strings being double-escaped

(SF Bug #1459029). Correct fix will be in 2.5, but is too risky for 2.4.3.

Extension Modules

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

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

- Ubuntu bug #29289: Fixed a bug that the gb18030 codec raises

RuntimeError on encoding surrogate pair area on UCS4 build.

What's New in Python 2.4.3c1?

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

*Release date: 23-MAR-2006*

Core and builtins

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

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

now gives a SyntaxError.

- Fix missing check on whether the PendingDeprecationWarning for string

exceptions was re-raised as an actual PendingDeprecationWarning when

'warnings' is set to a filter action of "error"

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

- 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 #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec

now encodes backslash correctly.

- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs

and long longs.

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

It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error

message in this case.

- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being 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.

- 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

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

- Bug #1448490: Fixed a bug that ISO-2022 codecs could not handle

SS2 (single-shift 2) escape sequences correctly.

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

INET_ADDRSTRLEN is not defined.

- Bug #876637, prevent stack corruption when socket descriptor

is larger than FD_SETSIZE.

- Patch #1407135, bug #1424041: mmap.mmap(-1, size, ...) can return

anonymous memory again on Unix.

- Bug #1215432: in bsddb DB.associate() would crash when a DBError

was supposed to be raised.

- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.

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

problem on AIX.

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

- 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 #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.

Library

-------

- Patch #1462313, bug #1443328: the pickle modules now can handle classes

that have __private names in their __slots__.

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

- Patch #1337756: fileinput now handles Unicode filenames correctly.

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

two gigabytes.

- 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.

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

LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,

LoadError subclasses IOError.

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

- Patch #1314396: Prevent threading.Thread.join() from blocking if a previous

call caused an exception to be raised (e.g., calling join() with an illegal

argument).

- urllib.unquote() now handles Unicode strings correctly. Formerly, it would

either ignore the substitution or raise UnicodeDecodeError.

- SF #1313496: the bisect module now accepts named arguments.

- 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.

Tools/Demos

-----------

- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to

wiggle over by a pixel.

Build

-----

- Patch #1432345: Make python compile on DragonFly.

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

What's New in Python 2.4.2 final?

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

*Release date: 28-SEP-2005*

Extension Modules

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

- 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.

Tests

-----

- Fixed failure in test_macfs on Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), which

apparently doesn't allow the creation time to be set later than the

modification time. Fixed by changing the test data.

Build

-----

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

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

- The Windows .msi files are now compressed using lzx:21. This produces a

significantly smaller installer.

What's New in Python 2.4.2c1?

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

*Release date: 21-SEP-2005*

Core and builtins

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

- 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).

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

represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.

- 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.

- SF bug #1257731: set.discard() and set.remove() did not correctly

handle keys that both inherited from set and defined their own

__hash__() function. Also, changed set.__contains__() to have

identical logic.

- The set() builtin can now properly compute s-=s as an empty set.

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

- 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 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.

- Fix garbage collection for set and frozenset objects. SF patch #1200018.

- 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.

Extension Modules

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

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

before the env.

- 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.

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

- 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.

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

implemented treated all integer values except 1 as false.

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

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

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

- weakref proxy has incorrect __nonzero__ behavior. SF bug #1770766.

Library

-------

- 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: time.strptime() was not invalidating its regex cache when the

locale changed.

- Fix a misuse of str.find() in detection of use of %U or %W in datetime

format.

- 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.

- 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 #1266283: "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.

- The sets module can now properly compute s-=s and s^=s as an empty set.

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

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

- 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 #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

though this 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 #1224621: tokenize module does not detect inconsistent dedents

- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.

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

component of the path.

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

them to PyPI.

- 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 '*'.

Build

-----

- Patch #1160164: Build zlib.pyd for Itanium.

- 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.

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().

Tools/Demos

-----------

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

What's New in Python 2.4.1 final?

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

*Release date: 30-MAR-2005*

Core and builtins

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

- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this

fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761

Tests

-----

- SF patch 1167316: doctest.py fails self-test if run directly.

Build

-----

- SF patch 1171767: 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.

What's New in Python 2.4.1c2?

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

*Release date: 17-MAR-2005*

Library

-------

- Fixed decimal operator and comparison methods to return NotImplemented

instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types.

Allows other classes to successfully implement __radd__ style methods.

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

hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.

- Bug #1160802: can't build Zope on Windows with 2.4.1c1. The

``MSVCCompiler`` class in distutils forgot to record that it was

initialized, and continued adding redundant entries to the system

``PATH`` environment variable until ``putenv()`` complained about the

size. This only affected building projects with many C extensions,

and only on Windows using Microsoft's compiler. This wasn't visible

before because a bugfix first included in 2.4.1c1 provoked it (bug

#1110478: revert os.environ.update to do putenv again).

- Bug #1156259: Seeking in codecs.reader was broken, now fixed.

Tests

-----

- Fix the test for socket.getfqdn() in test_socket to also consider the host

name returned by socket.gethostname() a valid return value for getfqdn().

Also clarified the wording of docs and docstring that this is the case.

Extensions Modules

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

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

What's New in Python 2.4.1c1?

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

*Release date: 10-MAR-2005*

Core and builtins

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

- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not verify that __init__()

returns None.

- 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.

- Bug #1085744: Add missing overflow check to PySequence_Tuple().

Make resize schedule linear (amortized).

- marshal.dumps() no longer crashes when the optional argument ``version``

is provided.

Extension Modules

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

- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer

in pyexpat.GetInputContext.

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

{remove_history,replace_history}

Library

-------

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

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

disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can

be exploited in various ways.

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

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

- Bug #1067732: wininst --install-script doesn't leave residual files anymore.

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

(Bug #951915).

- The decimal module wouldn't run on builds without threads (Bug #1083645).

- Bug #1086555: Fix leak in syslog module.

- atexit.register no longer references the sys module before importing it.

(Bug #1083202).

- 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).

- 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.