+++++++++++

Python News

+++++++++++

What's New in Python 3.3.0 Beta 2?

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

*Release date: xx-xxx-2012*

Core and Builtins

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

Library

-------

- Issue 10924: Fixed mksalt() to use a RNG that is suitable for cryptographic

purpose.

Extension Modules

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

- Issue #15194: Update libffi to the 3.0.11 release.

What's New in Python 3.3.0 Beta 1?

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

*Release date: 27-Jun-2012*

Core and Builtins

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

- Fix a (most likely) very rare memory leak when calling main() and not being

able to decode a command-line argument.

- Issue #14815: Use Py_ssize_t instead of long for the object hash, to

preserve all 64 bits of hash on Win64.

- Issue #12268: File readline, readlines and read() or readall() methods

no longer lose data when an underlying read system call is interrupted.

IOError is no longer raised due to a read system call returning EINTR

from within these methods.

- Issue #11626: Add _SizeT functions to stable ABI.

- Issue #15146: Add PyType_FromSpecWithBases. Patch by Robin Schreiber.

- Issue #15142: Fix reference leak when deallocating instances of types

created using PyType_FromSpec().

- Issue #15042: Add PyState_AddModule and PyState_RemoveModule. Add version

guard for Py_LIMITED_API additions. Patch by Robin Schreiber.

- Issue #10053: Don't close FDs when FileIO.__init__ fails. Loosely based on

the work by Hirokazu Yamamoto.

- Issue #15096: Removed support for ur'' as the raw notation isn't

compatible with Python 2.x's raw unicode strings.

- Issue #13783: Generator objects now use the identifier APIs internally

- Issue #14874: Restore charmap decoding speed to pre-PEP 393 levels.

Patch by Serhiy Storchaka.

- Issue #15026: utf-16 encoding is now significantly faster (up to 10x).

Patch by Serhiy Storchaka.

- Issue #11022: open() and io.TextIOWrapper are now calling

locale.getpreferredencoding(False) instead of locale.getpreferredencoding()

in text mode if the encoding is not specified. Don't change temporary the

locale encoding using locale.setlocale(), use the current locale encoding

instead of the user preferred encoding.

- Issue #14673: Add Eric Snow's sys.implementation implementation.

- Issue #15038: Optimize python Locks on Windows.

Library

-------

- Issue #15187: Bugfix: remove temporary directories test_shutil was leaving

behind.

- Issue #15177: Added dir_fd parameter to os.fwalk().

- Issue #15176: Clarified behavior, documentation, and implementation

of os.listdir().

- Issue #15061: Re-implemented hmac.compare_digest() in C to prevent further

timing analysis and to support all buffer protocol aware objects as well as

ASCII only str instances safely.

- Issue #15164: Change return value of platform.uname() from a

plain tuple to a collections.namedtuple.

- Support Mageia Linux in the platform module.

- Issue #11678: Support Arch linux in the platform module.

- Issue #15118: Change return value of os.uname() and os.times() from

plain tuples to immutable iterable objects with named attributes

(structseq objects).

- Speed up _decimal by another 10-15% by caching the thread local context

that was last accessed. In the pi benchmark (64-bit platform, prec=9),

_decimal is now only 1.5x slower than float.

- Remove the packaging module, which is not ready for prime time.

- Issue #15154: Add "dir_fd" parameter to os.rmdir, remove "rmdir"

parameter from os.remove / os.unlink.

- Issue #4489: Add a shutil.rmtree that isn't susceptible to symlink attacks.

It is used automatically on platforms supporting the necessary os.openat()

and os.unlinkat() functions. Main code by Martin von Löwis.

- Issue #15156: HTMLParser now uses the new "html.entities.html5" dictionary.

- Issue #11113: add a new "html5" dictionary containing the named character

references defined by the HTML5 standard and the equivalent Unicode

character(s) to the html.entities module.

- Issue #15114: the strict mode of HTMLParser and the HTMLParseError exception

are deprecated now that the parser is able to parse invalid markup.

- Issue #3665: \u and \U escapes are now supported in unicode regular

expressions. Patch by Serhiy Storchaka.

- Issue #15153: Added inspect.getgeneratorlocals to simplify white box

testing of generator state updates

- Issue #13062: Added inspect.getclosurevars to simplify testing stateful

closures

- Issue #11024: Fixes and additional tests for Time2Internaldate.

- Issue #14626: Large refactoring of functions / parameters in the os module.

Many functions now support "dir_fd" and "follow_symlinks" parameters;

some also support accepting an open file descriptor in place of of a path

string. Added os.support_* collections as LBYL helpers. Removed many

functions only previously seen in 3.3 alpha releases (often starting with

"f" or "l", or ending with "at"). Originally suggested by Serhiy Storchaka;

implemented by Larry Hastings.

- Issue #15008: Implement PEP 362 "Signature Objects".

Patch by Yury Selivanov.

- Issue: #15138: base64.urlsafe_{en,de}code() are now 3-4x faster.

- Issue #444582: Add shutil.which, for finding programs on the system path.

Original patch by Erik Demaine, with later iterations by Jan Killian

and Brian Curtin.

- Issue #14837: SSL errors now have ``library`` and ``reason`` attributes

describing precisely what happened and in which OpenSSL submodule. The

str() of a SSLError is also enhanced accordingly.

- Issue #9527: datetime.astimezone() method will now supply a class

timezone instance corresponding to the system local timezone when

called with no arguments.

- Issue #14653: email.utils.mktime_tz() no longer relies on system

mktime() when timezone offest is supplied.

- Issue #14684: zlib.compressobj() and zlib.decompressobj() now support the use

of predefined compression dictionaries. Original patch by Sam Rushing.

- Fix GzipFile's handling of filenames given as bytes objects.

- Issue #14772: Return destination values from some shutil functions.

- Issue #15064: Implement context manager protocol for multiprocessing types

- Issue #15101: Make pool finalizer avoid joining current thread.

- Issue #14657: The frozen instance of importlib used for bootstrap is now

also the module imported as importlib._bootstrap.

- Issue #14055: Add __sizeof__ support to _elementtree.

- Issue #15054: A bug in tokenize.tokenize that caused string literals

with 'b' prefixes to be incorrectly tokenized has been fixed.

Patch by Serhiy Storchaka.

- Issue #15006: Allow equality comparison between naive and aware

time or datetime objects.

- Issue #14982: Document that pkgutil's iteration functions require the

non-standard iter_modules() method to be defined by an importer (something

the importlib importers do not define).

- Issue #15036: Mailbox no longer throws an error if a flush is done

between operations when removing or changing multiple items in mbox,

MMDF, or Babyl mailboxes.

- Issue #14059: Implement multiprocessing.Barrier.

- Issue #15061: The inappropriately named hmac.secure_compare has been

renamed to hmac.compare_digest, restricted to operating on bytes inputs

only and had its documentation updated to more accurately reflect both its

intent and its limitations

- Issue #13841: Make child processes exit using sys.exit() on Windows.

- Issue #14936: curses_panel was converted to PEP 3121 and PEP 384 API.

Patch by Robin Schreiber.

- Issue #1667546: On platforms supporting tm_zone and tm_gmtoff fields

in struct tm, time.struct_time objects returned by time.gmtime(),

time.localtime() and time.strptime() functions now have tm_zone and

tm_gmtoff attributes. Original patch by Paul Boddie.

- Rename adjusted attribute to adjustable in time.get_clock_info() result.

- Issue #3518: Remove references to non-existent BaseManager.from_address()

method.

- Issue #13857: Added textwrap.indent() function (initial patch by Ezra

Berch)

- Issue #2736: Added datetime.timestamp() method.

- Issue #13854: Make multiprocessing properly handle non-integer

non-string argument to SystemExit.

- Issue #12157: Make pool.map() empty iterables correctly. Initial

patch by mouad.

- Issue #11823: disassembly now shows argument counts on calls with keyword args.

- Issue #14711: os.stat_float_times() has been deprecated.

- LZMAFile now accepts the modes "rb"/"wb"/"ab" as synonyms of "r"/"w"/"a".

- The bz2 and lzma modules now each contain an open() function, allowing

compressed files to readily be opened in text mode as well as binary mode.

- BZ2File.__init__() and LZMAFile.__init__() now accept a file object as their

first argument, rather than requiring a separate "fileobj" argument.

- gzip.open() now accepts file objects as well as filenames.

- Issue #14992: os.makedirs(path, exist_ok=True) would raise an OSError

when the path existed and had the S_ISGID mode bit set when it was

not explicitly asked for. This is no longer an exception as mkdir

cannot control if the OS sets that bit for it or not.

- Issue #14989: Make the CGI enable option to http.server available via command

line.

- Issue #14987: Add a missing import statement to inspect.

- Issue #1079: email.header.decode_header now correctly parses all the examples

in RFC2047. There is a necessary visible behavior change: the leading and/or

trailing whitespace on ASCII parts is now preserved.

- Issue #14969: Better handling of exception chaining in contextlib.ExitStack

- Issue #14962: Update text coloring in IDLE shell window after changing

options. Patch by Roger Serwy.

- Issue #14963: Convert contextlib.ExitStack.__exit__ to use an iterative

algorithm (Patch by Alon Horev)

- Issue #14785: Add sys._debugmallocstats() to help debug low-level memory

allocation issues

- Issue #14443: Ensure that .py files are byte-compiled with the correct Python

executable within bdist_rpm even on older versions of RPM

C-API

-----

- Issue #13783: Inadvertent additions to the public C API in the PEP 380

implementation have either been removed or marked as private interfaces.

Extension Modules

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

- Issue #15000: Support the "unique" x32 architecture in _posixsubprocess.c.

Documentation

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

- Issue #15081: Document PyState_FindModule.

Patch by Robin Schreiber.

- Issue #14814: Added first draft of ipaddress module API reference

Tests

-----

- Issue #14769: test_capi now has SkipitemTest, which cleverly checks

for "parity" between PyArg_ParseTuple() and the Python/getargs.c static

function skipitem() for all possible "format units".

- test_nntplib now tolerates being run from behind NNTP gateways that add

"X-Antivirus" headers to articles

- Issue #15043: test_gdb is now skipped entirely if gdb security settings

block loading of the gdb hooks

- Issue #14963: Add test cases for exception handling behaviour

in contextlib.ExitStack (Initial patch by Alon Horev)

Build

-----

- Issue #13590: Improve support for OS X Xcode 4:

* Try to avoid building Python or extension modules with problematic

llvm-gcc compiler.

* Since Xcode 4 removes ppc support, extension module builds now

check for ppc compiler support and automatically remove ppc and

ppc64 archs when not available.

* Since Xcode 4 no longer install SDKs in default locations,

extension module builds now revert to using installed headers

and libs if the SDK used to build the interpreter is not

available.

* Update ./configure to use better defaults for universal builds;

in particular, --enable-universalsdk=yes uses the Xcode default

SDK and --with-universal-archs now defaults to "intel" if ppc

not available.

- Issue #14225: Fix Unicode support for curses (#12567) on OS X

- Issue #14928: Fix importlib bootstrap issues by using a custom executable

(Modules/_freeze_importlib) to build Python/importlib.h.

What's New in Python 3.3.0 Alpha 4?

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

*Release date: 31-May-2012*

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #14835: Make plistlib output empty arrays & dicts like OS X.

Patch by Sidney San Martín.

- Issue #14744: Use the new _PyUnicodeWriter internal API to speed up

str%args and str.format(args).

- Issue #14930: Make memoryview objects weakrefable.

- Issue #14775: Fix a potential quadratic dict build-up due to the garbage

collector repeatedly trying to untrack dicts.

- Issue #14857: fix regression in references to PEP 3135 implicit __class__

closure variable (Reopens issue #12370)

- Issue #14712 (PEP 405): Virtual environments. Implemented by Vinay Sajip.

- Issue #14660 (PEP 420): Namespace packages. Implemented by Eric Smith.

- Issue #14494: Fix __future__.py and its documentation to note that

absolute imports are the default behavior in 3.0 instead of 2.7.

Patch by Sven Marnach.

- Issue #9260: A finer-grained import lock. Most of the import sequence

now uses per-module locks rather than the global import lock, eliminating

well-known issues with threads and imports.

- Issue #14624: UTF-16 decoding is now 3x to 4x faster on various inputs.

Patch by Serhiy Storchaka.

- asdl_seq and asdl_int_seq are now Py_ssize_t sized.

- Issue #14133 (PEP 415): Implement suppression of __context__ display with an

attribute on BaseException. This replaces the original mechanism of PEP 409.

- Issue #14417: Mutating a dict during lookup now restarts the lookup instead

of raising a RuntimeError (undoes issue #14205).

- Issue #14738: Speed-up UTF-8 decoding on non-ASCII data. Patch by Serhiy

Storchaka.

- Issue #14700: Fix two broken and undefined-behaviour-inducing overflow checks

in old-style string formatting.

- Issue #14705: The PyArg_Parse() family of functions now support the 'p' format

unit, which accepts a "boolean predicate" argument. It converts any Python

value into an integer--0 if it is "false", and 1 otherwise.

Library

-------

- Issue #14690: Use monotonic clock instead of system clock in the sched,

subprocess and trace modules.

- Issue #14958: Change IDLE systax highlighting to recognize all string and

byte literals supported in Python 3.3.

- Issue #10997: Prevent a duplicate entry in IDLE's "Recent Files" menu.

- Issue #14443: Tell rpmbuild to use the correct version of Python in

bdist_rpm. Initial patch by Ross Lagerwall.

- Issue #14929: Stop Idle 3.x from closing on Unicode decode errors when

grepping. Patch by Roger Serwy.

- Issue #12515: email now registers a defect if it gets to EOF while parsing

a MIME part without seeing the closing MIME boundary.

- Issue #12510: Attempting to get invalid tooltip no longer closes Idle.

Other tooltipss have been corrected or improved and the number of tests

has been tripled. Original patch by Roger Serwy.

- Issue #1672568: email now always decodes base64 payloads, adding padding and

ignoring non-base64-alphabet characters if needed, and registering defects

for any such problems.

- Issue #14925: email now registers a defect when the parser decides that there

is a missing header/body separator line. MalformedHeaderDefect, which the

existing code would never actually generate, is deprecated.

- Issue #10365: File open dialog now works instead of crashing even when

the parent window is closed before the dialog. Patch by Roger Serwy.

- Issue #8739: Updated smtpd to support RFC 5321, and added support for the

RFC 1870 SIZE extension.

- Issue #665194: Added a localtime function to email.utils to provide an

aware local datetime for use in setting Date headers.

- Issue #12586: Added new provisional policies that implement convenient

unicode support for email headers. See What's New for details.

- Issue #14731: Refactored email Policy framework to support full backward

compatibility with Python 3.2 by default yet allow for the introduction of

new features through new policies. Note that Policy.must_be_7bit is renamed

to cte_type.

- Issue #14876: Use user-selected font for highlight configuration.

- Issue #14920: Fix the help(urllib.parse) failure on locale C on terminals.

Have ascii characters in help.

- Issue #14548: Make multiprocessing finalizers check pid before

running to cope with possibility of gc running just after fork.

- Issue #14863: Update the documentation of os.fdopen() to reflect the

fact that it's only a thin wrapper around open() anymore.

- Issue #14036: Add an additional check to validate that port in urlparse does

not go in illegal range and returns None.

- Issue #14862: Add missing names to os.__all__

- Issue #14875: Use float('inf') instead of float('1e66666') in the json module.

- Issue #13585: Added contextlib.ExitStack

- PEP 3144, Issue #14814: Added the ipaddress module

- Issue #14426: Correct the Date format in Expires attribute of Set-Cookie

Header in Cookie.py.

- Issue #14588: The types module now provide new_class() and prepare_class()

functions to support PEP 3115 compliant dynamic class creation. Patch by

Daniel Urban and Nick Coghlan.

- Issue #13152: Allow to specify a custom tabsize for expanding tabs in

textwrap. Patch by John Feuerstein.

- Issue #14721: Send the correct 'Content-length: 0' header when the body is an

empty string ''. Initial Patch contributed by Arve Knudsen.

- Issue #14072: Fix parsing of 'tel' URIs in urlparse by making the check for

ports stricter.

- Issue #9374: Generic parsing of query and fragment portions of url for any

scheme. Supported both by RFC3986 and RFC2396.

- Issue #14798: Fix the functions in pyclbr to raise an ImportError

when the first part of a dotted name is not a package. Patch by

Xavier de Gaye.

- Issue #12098: multiprocessing on Windows now starts child processes

using the same sys.flags as the current process. Initial patch by

Sergey Mezentsev.

- Issue #13031: Small speed-up for tarfile when unzipping tarfiles.

Patch by Justin Peel.

- Issue #14780: urllib.request.urlopen() now has a ``cadefault`` argument

to use the default certificate store. Initial patch by James Oakley.

- Issue #14829: Fix bisect and range() indexing with large indices

(>= 2 ** 32) under 64-bit Windows.

- Issue #14732: The _csv module now uses PEP 3121 module initialization.

Patch by Robin Schreiber.

- Issue #14809: Add HTTP status codes introduced by RFC 6585 to http.server

and http.client. Patch by EungJun Yi.

- Issue #14777: tkinter may return undecoded UTF-8 bytes as a string when

accessing the Tk clipboard. Modify clipboad_get() to first request type

UTF8_STRING when no specific type is requested in an X11 windowing

environment, falling back to the current default type STRING if that fails.

Original patch by Thomas Kluyver.

- Issue #14773: Fix os.fwalk() failing on dangling symlinks.

- Issue #12541: Be lenient with quotes around Realm field of HTTP Basic

Authentation in urllib2.

- Issue #14807: move undocumented tarfile.filemode() to stat.filemode() and add

doc entry. Add tarfile.filemode alias with deprecation warning.

- Issue #13815: TarFile.extractfile() now returns io.BufferedReader objects.

- Issue #14532: Add a secure_compare() helper to the hmac module, to mitigate

timing attacks. Patch by Jon Oberheide.

- Add importlib.util.resolve_name().

- Issue #14366: Support lzma compression in zip files.

Patch by Serhiy Storchaka.

- Issue #13959: Introduce importlib.find_loader() and document

imp.find_module/load_module as deprecated.

- Issue #14082: shutil.copy2() now copies extended attributes, if possible.

Patch by Hynek Schlawack.

- Issue #13959: Make importlib.abc.FileLoader.load_module()/get_filename() and

importlib.machinery.ExtensionFileLoader.load_module() have their single

argument be optional. Allows for the replacement (and thus deprecation) of

imp.load_source()/load_package()/load_compiled().

- Issue #13959: imp.get_suffixes() has been deprecated in favour of the new

attributes on importlib.machinery: SOURCE_SUFFIXES, DEBUG_BYTECODE_SUFFIXES,

OPTIMIZED_BYTECODE_SUFFIXES, BYTECODE_SUFFIXES, and EXTENSION_SUFFIXES. This

led to an indirect deprecation of inspect.getmoduleinfo().

- Issue #14662: Prevent shutil failures on OS X when destination does not

support chflag operations. Patch by Hynek Schlawack.

- Issue #14157: Fix time.strptime failing without a year on February 29th.

Patch by Hynek Schlawack.

- Issue #14753: Make multiprocessing's handling of negative timeouts

the same as it was in Python 3.2.

- Issue #14583: Fix importlib bug when a package's __init__.py would first

import one of its modules then raise an error.

- Issue #14741: Fix missing support for Ellipsis ('...') in parser module.

- Issue #14697: Fix missing support for set displays and set comprehensions in

parser module.

- Issue #14701: Fix missing support for 'raise ... from' in parser module.

- Add support for timeouts to the acquire() methods of

multiprocessing's lock/semaphore/condition proxies.

- Issue #13989: Add support for text mode to gzip.open().

- Issue #14127: The os.stat() result object now provides three additional

fields: st_ctime_ns, st_mtime_ns, and st_atime_ns, providing those times as an

integer with nanosecond resolution. The functions os.utime(), os.lutimes(),

and os.futimes() now accept a new parameter, ns, which accepts mtime and atime

as integers with nanosecond resolution.

- Issue #14127 and #10148: shutil.copystat now preserves exact mtime and atime

on filesystems providing nanosecond resolution.

Tools/Demos

-----------

- Issue #14695: Bring Tools/parser/unparse.py support up to date with

the Python 3.3 Grammar.

Build

-----

- Issue #14472: Update .gitignore. Patch by Matej Cepl.

- Upgrade Windows library versions: bzip 1.0.6, OpenSSL 1.0.1c.

- Issue #14693: Under non-Windows platforms, hashlib's fallback modules are

always compiled, even if OpenSSL is present at build time.

- Issue #13210: Windows build now uses VS2010, ported from VS2008.

Documentation

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

- Issue #14588: The language reference now accurately documents the Python 3

class definition process. Patch by Nick Coghlan.

- Issue #14943: Correct a default argument value for winreg.OpenKey

and correctly list the argument names in the function's explanation.

What's New in Python 3.3.0 Alpha 3?

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

*Release date: 01-May-2012*

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #14699: Fix calling the classmethod descriptor directly.

- Issue #14433: Prevent msvcrt crash in interactive prompt when stdin is closed.

- Issue #14521: Make result of float('nan') and float('-nan') more consistent

across platforms.

- Issue #14646: __import__() sets __loader__ if the loader did not.

- Issue #14605: No longer have implicit entries in sys.meta_path. If

sys.meta_path is found to be empty, raise ImportWarning.

- Issue #14605: No longer have implicit entries in sys.path_hooks. If

sys.path_hooks is found to be empty, a warning will be raised. None is now

inserted into sys.path_importer_cache if no finder was discovered. This also

means imp.NullImporter is no longer implicitly used.

- Issue #13903: Implement PEP 412. Individual dictionary instances can now share

their keys with other dictionaries. Classes take advantage of this to share

their instance dictionary keys for improved memory and performance.

- Issue #11603 (again): Setting __repr__ to __str__ now raises a RuntimeError

when repr() or str() is called on such an object.

- Issue #14658: Fix binding a special method to a builtin implementation of a

special method with a different name.

- Issue #14630: Fix a memory access bug for instances of a subclass of int

with value 0.

- Issue #14339: Speed improvements to bin, oct and hex functions. Patch by

Serhiy Storchaka.

- Issue #14098: New functions PyErr_GetExcInfo and PyErr_SetExcInfo.

Patch by Stefan Behnel.

- Issue #14385: It is now possible to use a custom type for the __builtins__

namespace, instead of a dict. It can be used for sandboxing for example.

Raise also a NameError instead of ImportError if __build_class__ name if not

found in __builtins__.

- Issue #12599: Be more strict in accepting None compared to a false-like

object for importlib.util.module_for_loader and

importlib.machinery.PathFinder.

- Issue #14612: Fix jumping around with blocks by setting f_lineno.

- Issue #14592: Attempting a relative import w/o __package__ or __name__ set in

globals raises a KeyError.

- Issue #14607: Fix keyword-only arguments which started with ``__``.

- Issue #10854: The ImportError raised when an extension module on Windows

fails to import now uses the new path and name attributes from

Issue #1559549.

- Issue #13889: Check and (if necessary) set FPU control word before calling

any of the dtoa.c string <-> float conversion functions, on MSVC builds of

Python. This fixes issues when embedding Python in a Delphi app.

- __import__() now matches PEP 328 and documentation by defaulting 'index' to 0

instead of -1 and removing support for negative values.

- Issue #2377: Make importlib the implementation of __import__().

- Issue #1559549: ImportError now has 'name' and 'path' attributes that are set

using keyword arguments to its constructor. They are currently not set by

import as they are meant for use by importlib.

- Issue #14474: Save and restore exception state in thread.start_new_thread()

while writing error message if the thread leaves a unhandled exception.

- Issue #13019: Fix potential reference leaks in bytearray.extend(). Patch

by Suman Saha.

Library

-------

- Issue #14768: os.path.expanduser('~/a') doesn't works correctly when HOME is '/'.

- Issue #14371: Support bzip2 in zipfile module. Patch by Serhiy Storchaka.

- Issue #13183: Fix pdb skipping frames after hitting a breakpoint and running

step. Patch by Xavier de Gaye.

- Issue #14696: Fix parser module to understand 'nonlocal' declarations.

- Issue #10941: Fix imaplib.Internaldate2tuple to produce correct result near

the DST transition. Patch by Joe Peterson.

- Issue #9154: Fix parser module to understand function annotations.

- Issue #6085: In http.server.py SimpleHTTPServer.address_string returns the

client ip address instead client hostname. Patch by Charles-François Natali.

- Issue #14309: Deprecate time.clock(), use time.perf_counter() or

time.process_time() instead.

- Issue #14428: Implement the PEP 418. Add time.get_clock_info(),

time.perf_counter() and time.process_time() functions, and rename

time.steady() to time.monotonic().

- Issue #14646: importlib.util.module_for_loader() now sets __loader__ and

__package__ (when possible).

- Issue #14664: It is now possible to use @unittest.skip{If,Unless} on a

test class that doesn't inherit from TestCase (i.e. a mixin).

- Issue #4892: multiprocessing Connections can now be transferred over

multiprocessing Connections. Patch by Richard Oudkerk (sbt).

- Issue #14160: TarFile.extractfile() failed to resolve symbolic links when

the links were not located in an archive subdirectory.

- Issue #14638: pydoc now treats non-string __name__ values as if they

were missing, instead of raising an error.

- Issue #13684: Fix httplib tunnel issue of infinite loops for certain sites

which send EOF without trailing \r\n.

- Issue #14605: Add importlib.abc.FileLoader, importlib.machinery.(FileFinder,

SourceFileLoader, SourcelessFileLoader, ExtensionFileLoader).

- Issue #13959: imp.cache_from_source()/source_from_cache() now follow

os.path.join()/split() semantics for path manipulation instead of its prior,

custom semantics of caring the right-most path separator forward in path

joining.

- Issue #2193: Allow ":" character in Cookie NAME values.

- Issue #14629: tokenizer.detect_encoding will specify the filename in the

SyntaxError exception if found at readline.__self__.name.

- Issue #14629: Raise SyntaxError in tokenizer.detect_encoding if the

first two lines have non-UTF-8 characters without an encoding declaration.

- Issue #14308: Fix an exception when a "dummy" thread is in the threading

module's active list after a fork().

- Issue #11750: The Windows API functions scattered in the _subprocess and

_multiprocessing.win32 modules now live in a single module "_winapi".

Patch by sbt.

- Issue #14087: multiprocessing: add Condition.wait_for(). Patch by sbt.

- Issue #14538: HTMLParser can now parse correctly start tags that contain

a bare '/'.

- Issue #14452: SysLogHandler no longer inserts a UTF-8 BOM into the message.

- Issue #14386: Expose the dict_proxy internal type as types.MappingProxyType.

- Issue #13959: Make imp.reload() always use a module's __loader__ to perform

the reload.

- Issue #13959: Add imp.py and rename the built-in module to _imp, allowing for

re-implementing parts of the module in pure Python.

- Issue #13496: Fix potential overflow in bisect.bisect algorithm when applied

to a collection of size > sys.maxsize / 2.

- Have importlib take advantage of ImportError's new 'name' and 'path'

attributes.

- Issue #14399: zipfile now recognizes that the archive has been modified even

if only the comment is changed. In addition, the TypeError that results from

trying to set a non-binary value as a comment is now now raised at the time

the comment is set rather than at the time the zipfile is written.

- trace.CoverageResults.is_ignored_filename() now ignores any name that starts

with "<" and ends with ">" instead of special-casing "<string>" and

"<doctest ".

- Issue #12537: The mailbox module no longer depends on knowledge of internal

implementation details of the email package Message object.

- Issue #7978: socketserver now restarts the select() call when EINTR is

returned. This avoids crashing the server loop when a signal is received.

Patch by Jerzy Kozera.

- Issue #14522: Avoid duplicating socket handles in multiprocessing.connection.

Patch by sbt.

- Don't Py_DECREF NULL variable in io.IncrementalNewlineDecoder.

- Issue #8515: Set __file__ when run file in IDLE.

Initial patch by Bruce Frederiksen.

- Issue #14496: Fix wrong name in idlelib/tabbedpages.py.

Patch by Popa Claudiu.

- Issue #3033: Add displayof parameter to tkinter font. Patch by Guilherme Polo.

- Issue #14482: Raise a ValueError, not a NameError, when trying to create

a multiprocessing Client or Listener with an AF_UNIX type address under

Windows. Patch by Popa Claudiu.

- Issue #802310: Generate always unique tkinter font names if not directly passed.

- Issue #14151: Raise a ValueError, not a NameError, when trying to create

a multiprocessing Client or Listener with an AF_PIPE type address under

non-Windows platforms. Patch by Popa Claudiu.

- Issue #14493: Use gvfs-open or xdg-open in webbrowser.

Build

-----

- "make touch" will now touch generated files that are checked into Mercurial,

after a "hg update" which failed to bring the timestamps into the right order.

Tests

-----

- Issue #14026: In test_cmd_line_script, check that sys.argv is populated

correctly for the various invocation approaches (Patch by Jason Yeo)

- Issue #14032: Fix incorrect variable name in test_cmd_line_script debugging

message (Patch by Jason Yeo)

- Issue #14589: Update certificate chain for sha256.tbs-internet.com, fixing

a test failure in test_ssl.

- Issue #14355: Regrtest now supports the standard unittest test loading, and

will use it if a test file contains no `test_main` method.

Tools / Demos

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

- Issue #3561: The Windows installer now has an option, off by default, for

placing the Python installation into the system "Path" environment variable.

- Issue #13165: stringbench is now available in the Tools/stringbench folder.

It used to live in its own SVN project.

What's New in Python 3.3.0 Alpha 2?

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

*Release date: 01-Apr-2012*

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #1683368: object.__new__ and object.__init__ raise a TypeError if they

are passed arguments and their complementary method is not overridden.

- Issue #14378: Fix compiling ast.ImportFrom nodes with a "__future__" string as

the module name that was not interned.

- Issue #14331: Use significantly less stack space when importing modules by

allocating path buffers on the heap instead of the stack.

- Issue #14334: Prevent in a segfault in type.__getattribute__ when it was not

passed strings.

- Issue #1469629: Allow cycles through an object's __dict__ slot to be

collected. (For example if ``x.__dict__ is x``).

- Issue #14205: dict lookup raises a RuntimeError if the dict is modified

during a lookup.

- Issue #14220: When a generator is delegating to another iterator with the

yield from syntax, it needs to have its ``gi_running`` flag set to True.

- Issue #14435: Remove dedicated block allocator from floatobject.c and rely

on the PyObject_Malloc() api like all other objects.

- Issue #14471: Fix a possible buffer overrun in the winreg module.

- Issue #14288: Allow the serialization of builtin iterators

Library

-------

- Issue #14300: Under Windows, sockets created using socket.dup() now allow

overlapped I/O. Patch by sbt.

- Issue #13872: socket.detach() now marks the socket closed (as mirrored

in the socket repr()). Patch by Matt Joiner.

- Issue #14406: Fix a race condition when using ``concurrent.futures.wait(

return_when=ALL_COMPLETED)``. Patch by Matt Joiner.

- Issue #5136: deprecate old, unused functions from tkinter.

- Issue #14409: IDLE now properly executes commands in the Shell window

when it cannot read the normal config files on startup and

has to use the built-in default key bindings.

There was previously a bug in one of the defaults.

- Issue #14416: syslog now defines the LOG_ODELAY and LOG_AUTHPRIV constants

if they are defined in <syslog.h>.

- IDLE can be launched as python -m idlelib

- Issue #14295: Add unittest.mock

- Issue #7652: Add --with-system-libmpdec option to configure for linking

the _decimal module against an installed libmpdec.

- Issue #14380: MIMEText now defaults to utf-8 when passed non-ASCII unicode

with no charset specified.

- Issue #10340: asyncore - properly handle EINVAL in dispatcher constructor on

OSX; avoid to call handle_connect in case of a disconnected socket which

was not meant to connect.

- Issue #14204: The ssl module now has support for the Next Protocol

Negotiation extension, if available in the underlying OpenSSL library.

Patch by Colin Marc.

- Issue #3035: Unused functions from tkinter are marked as pending deprecated.

- Issue #12757: Fix the skipping of doctests when python is run with -OO so

that it works in unittest's verbose mode as well as non-verbose mode.

- Issue #7652: Integrate the decimal floating point libmpdec library to speed

up the decimal module. Performance gains of the new C implementation are

between 10x and 100x, depending on the application.

- Issue #3573: IDLE hangs when passing invalid command line args

(directory(ies) instead of file(s)) (Patch by Guilherme Polo)

- Issue #14269: SMTPD now conforms to the RFC and requires a HELO command

before MAIL, RCPT, or DATA.

- Issue #13694: asynchronous connect in asyncore.dispatcher does not set addr

attribute.

- Issue #14344: fixed the repr of email.policy objects.

- Issue #11686: Added missing entries to email package __all__ lists

(mostly the new Bytes classes).

- Issue #14335: multiprocessing's custom Pickler subclass now inherits from

the C-accelerated implementation. Patch by sbt.

- Issue #10484: Fix the CGIHTTPServer's PATH_INFO handling problem.

- Issue #11199: Fix the with urllib which hangs on particular ftp urls.

- Improve the memory utilization and speed of functools.lru_cache.

- Issue #14222: Use the new time.steady() function instead of time.time() for

timeout in queue and threading modules to not be affected of system time

update.

- Issue #13248: Remove lib2to3.pytree.Base.get_prefix/set_prefix.

- Issue #14234: CVE-2012-0876: Randomize hashes of xml attributes in the hash

table internal to the pyexpat module's copy of the expat library to avoid a

denial of service due to hash collisions. Patch by David Malcolm with some

modifications by the expat project.

- Issue #14200: Idle shell crash on printing non-BMP unicode character.

- Issue #12818: format address no longer needlessly \ escapes ()s in names when

the name ends up being quoted.

- Issue #14062: BytesGenerator now correctly folds Header objects,

including using linesep when folding.

- Issue #13839: When invoked on the command-line, the pstats module now

accepts several filenames of profile stat files and merges them all.

Patch by Matt Joiner.

- Issue #14291: Email now defaults to utf-8 for non-ASCII unicode headers

instead of raising an error. This fixes a regression relative to 2.7.

- Issue #989712: Support using Tk without a mainloop.

- Issue #5219: Prevent event handler cascade in IDLE.

- Issue #3835: Refuse to use unthreaded Tcl in threaded Python.

- Issue #2843: Add new Tk API to Tkinter.

- Issue #14184: Increase the default stack size for secondary threads on

Mac OS X to avoid interpreter crashes when using threads on 10.7.

- Issue #14180: datetime.date.fromtimestamp(),

datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp() and datetime.datetime.utcfromtimestamp()

now raise an OSError instead of ValueError if localtime() or gmtime() failed.

- Issue #14180: time.ctime(), gmtime(), time.localtime(),

datetime.date.fromtimestamp(), datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp() and

datetime.datetime.utcfromtimestamp() now raises an OverflowError, instead of

a ValueError, if the timestamp does not fit in time_t.

- Issue #14180: datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp() and

datetime.datetime.utcfromtimestamp() now round microseconds towards zero

instead of rounding to nearest with ties going away from zero.