+++++++++++

Python News

+++++++++++

What's New in Python 3.4.2?

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

Release date: XXXX-XX-XX

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #21669: With the aid of heuristics in SyntaxError.__init__, the

parser now attempts to generate more meaningful (or at least more search

engine friendly) error messages when "exec" and "print" are used as

statements.

- Issue #21642: If the conditional if-else expression, allow an integer written

with no space between itself and the ``else`` keyword (e.g. ``True if 42else

False``) to be valid syntax.

- Issue #21523: Fix over-pessimistic computation of the stack effect of

some opcodes in the compiler. This also fixes a quadratic compilation

time issue noticeable when compiling code with a large number of "and"

and "or" operators.

Library

-------

- Issue #21491: socketserver: Fix a race condition in child processes reaping.

- Issue #21635: The difflib SequenceMatcher.get_matching_blocks() method

cache didn't match the actual result. The former was a list of tuples

and the latter was a list of named tuples.

- Issue #21722: The distutils "upload" command now exits with a non-zero

return code when uploading fails. Patch by Martin Dengler.

- Issue #21723: asyncio.Queue: support any type of number (ex: float) for the

maximum size. Patch written by Vajrasky Kok.

- Issue #21326: Add a new is_closed() method to asyncio.BaseEventLoop.

run_forever() and run_until_complete() methods of asyncio.BaseEventLoop now

raise an exception if the event loop was closed.

- Issue #21774: Fixed NameError for an incorrect variable reference in the

XML Minidom code for creating processing instructions.

(Found and fixed by Claudiu Popa.)

- Issue #21766: Prevent a security hole in CGIHTTPServer by URL unquoting paths

before checking for a CGI script at that path.

- Issue #21310: Fixed possible resource leak in failed open().

- Issue #21677: Fixed chaining nonnormalized exceptions in io close() methods.

- Issue #11709: Fix the pydoc.help function to not fail when sys.stdin is not a

valid file.

- Issue #13223: Fix pydoc.writedoc so that the HTML documentation for methods

that use 'self' in the example code is generated correctly.

- Issue #21463: In urllib.request, fix pruning of the FTP cache.

- Issue #21618: The subprocess module could fail to close open fds that were

inherited by the calling process and already higher than POSIX resource

limits would otherwise allow. On systems with a functioning /proc/self/fd

or /dev/fd interface the max is now ignored and all fds are closed.

- Issue #21552: Fixed possible integer overflow of too long string lengths in

the tkinter module on 64-bit platforms.

- Issue #14315: The zipfile module now ignores extra fields in the central

directory that are too short to be parsed instead of letting a struct.unpack

error bubble up as this "bad data" appears in many real world zip files in

the wild and is ignored by other zip tools.

- Issue #21402: tkinter.ttk now works when default root window is not set.

- Issue #10203: sqlite3.Row now truly supports sequence protocol. In particulr

it supports reverse() and negative indices. Original patch by Claudiu Popa.

- Issue #18807: If copying (no symlinks) specified for a venv, then the python

interpreter aliases (python, python3) are now created by copying rather than

symlinking.

- Issue #14710: pkgutil.get_loader() no longer raises an exception when None is

found in sys.modules.

- Issue #14710: pkgutil.find_loader() no longer raises an exception when a

module doesn't exist.

- Issue #21481: Argparse equality and inequality tests now return

NotImplemented when comparing to an unknown type.

- Issue #8743: Fix interoperability between set objects and the

collections.Set() abstract base class.

- Issue #13355: random.triangular() no longer fails with a ZeroDivisionError

when low equals high.

- Issue #21538: The plistlib module now supports loading of binary plist files

when reference or offset size is not a power of two.

Build

-----

- Issue #17095: Fix Modules/Setup *shared* support.

IDLE

----

- Issue #21686: add unittest for HyperParser. Original patch by Saimadhav

Heblikar.

- Issue #12387: Add missing upper(lower)case versions of default Windows key

bindings for Idle so Caps Lock does not disable them. Patch by Roger Serwy.

- Issue #21695: Closing a Find-in-files output window while the search is

still in progress no longer closes Idle.

- Issue #18910: Add unittest for textView. Patch by Phil Webster.

- Issue #18292: Add unittest for AutoExpand. Patch by Saihadhav Heblikar.

- Issue #18409: Add unittest for AutoComplete. Patch by Phil Webster.

Tests

-----

- Issue #19493: Refactored the ctypes test package to skip tests explicitly

rather than silently.

- Issue #18492: All resources are now allowed when tests are not run by

regrtest.py.

- Issue #21634: Fix pystone micro-benchmark: use floor division instead of true

division to benchmark integers instead of floating point numbers. Set pystone

version to 1.2. Patch written by Lennart Regebro.

- Issue #21605: Added tests for Tkinter images.

- Issue #21493: Added test for ntpath.expanduser(). Original patch by

Claudiu Popa.

- Issue #19925: Added tests for the spwd module. Original patch by Vajrasky Kok.

- Issue #21522: Added Tkinter tests for Listbox.itemconfigure(),

PanedWindow.paneconfigure(), and Menu.entryconfigure().

Windows

-------

- Issue #21671, CVE-2014-0224: The bundled version of OpenSSL has been

updated to 1.0.1h.

Tools/Demos

-----------

- Issue #21629: Fix Argument Clinic's "--converters" feature.

What's New in Python 3.4.1?

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

Release date: 2014-05-18

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #21418: Fix a crash in the builtin function super() when called without

argument and without current frame (ex: embedded Python).

- Issue #21425: Fix flushing of standard streams in the interactive

interpreter.

- Issue #21435: In rare cases, when running finalizers on objects in cyclic

trash a bad pointer dereference could occur due to a subtle flaw in

internal iteration logic.

Library

-------

- Issue #10744: Fix PEP 3118 format strings on ctypes objects with a nontrivial

shape.

- Issue #20998: Fixed re.fullmatch() of repeated single character pattern

with ignore case. Original patch by Matthew Barnett.

- Issue #21075: fileinput.FileInput now reads bytes from standard stream if

binary mode is specified. Patch by Sam Kimbrel.

- Issue #21396: Fix TextIOWrapper(..., write_through=True) to not force a

flush() on the underlying binary stream. Patch by akira.

- Issue #21470: Do a better job seeding the random number generator by

using enough bytes to span the full state space of the Mersenne Twister.

- Issue #21398: Fix an unicode error in the pydoc pager when the documentation

contains characters not encodable to the stdout encoding.

Tests

-----

- Issue #17756: Fix test_code test when run from the installed location.

- Issue #17752: Fix distutils tests when run from the installed location.

IDLE

----

- Issue #18104: Add idlelib/idle_test/htest.py with a few sample tests to begin

consolidating and improving human-validated tests of Idle. Change other files

as needed to work with htest. Running the module as __main__ runs all tests.

What's New in Python 3.4.1rc1?

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

Release date: 2014-05-05

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #21274: Define PATH_MAX for GNU/Hurd in Python/pythonrun.c.

- Issue #21209: Fix sending tuples to custom generator objects with the yield

from syntax.

- Issue #21134: Fix segfault when str is called on an uninitialized

UnicodeEncodeError, UnicodeDecodeError, or UnicodeTranslateError object.

- Issue #19537: Fix PyUnicode_DATA() alignment under m68k. Patch by

Andreas Schwab.

- Issue #20929: Add a type cast to avoid shifting a negative number.

- Issue #20731: Properly position in source code files even if they

are opened in text mode. Patch by Serhiy Storchaka.

- Issue #20637: Key-sharing now also works for instance dictionaries of

subclasses. Patch by Peter Ingebretson.

- Issue #12546: Allow \x00 to be used as a fill character when using str, int,

float, and complex __format__ methods.

- Issue #13598: Modify string.Formatter to support auto-numbering of

replacement fields. It now matches the behavior of str.format() in

this regard. Patches by Phil Elson and Ramchandra Apte.

Library

-------

- Issue #21088: Bugfix for curses.window.addch() regression in 3.4.0.

In porting to Argument Clinic, the first two arguments were reversed.

- Issue #21469: Reduced the risk of false positives in robotparser by

checking to make sure that robots.txt has been read or does not exist

prior to returning True in can_fetch().

- Issue #21321: itertools.islice() now releases the reference to the source

iterator when the slice is exhausted. Patch by Anton Afanasyev.

- Issue #9815: assertRaises now tries to clear references to local variables

in the exception's traceback.

- Issue #13204: Calling sys.flags.__new__ would crash the interpreter,

now it raises a TypeError.

- Issue #19385: Make operations on a closed dbm.dumb database always raise the

same exception.

- Issue #21207: Detect when the os.urandom cached fd has been closed or

replaced, and open it anew.

- Issue #21291: subprocess's Popen.wait() is now thread safe so that

multiple threads may be calling wait() or poll() on a Popen instance

at the same time without losing the Popen.returncode value.

- Issue #21127: Path objects can now be instantiated from str subclass

instances (such as ``numpy.str_``).

- Issue #15002: urllib.response object to use _TemporaryFileWrapper (and

_TemporaryFileCloser) facility. Provides a better way to handle file

descriptor close. Patch contributed by Christian Theune.

- Issue #12220: mindom now raises a custom ValueError indicating it doesn't

support spaces in URIs instead of letting a 'split' ValueError bubble up.

- Issue #21239: patch.stopall() didn't work deterministically when the same

name was patched more than once.

- Issue #21222: Passing name keyword argument to mock.create_autospec now

works.

- Issue #21197: Add lib64 -> lib symlink in venvs on 64-bit non-OS X POSIX.

- Issue #17498: Some SMTP servers disconnect after certain errors, violating

strict RFC conformance. Instead of losing the error code when we issue the

subsequent RSET, smtplib now returns the error code and defers raising the

SMTPServerDisconnected error until the next command is issued.

- Issue #17826: setting an iterable side_effect on a mock function created by

create_autospec now works. Patch by Kushal Das.

- Issue #7776: Fix ``Host:`` header and reconnection when using

http.client.HTTPConnection.set_tunnel(). Patch by Nikolaus Rath.

- Issue #20968: unittest.mock.MagicMock now supports division.

Patch by Johannes Baiter.

- Fix arbitrary memory access in JSONDecoder.raw_decode with a negative second

parameter. Bug reported by Guido Vranken.

- Issue #21169: getpass now handles non-ascii characters that the

input stream encoding cannot encode by re-encoding using the

replace error handler.

- Issue #21171: Fixed undocumented filter API of the rot13 codec.

Patch by Berker Peksag.

- Issue #21172: isinstance check relaxed from dict to collections.Mapping.

- Issue #21155: asyncio.EventLoop.create_unix_server() now raises a ValueError

if path and sock are specified at the same time.

- Issue #21149: Improved thread-safety in logging cleanup during interpreter

shutdown. Thanks to Devin Jeanpierre for the patch.

- Issue #20145: `assertRaisesRegex` and `assertWarnsRegex` now raise a

TypeError if the second argument is not a string or compiled regex.

- Issue #21058: Fix a leak of file descriptor in

:func:`tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile`, close the file descriptor if

:func:`io.open` fails

- Issue #21200: Return None from pkgutil.get_loader() when __spec__ is missing.

- Issue #21013: Enhance ssl.create_default_context() when used for server side

sockets to provide better security by default.

- Issue #20633: Replace relative import by absolute import.

- Issue #20980: Stop wrapping exception when using ThreadPool.

- Issue #21082: In os.makedirs, do not set the process-wide umask. Note this

changes behavior of makedirs when exist_ok=True.

- Issue #20990: Fix issues found by pyflakes for multiprocessing.

- Issue #21015: SSL contexts will now automatically select an elliptic

curve for ECDH key exchange on OpenSSL 1.0.2 and later, and otherwise

default to "prime256v1".

- Issue #20995: Enhance default ciphers used by the ssl module to enable

better security an prioritize perfect forward secrecy.

- Issue #20884: Don't assume that __file__ is defined on importlib.__init__.

- Issue #21499: Ignore __builtins__ in several test_importlib.test_api tests.

- Issue #20879: Delay the initialization of encoding and decoding tables for

base32, ascii85 and base85 codecs in the base64 module, and delay the

initialization of the unquote_to_bytes() table of the urllib.parse module, to

not waste memory if these modules are not used.

- Issue #19157: Include the broadcast address in the usuable hosts for IPv6

in ipaddress.

- Issue #11599: When an external command (e.g. compiler) fails, distutils now

prints out the whole command line (instead of just the command name) if the

environment variable DISTUTILS_DEBUG is set.

- Issue #4931: distutils should not produce unhelpful "error: None" messages

anymore. distutils.util.grok_environment_error is kept but doc-deprecated.

- Issue #20875: Prevent possible gzip "'read' is not defined" NameError.

Patch by Claudiu Popa.

- Issue #11558: ``email.message.Message.attach`` now returns a more

useful error message if ``attach`` is called on a message for which

``is_multipart`` is False.

- Issue #20283: RE pattern methods now accept the string keyword parameters

as documented. The pattern and source keyword parameters are left as

deprecated aliases.

- Issue #20778: Fix modulefinder to work with bytecode-only modules.

- Issue #20791: copy.copy() now doesn't make a copy when the input is

a bytes object. Initial patch by Peter Otten.

- Issue #19748: On AIX, time.mktime() now raises an OverflowError for year

outsize range [1902; 2037].

- Issue #20816: Fix inspect.getcallargs() to raise correct TypeError for

missing keyword-only arguments. Patch by Jeremiah Lowin.

- Issue #20817: Fix inspect.getcallargs() to fail correctly if more

than 3 arguments are missing. Patch by Jeremiah Lowin.

- Issue #6676: Ensure a meaningful exception is raised when attempting

to parse more than one XML document per pyexpat xmlparser instance.

(Original patches by Hirokazu Yamamoto and Amaury Forgeot d'Arc, with

suggested wording by David Gutteridge)

- Issue #21117: Fix inspect.signature to better support functools.partial.

Due to the specifics of functools.partial implementation,

positional-or-keyword arguments passed as keyword arguments become

keyword-only.

- Issue #21209: Fix asyncio.tasks.CoroWrapper to workaround a bug

in yield-from implementation in CPythons prior to 3.4.1.

- asyncio: Add gi_{frame,running,code} properties to CoroWrapper

(upstream issue #163).

- Issue #21311: Avoid exception in _osx_support with non-standard compiler

configurations. Patch by John Szakmeister.

- Issue #11571: Ensure that the turtle window becomes the topmost window

when launched on OS X.

Extension Modules

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

- Issue #21276: posixmodule: Don't define USE_XATTRS on KFreeBSD and the Hurd.

- Issue #21226: Set up modules properly in PyImport_ExecCodeModuleObject

(and friends).

IDLE

----

- Issue #21139: Change default paragraph width to 72, the PEP 8 recommendation.

- Issue #21284: Paragraph reformat test passes after user changes reformat width.

- Issue #17654: Ensure IDLE menus are customized properly on OS X for

non-framework builds and for all variants of Tk.

Build

-----

- The Windows build now includes OpenSSL 1.0.1g

- Issue #21285: Refactor and fix curses configure check to always search

in a ncursesw directory.

- Issue #15234: For BerkelyDB and Sqlite, only add the found library and

include directories if they aren't already being searched. This avoids

an explicit runtime library dependency.

- Issue #20644: OS X installer build support for documentation build changes

in 3.4.1: assume externally supplied sphinx-build is available in /usr/bin.

C API

-----

- Issue #20942: PyImport_ImportFrozenModuleObject() no longer sets __file__ to

match what importlib does; this affects _frozen_importlib as well as any

module loaded using imp.init_frozen().

Documentation

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

- Issue #17386: Expanded functionality of the ``Doc/make.bat`` script to make

it much more comparable to ``Doc/Makefile``.

- Issue #21043: Remove the recommendation for specific CA organizations and to

mention the ability to load the OS certificates.

- Issue #20765: Add missing documentation for PurePath.with_name() and

PurePath.with_suffix().

- Issue #19407: New package installation and distribution guides based on

the Python Packaging Authority tools. Existing guides have been retained

as legacy links from the distutils docs, as they still contain some

required reference material for tool developers that isn't recorded

anywhere else.

- Issue #19697: Document cases where __main__.__spec__ is None.

Tests

-----

- Issue #18604: Consolidated checks for GUI availability. All platforms now

at least check whether Tk can be instantiated when the GUI resource is

requested.

- Issue #21275: Fix a socket test on KFreeBSD.

- Issue #21223: Pass test_site/test_startup_imports when some of the extensions

are built as builtins.

- Issue #20635: Added tests for Tk geometry managers.

- Add test case for freeze.

- Issue #20743: Fix a reference leak in test_tcl.

- Issue #21097: Move test_namespace_pkgs into test_importlib.

- Issue #20939: Avoid various network test failures due to new

redirect of http://www.python.org/ to https://www.python.org:

use http://www.example.com instead.

- Issue #20668: asyncio tests no longer rely on tests.txt file.

(Patch by Vajrasky Kok)

- Issue #21093: Prevent failures of ctypes test_macholib on OS X if a

copy of libz exists in $HOME/lib or /usr/local/lib.

Tools/Demos

-----------

- Add support for ``yield from`` to 2to3.

- Add support for the PEP 465 matrix multiplication operator to 2to3.

- Issue #16047: Fix module exception list and __file__ handling in freeze.

Patch by Meador Inge.

- Issue #11824: Consider ABI tags in freeze. Patch by Meador Inge.

- Issue #20535: PYTHONWARNING no longer affects the run_tests.py script.

Patch by Arfrever Frehtes Taifersar Arahesis.

What's New in Python 3.4.0?

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

Release date: 2014-03-16

Library

-------

- Issue #20939: Fix test_geturl failure in test_urllibnet due to

new redirect of http://www.python.org/ to https://www.python.org.

Documentation

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

- Merge in all documentation changes since branching 3.4.0rc1.

What's New in Python 3.4.0 release candidate 3?

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

Release date: 2014-03-09

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #20786: Fix signatures for dict.__delitem__ and

property.__delete__ builtins.

Library

-------

- Issue #20839: Don't trigger a DeprecationWarning in the still supported

pkgutil.get_loader() API when __loader__ isn't set on a module (nor

when pkgutil.find_loader() is called directly).

Build

-----

- Issue #14512: Launch pydoc -b instead of pydocgui.pyw on Windows.

- Issue #20748: Uninstalling pip does not leave behind the pyc of

the uninstaller anymore.

- Issue #20568: The Windows installer now installs the unversioned ``pip``

command in addition to the versioned ``pip3`` and ``pip3.4`` commands.

- Issue #20757: The ensurepip helper for the Windows uninstaller now skips

uninstalling pip (rather than failing) if the user has updated pip to a

different version from the one bundled with ensurepip.

- Issue #20465: Update OS X and Windows installer builds to use

SQLite 3.8.3.1.

What's New in Python 3.4.0 release candidate 2?

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

Release date: 2014-02-23

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #20625: Parameter names in __annotations__ were not mangled properly.

Discovered by Jonas Wielicki, patch by Yury Selivanov.

- Issue #20261: In pickle, lookup __getnewargs__ and __getnewargs_ex__ on the

type of the object.

- Issue #20619: Give the AST nodes of keyword-only arguments a column and line

number.

- Issue #20526: Revert changes of issue #19466 which introduces a regression:

don't clear anymore the state of Python threads early during the Python

shutdown.

Library

-------

- Issue #20710: The pydoc summary line no longer displays the "self" parameter

for bound methods.

- Issue #20566: Change asyncio.as_completed() to use a Queue, to

avoid O(N**2) behavior.

- Issue #20704: Implement new debug API in asyncio. Add new methods

BaseEventLoop.set_debug() and BaseEventLoop.get_debug().

Add support for setting 'asyncio.tasks._DEBUG' variable with

'PYTHONASYNCIODEBUG' environment variable.

- asyncio: Refactoring and fixes: BaseEventLoop.sock_connect() raises an

error if the address is not resolved; use __slots__ in Handle and

TimerHandle; as_completed() and wait() raise TypeError if the passed

list of Futures is a single Future; call_soon() and other 'call_*()'

functions raise TypeError if the passed callback is a coroutine

function; _ProactorBasePipeTransport uses _FlowControlMixin;

WriteTransport.set_write_buffer_size() calls _maybe_pause_protocol()

to consider pausing receiving if the watermark limits have changed;

fix _check_resolved_address() for IPv6 address; and other minor

improvements, along with multiple documentation updates.

- Issue #20684: Fix inspect.getfullargspec() to not to follow __wrapped__

chains. Make its behaviour consistent with bound methods first argument.

Patch by Nick Coghlan and Yury Selivanov.

- Issue #20681: Add new error handling API in asyncio. New APIs:

loop.set_exception_handler(), loop.default_exception_handler(), and

loop.call_exception_handler().

- Issue #20673: Implement support for UNIX Domain Sockets in asyncio.

New APIs: loop.create_unix_connection(), loop.create_unix_server(),

streams.open_unix_connection(), and streams.start_unix_server().

- Issue #20616: Add a format() method to tracemalloc.Traceback.

- Issue #19744: the ensurepip installation step now just prints a warning to

stderr rather than failing outright if SSL/TLS is unavailable. This allows

local installation of POSIX builds without SSL/TLS support.

- Issue #20594: Avoid name clash with the libc function posix_close.

Build

-----

- Issue #20641: Run MSI custom actions (pip installation, pyc compilation)

with the NoImpersonate flag, to support elevated execution (UAC).

- Issue #20221: Removed conflicting (or circular) hypot definition when

compiled with VS 2010 or above. Initial patch by Tabrez Mohammed.

- Issue #20609: Restored the ability to build 64-bit Windows binaries on

32-bit Windows, which was broken by the change in issue #19788.

What's New in Python 3.4.0 release candidate 1?

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

Release date: 2014-02-10

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #19255: The builtins module is restored to initial value before

cleaning other modules. The sys and builtins modules are cleaned last.

- Issue #20588: Make Python-ast.c C89 compliant.

- Issue #20437: Fixed 22 potential bugs when deleting objects references.

- Issue #20500: Displaying an exception at interpreter shutdown no longer

risks triggering an assertion failure in PyObject_Str.

- Issue #20538: UTF-7 incremental decoder produced inconsistent string when

input was truncated in BASE64 section.

- Issue #20404: io.TextIOWrapper (and hence the open() builtin) now uses the

internal codec marking system added for issue #19619 to throw LookupError

for known non-text encodings at stream construction time. The existing

output type checks remain in place to deal with unmarked third party

codecs.

- Issue #17162: Add PyType_GetSlot.

- Issue #20162: Fix an alignment issue in the siphash24() hash function which

caused a crash on PowerPC 64-bit (ppc64).

Library

-------

- Issue #20530: The signatures for slot builtins have been updated

to reflect the fact that they only accept positional-only arguments.

- Issue #20517: Functions in the os module that accept two filenames

now register both filenames in the exception on failure.

- Issue #20563: The ipaddress module API is now considered stable.

- Issue #14983: email.generator now always adds a line end after each MIME

boundary marker, instead of doing so only when there is an epilogue. This

fixes an RFC compliance bug and solves an issue with signed MIME parts.

- Issue #20540: Fix a performance regression (vs. Python 3.2) when layering

a multiprocessing Connection over a TCP socket. For small payloads, Nagle's

algorithm would introduce idle delays before the entire transmission of a

message.

- Issue #16983: the new email header parsing code will now decode encoded words

that are (incorrectly) surrounded by quotes, and register a defect.

- Issue #19772: email.generator no longer mutates the message object when

doing a down-transform from 8bit to 7bit CTEs.

- Issue #20536: the statistics module now correctly handle Decimal instances

with positive exponents

- Issue #18805: the netmask/hostmask parsing in ipaddress now more reliably

filters out illegal values and correctly allows any valid prefix length.

- Issue #20481: For at least Python 3.4, the statistics module will require

that all inputs for a single operation be of a single consistent type, or

else a mixed of ints and a single other consistent type. This avoids

some interoperability issues that arose with the previous approach of

coercing to a suitable common type.

- Issue #20478: the statistics module now treats collections.Counter inputs

like any other iterable.

- Issue #17369: get_filename was raising an exception if the filename

parameter's RFC2231 encoding was broken in certain ways. This was

a regression relative to python2.

- Issue #20013: Some imap servers disconnect if the current mailbox is

deleted, and imaplib did not handle that case gracefully. Now it

handles the 'bye' correctly.

- Issue #20531: Revert 3.4 version of fix for #19063, and apply the 3.3

version. That is, do *not* raise an error if unicode is passed to

email.message.Message.set_payload.

- Issue #20476: If a non-compat32 policy is used with any of the email parsers,

EmailMessage is now used as the factory class. The factory class should

really come from the policy; that will get fixed in 3.5.

- Issue #19920: TarFile.list() no longer fails when outputs a listing

containing non-encodable characters. Based on patch by Vajrasky Kok.

- Issue #20515: Fix NULL pointer dereference introduced by issue #20368.

- Issue #19186: Restore namespacing of expat symbols inside the pyexpat module.

- Issue #20053: ensurepip (and hence venv) are no longer affected by the

settings in the default pip configuration file.

- Issue #20426: When passing the re.DEBUG flag, re.compile() displays the

debug output every time it is called, regardless of the compilation cache.

- Issue #20368: The null character now correctly passed from Tcl to Python.

Improved error handling in variables-related commands.

- Issue #20435: Fix _pyio.StringIO.getvalue() to take into account newline

translation settings.

- tracemalloc: Fix slicing traces and fix slicing a traceback.

- Issue #20354: Fix an alignment issue in the tracemalloc module on 64-bit

platforms. Bug seen on 64-bit Linux when using "make profile-opt".

- Issue #17159: inspect.signature now accepts duck types of functions,

which adds support for Cython functions. Initial patch by Stefan Behnel.

- Issue #18801: Fix inspect.classify_class_attrs to correctly classify

object.__new__ and object.__init__.

- Fixed cmath.isinf's name in its argument parsing code.

- Issue #20311, #20452: poll and epoll now round the timeout away from zero,

instead of rounding towards zero, in select and selectors modules:

select.epoll.poll(), selectors.PollSelector.poll() and

selectors.EpollSelector.poll(). For example, a timeout of one microsecond

(1e-6) is now rounded to one millisecondi (1e-3), instead of being rounded to

zero. However, the granularity property and asyncio's resolution feature

were removed again.

- asyncio: Some refactoring; various fixes; add write flow control to

unix pipes; Future.set_exception() instantiates the exception

argument if it is a class; improved proactor pipe transport; support

wait_for(f, None); don't log broken/disconnected pipes; use

ValueError instead of assert for forbidden subprocess_{shell,exec}

arguments; added a convenience API for subprocess management; added

StreamReader.at_eof(); properly handle duplicate coroutines/futures

in gather(), wait(), as_completed(); use a bytearray for buffering

in StreamReader; and more.

- Issue #20288: fix handling of invalid numeric charrefs in HTMLParser.

- Issue #20424: Python implementation of io.StringIO now supports lone surrogates.

- Issue #20308: inspect.signature now works on classes without user-defined

__init__ or __new__ methods.

- Issue #20372: inspect.getfile (and a bunch of other inspect functions that

use it) doesn't crash with unexpected AttributeError on classes defined in C

without __module__.

- Issue #20356: inspect.signature formatting uses '/' to separate

positional-only parameters from others.

- Issue #20223: inspect.signature now supports methods defined with

functools.partialmethods.

- Issue #19456: ntpath.join() now joins relative paths correctly when a drive

is present.

- Issue #19077: tempfile.TemporaryDirectory cleanup no longer fails when

called during shutdown. Emitting resource warning in __del__ no longer fails.

Original patch by Antoine Pitrou.

- Issue #20394: Silence Coverity warning in audioop module.

- Issue #20367: Fix behavior of concurrent.futures.as_completed() for

duplicate arguments. Patch by Glenn Langford.

- Issue #8260: The read(), readline() and readlines() methods of

codecs.StreamReader returned incomplete data when were called after

readline() or read(size). Based on patch by Amaury Forgeot d'Arc.

- Issue #20105: the codec exception chaining now correctly sets the

traceback of the original exception as its __traceback__ attribute.

- Issue #17481: inspect.getfullargspec() now uses inspect.signature() API.

- Issue #15304: concurrent.futures.wait() can block forever even if

Futures have completed. Patch by Glenn Langford.

- Issue #14455: plistlib: fix serializing integers integers in the range

of an unsigned long long but outside of the range of signed long long for

binary plist files.

IDLE

----

- Issue #20406: Use Python application icons for Idle window title bars.

Patch mostly by Serhiy Storchaka.

- Update the python.gif icon for the Idle classbrowser and pathbowser

from the old green snake to the new new blue and yellow snakes.

- Issue #17721: Remove non-functional configuration dialog help button until we

make it actually gives some help when clicked. Patch by Guilherme Simões.

Tests

-----

- Issue #20532: Tests which use _testcapi now are marked as CPython only.

- Issue #19920: Added tests for TarFile.list(). Based on patch by Vajrasky Kok.

- Issue #19990: Added tests for the imghdr module. Based on patch by

Claudiu Popa.

- Issue #20474: Fix test_socket "unexpected success" failures on OS X 10.7+.

Tools/Demos

-----------

- Issue #20530: Argument Clinic's signature format has been revised again.

The new syntax is highly human readable while still preventing false

positives. The syntax also extends Python syntax to denote "self" and

positional-only parameters, allowing inspect.Signature objects to be

totally accurate for all supported builtins in Python 3.4.

- Issue #20456: Argument Clinic now observes the C preprocessor conditional

compilation statements of the C files it parses. When a Clinic block is

inside a conditional code, it adjusts its output to match, including

automatically generating an empty methoddef macro.

- Issue #20456: Cloned functions in Argument Clinic now use the correct

name, not the name of the function they were cloned from, for text

strings inside generated code.

- Issue #20456: Fixed Argument Clinic's test suite and "--converters" feature.

- Issue #20456: Argument Clinic now allows specifying different names

for a parameter in Python and C, using "as" on the parameter line.

- Issue #20326: Argument Clinic now uses a simple, unique signature to

annotate text signatures in docstrings, resulting in fewer false

positives. "self" parameters are also explicitly marked, allowing

inspect.Signature() to authoritatively detect (and skip) said parameters.

- Issue #20326: Argument Clinic now generates separate checksums for the

input and output sections of the block, allowing external tools to verify

that the input has not changed (and thus the output is not out-of-date).

Build

-----

- Issue #20465: Update SQLite shipped with OS X installer to 3.8.3.

C-API

-----

- Issue #20517: Added new functions allowing OSError exceptions to reference

two filenames instead of one: PyErr_SetFromErrnoWithFilenameObjects() and

PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilenameObjects().

Documentation

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

- Issue #20488: Change wording to say importlib is *the* implementation of

import instead of just *an* implementation.

- Issue #6386: Clarify in the tutorial that specifying a symlink to execute

means the directory containing the executed script and not the symlink is

added to sys.path.

What's New in Python 3.4.0 Beta 3?

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

Release date: 2014-01-26

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #20189: Four additional builtin types (PyTypeObject,

PyMethodDescr_Type, _PyMethodWrapper_Type, and PyWrapperDescr_Type)

have been modified to provide introspection information for builtins.

- Issue #17825: Cursor "^" is correctly positioned for SyntaxError and

IndentationError.

- Issue #2382: SyntaxError cursor "^" is now written at correct position in most

cases when multibyte characters are in line (before "^"). This still not

works correctly with wide East Asian characters.

- Issue #18960: The first line of Python script could be executed twice when

the source encoding was specified on the second line. Now the source encoding

declaration on the second line isn't effective if the first line contains

anything except a comment. 'python -x' works now again with files with the

source encoding declarations, and can be used to make Python batch files

on Windows.

Library

-------

- asyncio: Various improvements and small changes not all covered by

issues listed below. E.g. wait_for() now cancels the inner task if

the timeout occcurs; tweaked the set of exported symbols; renamed

Empty/Full to QueueEmpty/QueueFull; "with (yield from lock)" now

uses a separate context manager; readexactly() raises if not enough

data was read; PTY support tweaks.

- Issue #20311: asyncio: Add a granularity attribute to BaseEventLoop: maximum

between the resolution of the BaseEventLoop.time() method and the resolution

of the selector. The granuarility is used in the scheduler to round time and

deadline.

- Issue #20311: selectors: Add a resolution attribute to BaseSelector.

- Issue #20189: unittest.mock now no longer assumes that any object for

which it could get an inspect.Signature is a callable written in Python.

Fix courtesy of Michael Foord.

- Issue #20317: ExitStack.__exit__ could create a self-referential loop if an

exception raised by a cleanup operation already had its context set

correctly (for example, by the @contextmanager decorator). The infinite

loop this caused is now avoided by checking if the expected context is

already set before trying to fix it.

- Issue #20374: Fix build with GNU readline >= 6.3.

- Issue #20262: Warnings are raised now when duplicate names are added in the

ZIP file or too long ZIP file comment is truncated.

- Issue #20165: The unittest module no longer considers tests marked with

@expectedFailure successful if they pass.

- Issue #18574: Added missing newline in 100-Continue reply from

http.server.BaseHTTPRequestHandler. Patch by Nikolaus Rath.

- Issue #20270: urllib.urlparse now supports empty ports.

- Issue #20243: TarFile no longer raise ReadError when opened in write mode.

- Issue #20238: TarFile opened with external fileobj and "w:gz" mode didn't

write complete output on close.

- Issue #20245: The open functions in the tarfile module now correctly handle

empty mode.

- Issue #20242: Fixed basicConfig() format strings for the alternative

formatting styles. Thanks to kespindler for the bug report and patch.