+++++++++++

Python News

+++++++++++

What's New in Python 3.2.4

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

*Release date: XX-XX-XXXX*

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #6074: Ensure cached bytecode files can always be updated by the

user that created them, even when the source file is read-only.

- Issue #14783: Improve int() docstring and switch docstrings for str(),

range(), and slice() to use multi-line signatures.

- Issue #15379: Fix passing of non-BMP characters as integers for the charmap

decoder (already working as unicode strings). Patch by Serhiy Storchaka.

- Issue #13992: The trashcan mechanism is now thread-safe. This eliminates

sporadic crashes in multi-thread programs when several long deallocator

chains ran concurrently and involved subclasses of built-in container

types.

- Issue #15846: Fix SystemError which happened when using ast.parse in an

exception handler on code with syntax errors.

- Issue #15761: Fix crash when PYTHONEXECUTABLE is set on Mac OS X.

- Issue #15801: Make sure mappings passed to '%' formatting are actually

subscriptable.

- Issue #15726: Fix incorrect bounds checking in PyState_FindModule.

Patch by Robin Schreiber.

- Issue #15604: Update uses of PyObject_IsTrue() to check for and handle

errors correctly. Patch by Serhiy Storchaka.

- Issue #13119: sys.stdout and sys.stderr are now using "\r\n" newline on

Windows, as Python 2.

- Issue #14579: Fix CVE-2012-2135: vulnerability in the utf-16 decoder after

error handling. Patch by Serhiy Storchaka.

- Issue #15404: Refleak in PyMethodObject repr.

- Issue #15394: An issue in PyModule_Create that caused references to

be leaked on some error paths has been fixed. Patch by Julia Lawall.

- Issue #15368: An issue that caused bytecode generation to be

non-deterministic when using randomized hashing (-R) has been fixed.

- Issue #15020: The program name used to search for Python's path is now

"python3" under Unix, not "python".

- Issue #15897: zipimport.c doesn't check return value of fseek().

Patch by Felipe Cruz.

- Issue #15033: Fix the exit status bug when modules invoked using -m swith,

return the proper failure return value (1). Patch contributed by Jeff Knupp.

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

created using PyType_FromSpec().

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

the work by Hirokazu Yamamoto.

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

collector repeatedly trying to untrack dicts.

- 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 #14761: Fix potential leak on an error case in the import machinery.

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

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

is closed.

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

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

- 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.

- 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.

- 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 #14172: Fix reference leak when marshalling a buffer-like object

(other than a bytes object).

- Issue #13521: dict.setdefault() now does only one lookup for the given key,

making it "atomic" for many purposes. Patch by Filip Gruszczyński.

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

Library

-------

- Issue #12890: cgitb no longer prints spurious <p> tags in text

mode when the logdir option is specified.

- Issue #16250: Fix URLError invocation with proper args.

- Issue #16305: Fix a segmentation fault occurring when interrupting

math.factorial.

- Issue #14398: Fix size truncation and overflow bugs in the bz2 module.

- Issue #16220: wsgiref now always calls close() on an iterable response.

Patch by Brent Tubbs.

- Issue #16270: urllib may hang when used for retrieving files via FTP by using

a context manager. Patch by Giampaolo Rodola'.

- Issue #16176: Properly identify Windows 8 via platform.platform()

- Issue #16114: The subprocess module no longer provides a misleading

error message stating that args[0] did not exist when either the cwd or

executable keyword arguments specified a path that did not exist.

- Issue #15756: subprocess.poll() now properly handles errno.ECHILD to

return a returncode of 0 when the child has already exited or cannot

be waited on.

- Issue #12376: Pass on parameters in TextTestResult.__init__ super call

- Issue #15222: Insert blank line after each message in mbox mailboxes

- Issue #16013: Fix CSV Reader parsing issue with ending quote characters.

Patch by Serhiy Storchaka.

- Issue #15421: fix an OverflowError in Calendar.itermonthdates() after

datetime.MAXYEAR. Patch by Cédric Krier.

- Issue #15970: xml.etree.ElementTree now serializes correctly the empty HTML

elements 'meta' and 'param'.

- Issue #15842: the SocketIO.{readable,writable,seekable} methods now

raise ValueError when the file-like object is closed. Patch by Alessandro

Moura.

- Issue #15881: Fixed atexit hook in multiprocessing. Original patch

by Chris McDonough.

- Issue #15340: Fix importing the random module when /dev/urandom cannot

be opened. This was a regression caused by the hash randomization patch.

- Issue #15841: The readable(), writable() and seekable() methods of BytesIO

and StringIO objects now raise ValueError when the object has been closed.

Patch by Alessandro Moura.

- Issue #15509: webbrowser.UnixBrowser no longer passes empty arguments to

Popen when %action substitutions produce empty strings.

- Issue #16112: platform.architecture does not correctly escape argument to

/usr/bin/file. Patch by David Benjamin.

- Issue #12776,#11839: call argparse type function (specified by add_argument)

only once. Before, the type function was called twice in the case where the

default was specified and the argument was given as well. This was

especially problematic for the FileType type, as a default file would always

be opened, even if a file argument was specified on the command line.

- Issue #15906: Fix a regression in argparse caused by the preceding change,

when action='append', type='str' and default=[].

- Issue #13370: Ensure that ctypes works on Mac OS X when Python is

compiled using the clang compiler

- Issue #15544: Fix Decimal.__float__ to work with payload-carrying NaNs.

- Issue #15249: BytesGenerator now correctly mangles From lines (when

requested) even if the body contains undecodable bytes.

- Issue #15777: Fix a refleak in _posixsubprocess.

- Issue #15199: Fix JavaScript's default MIME type to application/javascript.

Patch by Bohuslav Kabrda.

- Issue #13579: string.Formatter now understands the 'a' conversion specifier.

- Issue #15793: Stack corruption in ssl.RAND_egd().

Patch by Serhiy Storchaka.

- Issue #15595: Fix subprocess.Popen(universal_newlines=True)

for certain locales (utf-16 and utf-32 family). Patch by Chris Jerdonek.

- Issue #15477: In cmath and math modules, add workaround for platforms whose

system-supplied log1p function doesn't respect signs of zeros.

- Issue #11062: Fix adding a message from file to Babyl mailbox.

- Issue #15646: Prevent equivalent of a fork bomb when using

multiprocessing on Windows without the "if __name__ == '__main__'"

idiom.

- Issue #15424: Add a __sizeof__ implementation for array objects.

Patch by Ludwig Hähne.

- Issue #13052: Fix IDLE crashing when replace string in Search/Replace dialog

ended with '\'. Patch by Roger Serwy.

- Issue #15538: Fix compilation of the getnameinfo() / getaddrinfo()

emulation code. Patch by Philipp Hagemeister.

- Issue #9803: Don't close IDLE on saving if breakpoint is open.

Patch by Roger Serwy.

- Issue #12288: Consider '0' and '0.0' as valid initialvalue

for tkinter SimpleDialog.

- Issue #15512: Add a __sizeof__ implementation for parser.

Patch by Serhiy Storchaka.

- Issue #15469: Add a __sizeof__ implementation for deque objects.

Patch by Serhiy Storchaka.

- Issue #15489: Add a __sizeof__ implementation for BytesIO objects.

Patch by Serhiy Storchaka.

- Issue #15487: Add a __sizeof__ implementation for buffered I/O objects.

Patch by Serhiy Storchaka.

- Issue #6056: Make multiprocessing use setblocking(True) on the

sockets it uses. Original patch by J Derek Wilson.

- Issue #15041: update "see also" list in tkinter documentation.

- Issue #15402: An issue in the struct module that caused sys.getsizeof to

return incorrect results for struct.Struct instances has been fixed.

Initial patch by Serhiy Storchaka.

- Issue #15232: when mangle_from is True, email.Generator now correctly mangles

lines that start with 'From ' that occur in a MIME preamble or epilogue.

- Issue #13922: argparse no longer incorrectly strips '--'s that appear

after the first one.

- Issue #12353: argparse now correctly handles null argument values.

- Issues #10017 and #14998: Fix TypeError using pprint on dictionaries with

user-defined types as keys or other unorderable keys.

- Issue #14635: telnetlib will use poll() rather than select() when possible

to avoid failing due to the select() file descriptor limit.

- Issue #15180: Clarify posixpath.join() error message when mixing str & bytes

- Issue #15230: runpy.run_path now correctly sets __package__ as described

in the documentation

- Issue #14990: Correctly fail with SyntaxError on invalid encoding

declaration.

- Issue #15247: FileIO now raises an error when given a file descriptor

pointing to a directory.

- Issue #5346: Preserve permissions of mbox, MMDF and Babyl mailbox

files on flush().

- Issue #10571: Fix the "--sign" option of distutils' upload command.

Patch by Jakub Wilk.

- Issue #9559: If messages were only added, a new file is no longer

created and renamed over the old file when flush() is called on an

mbox, MMDF or Babyl mailbox.

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

mktime() when timezone offest is supplied.

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

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

- 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 #10133: Make multiprocessing deallocate buffer if socket read

fails. Patch by Hallvard B Furuseth.

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

options. Patch by Roger Serwy.

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

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

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

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

Header in Cookie.py.

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

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

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

Authentation in urllib2.

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

- 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.

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

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

- 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.

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

Patch by Popa Claudiu.

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

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

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

attribute.

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

(mostly the new Bytes classes).

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

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

- Issue #14062: Header objects now correctly respect the 'linesep' setting

when processed by BytesParser (which smtplib.SMTP.send_message uses).

- 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 #5219: Prevent event handler cascade in IDLE.

- 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 #10543: Fix unittest test discovery with Jython bytecode files.

- Issue #14252: Fix subprocess.Popen.terminate() to not raise an error under

Windows when the child process has already exited.

- Issue #14195: An issue that caused weakref.WeakSet instances to incorrectly

return True for a WeakSet instance 'a' in both 'a < a' and 'a > a' has been

fixed.

- Issue #14177: marshal.loads() now raises TypeError when given an unicode

string. Patch by Guilherme Gonçalves.

- Issue #14159: Fix the len() of weak containers (WeakSet, WeakKeyDictionary,

WeakValueDictionary) to return a better approximation when some objects

are dead or dying. Moreover, the implementation is now O(1) rather than

O(n).

- Issue #13125: Silence spurious test_lib2to3 output when in non-verbose mode.

Patch by Mikhail Novikov.

- Issue #13447: Add a test file to host regression tests for bugs in the

scripts found in the Tools directory.

- Issue #8033: sqlite3: Fix 64-bit integer handling in user functions

on 32-bit architectures. Initial patch by Philippe Devalkeneer.

Extension Modules

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

- Issue #16012: Fix a regression in pyexpat. The parser's UseForeignDTD()

method doesn't require an argument again.

- Issue #15676: Now "mmap" check for empty files before doing the

offset check. Patch by Steven Willis.

- Issue #6493: An issue in ctypes on Windows that caused structure bitfields

of type ctypes.c_uint32 and width 32 to incorrectly be set has been fixed.

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

- Issue #9041: An issue in ctypes.c_longdouble, ctypes.c_double, and

ctypes.c_float that caused an incorrect exception to be returned in the

case of overflow has been fixed.

- Issue #14212: The re module didn't retain a reference to buffers it was

scanning, resulting in segfaults.

Tests

-----

- Issue #15304: Fix warning message when os.chdir() fails inside

test.support.temp_cwd(). Patch by Chris Jerdonek.

- Issue #15802: Fix test logic in TestMaildir.test_create_tmp. Patch

by Serhiy Storchaka.

- Issue #15747: ZFS always returns EOPNOTSUPP when attempting to set the

UF_IMMUTABLE flag (via either chflags or lchflags); refactor affected

tests in test_posix.py to account for this.

- Issue #15285: Refactor the approach for testing connect timeouts using

two external hosts that have been configured specifically for this type

of test.

- Issue #15615: Add some tests for the json module's handling of invalid

input data. Patch by Kushal Das.

- Issue #15496: Add directory removal helpers for tests on Windows.

Patch by Jeremy Kloth.

- Issue #15467: Move helpers for __sizeof__ tests into test_support.

Patch by Serhiy Storchaka.

- Issue #15320: Make iterating the list of tests thread-safe when running

tests in multiprocess mode. Patch by Chris Jerdonek.

- Issue #15230: Adopted a more systematic approach in the runpy tests

- Issue #15300: Ensure the temporary test working directories are in the same

parent folder when running tests in multiprocess mode from a Python build.

Patch by Chris Jerdonek.

- 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 #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.

Build

-----

- Issue #16262: fix out-of-src-tree builds, if mercurial is not installed.

- Issue #15923: fix a mistake in asdl_c.py that resulted in a TypeError after

2801bf875a24 (see #15801).

- Issue #11715: Fix multiarch detection without having Debian development

tools (dpkg-dev) installed.

- Issue #15819: Make sure we can build Python out-of-tree from a readonly

source directory. (Somewhat related to Issue #9860.)

- Issue #15822: Ensure 2to3 grammar pickles are properly installed.

- Issue #15560: Fix building _sqlite3 extension on OS X with an SDK.

- Issue #8847: Disable COMDAT folding in Windows PGO builds.

- Issue #14197: For OS X framework builds, ensure links to the shared

library are created with the proper ABI suffix.

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

- The Windows build now uses OpenSSL 1.0.0j and bzip2 1.0.6.

- Issue #14557: Fix extensions build on HP-UX. Patch by Adi Roiban.

- Issue #14437: Fix building the _io module under Cygwin.

- Issue #14387: Do not include accu.h from Python.h.

- Issue #14359: Only use O_CLOEXEC in _posixmodule.c if it is defined.

Based on patch from Hervé Coatanhay.

- Issue #14018: Fix OS X Tcl/Tk framework checking when using OS X SDKs.

Documentation

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

- Issue #8040: added a version switcher to the documentation. Patch by

Yury Selivanov.

- Issue #16115: Improve subprocess.Popen() documentation around args, shell,

and executable arguments.

- Issue #13498: Clarify docs of os.makedirs()'s exist_ok argument. Done with

great native-speaker help from R. David Murray.

- Issue #15533: Clarify docs and add tests for subprocess.Popen()'s cwd

argument.

- Issue #15979: Improve timeit documentation.

- Issue #16036: Improve documentation of built-in int()'s signature and

arguments.

- Issue #15935: Clarification of argparse docs, re: add_argument() type and

default arguments. Patch contributed by Chris Jerdonek.

- Issue #11964: Document a change in v3.2 to the behavior of the indent

parameter of json encoding operations.

- Issue #14674: Add a discussion of the json module's standard compliance.

Patch by Chris Rebert.

- Issue #15630: Add an example for "continue" stmt in the tutorial. Patch by

Daniel Ellis.

- Issue #15444: Use proper spelling for non-ASCII contributor names. Patch

by Serhiy Storchaka.

- Issue 15482: Properly document the default 'level' value for __import__()

while warning about using negative values.

- Issue #15230: Clearly document some of the limitations of the runpy

module and nudge readers towards importlib when appropriate.

- Issue #13557: Clarify effect of giving two different namespaces to exec or

execfile().

- Issue #8799: Fix and improve the threading.Condition documentation.

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

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

- Issue #14034: added the argparse tutorial.

- Issue #15250: Document that filecmp.dircmp compares files shallowly. Patch

contributed by Chris Jerdonek.

Tools/Demos

-----------

- Issue #15378: Fix Tools/unicode/comparecodecs.py. Patch by Serhiy Storchaka.

- Issue #14695: Fix missing support for starred assignments in

Tools/parser/unparse.py.

What's New in Python 3.2.3?

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

*Release date: 10-Apr-2012*

Build

-----

- Issue #14387: Work around a problem building extension modules under Windows

by undefining ``small`` before use in the Python headers.

What's New in Python 3.2.3 release candidate 2?

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

*Release date: 18-Mar-2012*

Library

-------

- Issue #6884: Fix long-standing bugs with MANIFEST.in parsing in distutils

on Windows.

Extension Modules

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

- 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.

What's New in Python 3.2.3 release candidate 1?

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

*Release date: 24-Feb-2012*

Core and Builtins

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

- Issue #13703: oCERT-2011-003: add -R command-line option and PYTHONHASHSEED

environment variable, to provide an opt-in way to protect against denial of

service attacks due to hash collisions within the dict and set types. Patch

by David Malcolm, based on work by Victor Stinner.

- Issue #14084: Fix a file descriptor leak when importing a module with a

bad encoding.

- Issue #13020: Fix a reference leak when allocating a structsequence object

fails. Patch by Suman Saha.

- Issue #13908: Ready types returned from PyType_FromSpec.

- Issue #11235: Fix OverflowError when trying to import a source file whose

modification time doesn't fit in a 32-bit timestamp.

- Fix the builtin module initialization code to store the init function for

future reinitialization.

- Issue #8052: The posix subprocess module would take a long time closing

all possible file descriptors in the child process rather than just open

file descriptors. It now closes only the open fds if possible for the

default close_fds=True behavior.

- Issue #13629: Renumber the tokens in token.h so that they match the indexes

into _PyParser_TokenNames.

- Fix the fix for issue #12149: it was incorrect, although it had the side

effect of appearing to resolve the issue. Thanks to Mark Shannon for

noticing.

- Issue #13505: Pickle bytes objects in a way that is compatible with

Python 2 when using protocols <= 2.

- Issue #11147: Fix an unused argument in _Py_ANNOTATE_MEMORY_ORDER. (Fix

given by Campbell Barton).

- Issue #7111: Python can now be run without a stdin, stdout or stderr

stream. It was already the case with Python 2. However, the corresponding

sys module entries are now set to None (instead of an unusable file object).

- Issue #13436: Fix a bogus error message when an AST object was passed

an invalid integer value.

- Issue #13338: Handle all enumerations in _Py_ANNOTATE_MEMORY_ORDER

to allow compiling extension modules with -Wswitch-enum on gcc.

Initial patch by Floris Bruynooghe.

- Issue #13333: The UTF-7 decoder now accepts lone surrogates (the encoder

already accepts them).

- Issue #13342: input() used to ignore sys.stdin's and sys.stdout's unicode

error handler in interactive mode (when calling into PyOS_Readline()).

- Issue #13343: Fix a SystemError when a lambda expression uses a global

variable in the default value of a keyword-only argument:

(lambda *, arg=GLOBAL_NAME: None)

- Issue #10519: Avoid unnecessary recursive function calls in

setobject.c.

- Issue #10363: Deallocate global locks in Py_Finalize().

- Issue #13018: Fix reference leaks in error paths in dictobject.c.

Patch by Suman Saha.

- Issue #1294232: In a few cases involving metaclass inheritance, the

interpreter would sometimes invoke the wrong metaclass when building a new

class object. These cases now behave correctly. Patch by Daniel Urban.

- Issue #12604: VTRACE macro expanded to no-op in _sre.c to avoid compiler

warnings. Patch by Josh Triplett and Petri Lehtinen.

- Issue #13188: When called without an explicit traceback argument,

generator.throw() now gets the traceback from the passed exception's

``__traceback__`` attribute. Patch by Petri Lehtinen.

- Issue #7833: Extension modules built using distutils on Windows will no

longer include a "manifest" to prevent them failing at import time in some

embedded situations.

- Issue #13063: the Windows error ERROR_NO_DATA (numbered 232 and described

as "The pipe is being closed") is now mapped to POSIX errno EPIPE

(previously EINVAL).

- Issue #12911: Fix memory consumption when calculating the repr() of huge

tuples or lists.

- Issue #7732: Don't open a directory as a file anymore while importing a

module. Ignore the direcotry if its name matchs the module name (e.g.

"__init__.py") and raise a ImportError instead.

- Issue #13021: Missing decref on an error path. Thanks to Suman Saha for

finding the bug and providing a patch.

- Issue #12973: Fix overflow checks that relied on undefined behaviour in

list_repeat (listobject.c) and islice_next (itertoolsmodule.c). These bugs

caused test failures with recent versions of Clang.

- Issue #12802: the Windows error ERROR_DIRECTORY (numbered 267) is now

mapped to POSIX errno ENOTDIR (previously EINVAL).

- Issue #9200: The str.is* methods now work with strings that contain non-BMP

characters even in narrow Unicode builds.

- Issue #12791: Break reference cycles early when a generator exits with

an exception.

- Issue #12266: Fix str.capitalize() to correctly uppercase/lowercase

titlecased and cased non-letter characters.

Library

-------

- HTMLParser is now able to handle slashes in the start tag.

- Issue #14001: CVE-2012-0845: xmlrpc: Fix an endless loop in

SimpleXMLRPCServer upon malformed POST request.

- Issue #2489: pty.spawn could consume 100% cpu when it encountered an EOF.

- Issue #13014: Fix a possible reference leak in SSLSocket.getpeercert().

- Issue #13015: Fix a possible reference leak in defaultdict.__repr__.

Patch by Suman Saha.

- Issue #1326113: distutils' build_ext command --libraries option now

correctly parses multiple values separated by whitespace or commas.

- Issue #10287: nntplib now queries the server's CAPABILITIES first before

sending MODE READER, and only sends it if not already in READER mode.

Patch by Hynek Schlawack.

- Issue #13979: A bug in ctypes.util.find_library that caused

the wrong library name to be returned has been fixed.

- Issue #13993: HTMLParser is now able to handle broken end tags when

strict=False.

- Issue #9750: Fix sqlite3.Connection.iterdump on tables and fields

with a name that is a keyword or contains quotes. Patch by Marko

Kohtala.

- Issue #10287: nntplib now queries the server's CAPABILITIES again after

authenticating (since the result may change, according to RFC 4643).

Patch by Hynek Schlawack.

- Issue #13989: Document that GzipFile does not support text mode, and give a

more helpful error message when opened with an invalid mode string.

- Issue #13590: On OS X 10.7 and 10.6 with Xcode 4.2, building

Distutils-based packages with C extension modules may fail because

Apple has removed gcc-4.2, the version used to build python.org

64-bit/32-bit Pythons. If the user does not explicitly override

the default C compiler by setting the CC environment variable,

Distutils will now attempt to compile extension modules with clang

if gcc-4.2 is required but not found. Also as a convenience, if

the user does explicitly set CC, substitute its value as the default

compiler in the Distutils LDSHARED configuration variable for OS X.

(Note, the python.org 32-bit-only Pythons use gcc-4.0 and the 10.4u

SDK, neither of which are available in Xcode 4. This change does not

attempt to override settings to support their use with Xcode 4.)

- Issue #13960: HTMLParser is now able to handle broken comments when

strict=False.

- Issue #9021: Add an introduction to the copy module documentation.

- Issue #6005: Examples in the socket library documentation use sendall, where

relevant, instead send method.

- Issue #10811: Fix recursive usage of cursors. Instead of crashing,

raise a ProgrammingError now.

- Issue #10881: Fix test_site failure with OS X framework builds.

- Issue #964437: Make IDLE help window non-modal.

Patch by Guilherme Polo and Roger Serwy.

- Issue #2945: Make the distutils upload command aware of bdist_rpm products.

- Issue #13933: IDLE auto-complete did not work with some imported

module, like hashlib. (Patch by Roger Serwy)

- Issue #13901: Prevent test_distutils failures on OS X with --enable-shared.

- Issue #13676: Handle strings with embedded zeros correctly in sqlite3.

- Issue #13506: Add '' to path for IDLE Shell when started and restarted with Restart Shell.

Original patches by Marco Scataglini and Roger Serwy.

- Issue #13848: open() and the FileIO constructor now check for NUL

characters in the file name. Patch by Hynek Schlawack.

- Issue #13806: The size check in audioop decompression functions was too

strict and could reject valid compressed data. Patch by Oleg Plakhotnyuk.

- Issue #13812: When a multiprocessing Process child raises an exception,

flush stderr after printing the exception traceback.

- Issue #13885: CVE-2011-3389: the _ssl module would always disable the CBC

IV attack countermeasure.

- Issue #13772: In os.symlink() under Windows, do not try to guess the link

target's type (file or directory). The detection was buggy and made the

call non-atomic (therefore prone to race conditions).

- Issue #6631: Disallow relative file paths in urllib urlopen methods.

- Issue #13722: Avoid silencing ImportErrors when initializing the codecs

registry.

- Issue #13781: Fix GzipFile bug that caused an exception to be raised when

opening for writing using a fileobj returned by os.fdopen().

- Issue #13803: Under Solaris, distutils doesn't include bitness

in the directory name.

- Issue #13589: Fix some serialization primitives in the aifc module.

Patch by Oleg Plakhotnyuk.

- Issue #13642: Unquote before b64encoding user:password during Basic

Authentication. Patch contributed by Joonas Kuorilehto.

- Issue #13726: Fix the ambiguous -S flag in regrtest. It is -o/--slow for slow

tests.

- Issue #12364: Fix a hang in concurrent.futures.ProcessPoolExecutor.

The hang would occur when retrieving the result of a scheduled future after

the executor had been shut down.

- Issue #13502: threading: Fix a race condition in Event.wait() that made it

return False when the event was set and cleared right after.

- Issue #12926: Fix a bug in tarfile's link extraction.

- Issue #13696: Fix the 302 Relative URL Redirection problem.

- Issue #13636: Weak ciphers are now disabled by default in the ssl module

(except when SSLv2 is explicitly asked for).

- Issue #12798: Updated the mimetypes documentation.

- Issue #11006: Don't issue low level warning in subprocess when pipe2() fails.

- Issue #11829: Fix code execution holes in inspect.getattr_static for

metaclasses with metaclasses. Patch by Andreas Stührk.

- Issue #1785: Fix inspect and pydoc with misbehaving descriptors.

- Issue #11813: Fix inspect.getattr_static for modules. Patch by Andreas

Stührk.

- Issue #7502: Fix equality comparison for DocTestCase instances. Patch by

Cédric Krier.

- Issue #11870: threading: Properly reinitialize threads internal locks and

condition variables to avoid deadlocks in child processes.

- Issue #8035: urllib: Fix a bug where the client could remain stuck after a

redirection or an error.