Log Message:
Update to 2.6.3:

What's New in Python 2.6.3
==========================

*Release date: 02-Oct-2009*

What's New in Python 2.6.3rc1
=============================

*Release date: 29-Sep-2009*

Core and Builtins
-----------------

- Issue #5329: Fix os.popen* regression from 2.5 with commands as a
  sequence running through the shell.  Patch by Jean-Paul Calderone
  and Jani Hakala.

- Issue #6990: Fix threading.local subclasses leaving old state around
  after a reference cycle GC which could be recycled by new locals.

- Issue #6922: Fix an infinite loop when trying to decode an invalid
  UTF-32 stream with a non-raising error handler like "replace" or \ 
"ignore".

- Issue #1590864: Fix potential deadlock when mixing threads and fork().

- Issue #6844: Do not emit DeprecationWarnings when accessing a "message"
  attribute on exceptions that was set explicitly.

- Issue #6846: Fix bug where bytearray.pop() returns negative integers.

- Issue #6707: dir() on an uninitialized module caused a crash.

- Issue #6540: Fixed crash for bytearray.translate() with invalid parameters.

- Issue #6573: set.union() stopped processing inputs if an instance of self
  occurred in the argument chain.

- Issue #6070: On posix platforms import no longer copies the execute bit
  from the .py file to the .pyc file if it is set.

- Issue #4547: When debugging a very large function, it was not always
  possible to update the lineno attribute of the current frame.

- Issue #4618: When unicode arguments are passed to print(), the default
  separator and end should be unicode also.

- Issue #6119: Fixed a incorrect Py3k warning about order comparisons of
  builtin functions and methods.

- Issue #5330: C functions called with keyword arguments were not reported by
  the various profiling modules (profile, cProfile). Patch by Hagen Fürstenau.

- Issue #6089: str.format can raise SystemError with certain invalid
  field specifiers.

- Issue #5994: the marshal module now has docstrings.

- Issue #5981: Fix two minor inf/nan issues in float.fromhex: (1) inf
  and nan strings with trailing whitespace were incorrectly rejected
  and (2) the interpretation of fromhex('-nan') didn't match that of
  float('-nan').

- Issue #5890: in subclasses of 'property' the __doc__ attribute was
  shadowed by classtype's, even if it was None.  property now
  inserts the __doc__ into the subclass instance __dict__.

- Issue #5724: (See also issue #4575.) Fix Py_IS_INFINITY macro to
  work correctly on x87 FPUs: it now forces its argument to double
  before testing for infinity.

- Issue #4971: Fix titlecase for characters that are their own
  titlecase, but not their own uppercase.

- Issue #5829: complex('1e-500') no longer raises an exception

- Issue #5787: object.__getattribute__(some_type, "__bases__") \ 
segfaulted on
  some builtin types.

- Issue #5283: Setting __class__ in __del__ caused a segfault.

- Issue #5759: float() didn't call __float__ on str subclasses.

- Issue #5108: Handle %s like %S and %R in PyUnicode_FromFormatV(): Call
  PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8() once, remember the result and output it in a second
  step. This avoids problems with counting UTF-8 bytes that ignores the effect
  of using the replace error handler in PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8().

Library
-------

- Issue #6790: Make it possible again to pass an `array.array` to
  `httplib.HTTPConnection.send`. Patch by Kirk McDonald.

- Issue #6236, #6348: Fix various failures in the `io` module under AIX
  and other platforms, when using a non-gcc compiler. Patch by egreen.

- Issue #6851: Fix urllib.urlopen crash on secondairy threads on OSX 10.6

- Issue #6947: Fix distutils test on windows. Patch by Hirokazu Yamamoto.

- Issue #4606: Passing 'None' if ctypes argtype is set to POINTER(...)
  does now always result in NULL.

- Issue #5042: ctypes Structure sub-subclass does now initialize
  correctly with base class positional arguments.

- Issue #6938: Fix a TypeError in string formatting of a multiprocessing
  debug message.

- Issue #6635: Fix profiler printing usage message.

- Issue #6795: int(Decimal('nan')) now raises ValueError instead of
  returning NaN or raising InvalidContext.  Also, fix infinite recursion
  in long(Decimal('nan')).

- Issue #6850: Fix bug in Decimal._parse_format_specifier for formats
  with no type specifier.

- Issue #4937: plat-mac/bundlebuilder revers to non-existing version.plist

- Issue #6838: Use a list to accumulate the value instead of
  repeatedly concatenating strings in httplib's
  HTTPResponse._read_chunked providing a significant speed increase
  when downloading large files servend with a Transfer-Encoding of 'chunked'.

- Issue #6794: Fix Decimal.compare_total and Decimal.compare_total_mag: NaN
  payloads are now ordered by integer value rather than lexicographically.

- Issue #6117: Fix O(n**2) performance degradation when outputting lots of
  small data on a buffered socket.socket.makefile() object.

- Issue #6637: defaultdict.copy() did not work when the default factory
  was left unspecified.  Also, the eval/repr round-trip would fail when
  the default_factory was None.

- Issue #1424152: Fix for httplib, urllib2 to support SSL while working through
  proxy. Original patch by Christopher Li, changes made by Senthil Kumaran.

- Issues #5155, 5313, 5331: multiprocessing.Process._bootstrap was
  unconditionally calling "os.close(sys.stdin.fileno())" resulting in file
  descriptor errors

- Issue #6415: Fixed warnings.warn sagfault on bad formatted string.

- Issue #6344: Fixed a crash of mmap.read() when passed a negative argument.

- Issue #5230: pydoc would report no documentation found if a module generated
  a 'not found' import error when loaded; it now reports the import errors.
  Thanks to Lucas Prado Melo for initial fix and collaboration on the tests.

- Issue #6274: Fixed possible file descriptors leak in subprocess.py

- Issue #6271: mmap tried to close invalid file handle (-1) when annonymous.
  (On Unix)

- Issue #6258: Support AMD64 in bdist_msi.

- Issue #5262: Fixed bug in next rollover time computation in
  TimedRotatingFileHandler.

- Issue #6121: pydoc now ignores leading and trailing spaces in the
  argument to the 'help' function.

- Issue #6050: Don't fail extracting a directory from a zipfile if
  the directory already exists.

- collections.namedtuple() was not working with the following field
  names:  cls, self, tuple, itemgetter, and property.

- Issue #1309352: fcntl now converts its third arguments to a C `long` rather
  than an int, which makes some operations possible under 64-bit Linux (e.g.
  DN_MULTISHOT with F_NOTIFY).

- Issue #1983: Fix functions taking or returning a process identifier to use
  the dedicated C type ``pid_t`` instead of a C ``int``. Some platforms have
  a process identifier type wider than the standard C integer type.

- Issue #4066: smtplib.SMTP_SSL._get_socket now correctly returns the socket.
  Patch by Farhan Ahmad, test by Marcin Bachry.

- Issue #1655: Make imaplib IPv6-capable. Patch by Derek Morr.

- Issue #1664: Make nntplib IPv6-capable. Patch by Derek Morr.

- Issue #5971: StreamHandler.handleError now swallows IOErrors which occur when
  trying to print a traceback.

- Issue 5955: aifc's close method did not close the file it wrapped,
  now it does.  This also means getfp method now returns the real fp.

- Issue #4875: On win32, ctypes.util.find_library does no longer
  return directories.

- Issue #5692: In :class:`zipfile.Zipfile`, fix wrong path calculation when
  extracting a file to the root directory.

- Issue #2245: aifc now skips chunk types it doesn't recognize, per spec.

- Issue #4305: ctypes should now build again on mipsel-linux-gnu

- Issue #5853: calling a function of the mimetypes module from several threads
  at once could hit the recursion limit if the mimetypes database hadn't been
  initialized before.

- Issue #5041: ctypes does now allow pickling wide character.

- Issue #5768: Fixed bug in Unicode output logic and test case for same.

- Issue #1161031: fix readwrite select flag handling: POLLPRI now
  results in a handle_expt_event call, not handle_read_event, and POLLERR
  and POLLNVAL now call handle_close, not handle_expt_event.  Also,
  dispatcher now has an 'ignore_log_types' attribute for suppressing
  log messages, which is set to 'warning' by default.

- Issue #5828 (Invalid behavior of unicode.lower): Fixed bogus logic in
  makeunicodedata.py and regenerated the Unicode database (This fixes
  u'\u1d79'.lower() == '\x00').

- Issue #1202: zipfile module would cause a DeprecationWarning when storing
  files with a CRC32 > 2**31-1.

- Issue #6163: Fixed HP-UX runtime library dir options in
  distutils.unixcompiler. Initial patch by Sridhar Ratnakumar and
  Michael Haubenwallner.

- Issue #4660: If a multiprocessing.JoinableQueue.put() was preempted, it was
  possible to get a spurious 'task_done() called too many times' error.

- Issue #6595: The Decimal constructor now allows arbitrary Unicode
  decimal digits in input, as recommended by the standard.  Previously
  it was restricted to accepting [0-9].

- Issue #6553: Fixed a crash in cPickle.load(), when given a file-like object
  containing incomplete data.

- Issue #2622: Fixed an ImportError when importing email.messsage from a
  standalone application built with py2exe or py2app.

- Issue #6455: Fixed test_build_ext under win32.

- Issue #6403: Fixed package path usage in build_ext.

- Issue #6287: Added the license field in Distutils documentation.

- Issue #6263: Fixed syntax error in distutils.cygwincompiler.

- Issue #5201: distutils.sysconfig.parse_makefile() now understands `$$`
  in Makefiles. This prevents compile errors when using syntax like:
  `LDFLAGS='-rpath=\$$LIB:/some/other/path'`. Patch by Floris Bruynooghe.

- Issue #6062: In distutils, fixed the package option of build_ext. Feedback
  and tests on pywin32 by Tim Golden.

- Issue #1309567: Fix linecache behavior of stripping subdirectories when
  looking for files given by a relative filename.

- Issue #6046: Fixed the library extension when distutils build_ext is used
  inplace. Initial patch by Roumen Petrov.

- Issue #6022: a test file was created in the current working directory by
  test_get_outputs in Distutils.

- Issue #5977: distutils build_ext.get_outputs was not taking into account the
  inplace option. Initial patch by kxroberto.

- Issue #5984: distutils.command.build_ext.check_extensions_list checks were
  broken for old-style extensions.

- Issue #5854: Updated __all__ to include some missing names and remove some
  names which should not be exported.

- Issue #5810: Fixed Distutils test_build_scripts so it uses
  sysconfig.get_config_vars.

- Issue #6865: Fix reference counting issue in the initialization of the pwd
  module.

Extension Modules
-----------------

- Issue #6944: Fix a SystemError when socket.getnameinfo() was called
  with something other than a tuple as first argument.

- Issue #6848: Fix curses module build failure on OS X 10.6.

- Fix expat to not segfault with specially crafted input.

- Issue #4873: Fix resource leaks in error cases of pwd and grp.

Build
-----

- Issue #6980: Fix ctypes build failure on armel-linux-gnueabi with
  -mfloat-abi=softfp.

- Issue #6802: Fix build issues on MacOSX 10.6

- Issue 5390: Add uninstall icon independent of whether file
  extensions are installed.

- Issue #6094: Build correctly with Subversion 1.7.

- Issue #5726: Make Modules/ld_so_aix return the actual exit code of the
  linker, rather than always exit successfully. Patch by Floris Bruynooghe.

- Issue 5809: Specifying both --enable-framework and --enable-shared is
  an error. Configure now explicity tells you about this.

Documentation
-------------

- Issue #6556: Fixed the Distutils configuration files location explanation
  for Windows.

- Issue #6801 : symmetric_difference_update also accepts |.
  Thanks to Carl Chenet.

Tests
-----

- Issue #5837: Certain sequences of calls to set() and unset() for
  support.EnvironmentVarGuard objects restored the environment variables
  incorrectly on __exit__.