Download Python 2.4.1 RC2

Python is a programming language with which simple to complex platform-independent applications can be developed. This language is used by many companies such as Industrial Light & Magic† google and NASA† The development team is working hard on the upcoming 2.4.1 version and has released its second release candidate. A number of bugs have been fixed again as the release notes show us:

We are pleased to announce the release of Python 2.4.1, release candidate 2 on March 17, 2005. This is the second release candidate of Python 2.4.1 – users are encouraged to download this and test it works for them, but it is not suggested for production usage. A final release of 2.4.1 should be around the 29th of March – straight after Pycon.

Python 2.4.1 is a bugfix release of Python 2.4 – Python 2.4 is now in bugfix-only mode, no new features are being added. Several dozen bugs were squashed since Python 2.4, including the SimpleXMLRPCServer security fix.

library:

• Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
• Bug #1160802: can’t build Zope on Windows with 2.4.1c1. The MSVCCompiler class in distutils forgot to record that it was initialized, and continued adding redundant entries to the system PATH environment variable until putenv() complained about the size. This only affected building projects with many C extensions, and only on Windows using Microsoft’s compiler. This wasn’t visible before because a bugfix first included in 2.4.1c1 provoked it (bug #1110478: revert os.environ.update to do putenv again).
• Bug #1156259: Seeking in codecs.reader was broken, now fixed.

Testing:

• Fix the test for socket.getfqdn() in test_socket to also consider the host name returned by socket.gethostname() a valid return value for getfqdn(). Also clarified the wording of docs and docstring that this is the case.

ExtensionsModules:

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

[break]The following downloads are ready:
Windows Installer
Windows Installer IA-64
source .tgz
Source .bz2