Download Python 2.5.2

Python is an object-oriented programming language that can be used to develop simple to complex cross-platform applications. For a guide aimed at beginners you can visit this page justly. This language is used by many companies, including Industrial Light & Magic, google and nasa. The developers have released version 2.5.2 with the following list of changes:

What’s New in Python 2.5.2?

Extension Modules:

• Fix deallocation of array objects when allocation ran out of memory. Remove array test case that was incorrect on 64-bit systems.
• Bug #2137: Remove test_struct.test_crasher, which was meaningful only on 32-bit systems.

What’s New in Python 2.5.2c1?

Core and built-ins:

• Added checks for integer overflows, contributed by Google. Some are only available if asserts are left in the code, in cases where they can’t be triggered from Python code.
• Issue #2045: Fix an infinite recursion triggered when printing a subclass of collections.defaultdict, if its default_factory is set to a bound method.
• Issue #1920: “while 0” statements were completely removed by the compiler, even in the presence of an “else” clause, which is supposed to be run when the condition is false. Now the compiler correctly emits bytecode for the “else” suite.
• A few crashers fixed: weakref_in_del.py (issue #1377858); releasing_dict_ref.py (issue #1303614, test67.py); borrowed_ref_[34].py (not in tracker).
• Fix for #1303614 and #1174712 backported from the trunk: __dict__ descriptor abuse for subclasses of built-in types; subclassing from both ModuleType and another built-in types.
• Bug #1915: Python compiles with –enable-unicode=no again. However several extension methods and modules do not work without unicode support.
• Issue #1678380: distinction between 0.0 and -0.0 was lost during constant folding optimization. This was a regression from Python 2.4.
• Issue #1882: when compiling code from a string, encoding cookies in the second line of code were not always recognized correctly.
• Bug #1517: Possible segfault in lookup().
• Issue #1638: %zd configure test fails on Linux.
• Issue #1553: An erroneous __length_hint__ can make list() raise a SystemError.
• Issue #1521: On 64bit platforms, using PyArgs_ParseTuple with the t# of w# format code incorrectly truncated the length to an int, even when PY_SSIZE_T_CLEAN is set. The str.decode method used to return incorrect results with huge strings.
• Issue #1445: Fix a SystemError when accessing the “cell_contents“ attribute of an empty cell object.
• Issue #1265: Fix a problem with sys.settrace, if the tracing function uses a generator expression when at the same time the executed code is closing a paused generator.
• Issue 1704621: Fix segfaults in list_repeat() and list_inplace_repeat().
• Issue #1147: Generators were not raising a DeprecationWarning when a string was passed into throw().
• Patch #1031213: Decode source line in SyntaxErrors back to its original source encoding.
• Patch #1673759: add a missing overflow check when formatting floats with %G.
• Patch #1733960: Allow T_LONGLONG to accept ints.
• Prevent expandtabs() on string and unicode objects from causing a segfault when a large width is passed on 32-bit platforms.
• Bug #1733488: Fix compilation of bufferobject.c on AIX.
• Fix Issue #1703448: A joined thread could show up in the threading.enumerate() list after the join() for a brief period until it actually exited.

library:

• Patch #1966: Break infinite loop in httplib when the servers implements the chunked encoding incorrectly.
• tarfile.py: Fix reading of xstar archives.
• #2021: Allow tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile to be used in with statements by correctly supporting the context management protocol.
• Fixed _ctypes.COMError so that it must be called with exactly three arguments, instances now have the hresult, text, and details instance variables.
• #1507247, #2004: tarfile.py: Use mode 0700 for temporary directories and default permissions for missing directories.
• #175006: The debugger used to skip the condition of a “while” statement after the first iteration. Now it correctly steps on the expression, and breakpoints on the “while” statement are honored on each loop.
• The ctypes int types did not accept objects implementing __int__() in the constructor.
• #1189216: Fix the zipfile module to work on archives with headers past the 2**31 byte boundary.
• Issue #1336: fix a race condition in subprocess.Popen if the garbage collector kicked in at the wrong time that would cause the process to hang when the child wrote to stderr.
• Bug #1687: Fixed plistlib.py restricts to Python int when writing.
• Issue #1182: many arithmetic bugs in the decimal module have been fixed, and the decimal module has been updated to comply with the latest IBM Decimal Arithmetic specification (version 1.66) and testsuite (version 2.57). (Backported from Python 2.6a0.)
• Patch #1637: fix urlparse for URLs like ‘http://x.com?arg=/foo’.
• Issue #1735: TarFile.extractall() now correctly sets directory permissions and times.
• Bug #1713: posixpath.ismount() claims symlink to a mountpoint is a mountpoint.
• Issue #1700: Regular expression inline flags incorrectly handle certain unicode characters.
• Change ctypes version number to 1.0.3 (when Python 2.5.2 is released, ctypes 1.0.3 will be also be released).
• Issue #1695: Fixed typo in the docstrings for time.localtime() and gmtime().
• Issue #1642: Fix segfault in ctypes when trying to delete attributes.
• os.access now returns True on Windows for any existing directory.
• Issue #1531: tarfile.py: Read fileobj from the current offset, do not seek to the start.
• Issue 1429818: patch for trace and doctest modules so they play nicely together.
• doctest mis-used __loader__.get_data(), assuming universal newlines was used.
• Issue #1705170: contextlib.contextmanager was still swallowing StopIteration in some cases. This should no longer happen.
• Bug #1307: Fix smtpd so it doesn’t raise an exception when there is no arg.
• ctypes will now work correctly on 32-bit systems when Python is configured with –with-system-ffi.
• Bug #1777530: ctypes.util.find_library uses dump(1) instead of objdump(1) on Solaris.
• Bug #1153: repr.repr() now doesn’t require set and dictionary items to be orderable to properly represent them.
• Bug #1709599: Run test_1565150 only if the file system is NTFS.
• When encountering a password-protected robots.txt file the RobotFileParser no longer prompts interactively for a username and password (bug 813986).
• TarFile.__init__() no longer fails if no name argument is passed and the fileobj argument has no usable name attribute (eg StringIO).
• Reverted the fix for bug #1548891 because it broke compatibility with arbitrary read buffers. Added a note in the documentation.
• GB18030 codec now can encode additional two-byte characters that are missing in GBK.
• Bug #1704793: Raise KeyError if unicodedata.lookup cannot represent the result in a single character.
• Change location of the package index to pypi.python.org/pypi
• Bug #1701409: Fix a segfault in printing ctypes.c_char_p and ctypes.c_wchar_p when they point to an invalid location. As a side effect the representation of these instances has changed.
• Bug #1734723: Fix repr.Repr() so it doesn’t ignore the maxtuple attribute.
• Bug #1728403: Fix a bug that CJKCodecs StreamReader hangs when it reads a file that ends with incomplete sequence and sizehint argument for .read() is specified.
• Bug #1730389: Have time.strptime() match spaces in a format argument with “\s+“ instead of “\s*“.
• SF 1668596/1720897: distutils now copies data files even if package_dir is empty.
• Fix bug in marshal where bad data would cause a segfault due to lack of an infinite recursion check.
• mailbox.py: Ignore stray directories found in Maildir’s cur/new/tmp subdirectories.
• HTML-escape the plain traceback in cgitb’s HTML output, to prevent the traceback inadvertently or maliciously closing the comment and injecting HTML into the error page.
• Bug #1290505: Properly clear time.strptime’s locale cache when the locale changes between calls. Backport of r54646 and r54647.
• Bug #1706381: Specifying the SWIG option “-c++” in the setup.py file (as opposed to the command line) will now write file names ending in “.cpp” too.
• Patch #1695229: Fix a regression with tarfile.open() and a missing name argument.
• tarfile.py: Fix directory names to have only one trailing slash.
• Fix test_pty.py to not hang on OS X (and theoretically other *nixes) when run in verbose mode.
• Bug #1693258: IDLE would show two “Preferences” menu’s with some versions of Tcl/Tk
• Issue1385: The hmac module now computes the correct hmac when using hashes with a block size other than 64 bytes (such as sha384 and sha512).
• Issue829951: In the smtplib module, SMTP.starttls() now complies with RFC 3207 and forgets any knowledge obtained from the server not obtained from the TLS negotiation itself. Patch contributed by Bill Fenner.

Extension Modules:

• Patch #1736: Fix file name handling of _msi.FCICreate.
• Backport r59862 (issue #712900): make long regexp matches interruptable.
• #1940: make it possible to use curses.filter() before curses.initscr() as the documentation says.
• Fix a potential ‘SystemError: NULL result without error’ in _ctypes.
• Bug #1301: Bad assert in _tkinter fixed.
• Patch #1114: fix curses module compilation on 64-bit AIX, & possibly other 64-bit LP64 platforms where attr_t is not the same size as a long. (Contributed by Luke Mewburn.)
• Bug #1649098: Avoid declaration of zero-sized array declaration in structure.
• Bug #1703286: ctypes no longer truncates 64-bit pointers.
• Bug #1721309: prevent bsddb module from freeing random memory.
• Bug #1233: fix bsddb.dbshelve.DBShelf append method to work as intended for RECNO databases.
• Bug #1726026: Correct the field names of WIN32_FIND_DATAA and WIN32_FIND_DATAW structures in the ctypes.wintypes module.
• Added support for linking the bsddb module against BerkeleyDB 4.6.x.
• Fix libffi configure for hppa*-*-linux* | parisc*-*-linux*.
• Build using system ffi library on arm*-linux*.
• Bug #1372: zlibmodule.c: int overflow in PyZlib_decompress
• bsddb module: Fix memory leak when using database cursors on databases without a DBEnv.

Documentation:

• Bug #1637365: add subsection about “__name__ == __main__” to the Python tutorial.
• Bug #1569057: Document that calling file.next() on a file open for writing has undefined behaviour. Backport or r54712.

build:

• Have the search path for building extensions follow the declared order in $CPPFLAGS and $LDFLAGS.
• Bug #1234: Fixed semaphore errors on AIX 5.2
• Bug #1699: Define _BSD_SOURCE only on OpenBSD.
• Bug #1608: use -fwrapv when GCC supports it. This is important, newer GCC versions may optimize away overflow buffer overflow checks without this option!
• Allow simultaneous installation of 32-bit and 64-bit versions on 64-bit Windows systems.
• Patch #786737: Allow building in a tree of symlinks pointing to a readonly source.
• Bug #1737210: Change Manufacturer of Windows installer to PSF.
• Bug #1746880: Correctly install DLLs into system32 folder on Win64.
• Define _BSD_SOURCE, to get access to POSIX extensions on OpenBSD 4.1+.
• Patch #1673122: Use an explicit path to libtool when building a framework. This avoids picking up GNU libtool from a users PATH.
• Allow Emacs 22 for building the documentation in info format.
• Makefile.pre.in(buildbottest): Run an optional script pybuildbot.identify to include some information about the build environment.

Windows:

• Bug #1216: Restore support for Visual Studio 2002.