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Python 2.3.4 Release Notes
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What's New in Python 2.3.4 final?
=================================

*Release date: 27-May-2004*

What's New in Python 2.3.4rc1?
==============================

*Release date: 13-May-2004*

Core and builtins
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- Bug #858016: isinstance() and issubclass() can have their second
  argument be a tuple whose nested depth is capped at the interpreter's
  recursion limit.  Raises RuntimeError if the limit reached.

- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
  weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
  cases.

- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
  assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
  would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object.  Since
  GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
  invalid.  In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
  creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
  has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
  cyclic trash, a memory error can occur.  This consistently created a
  segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
  a release build.

- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2.  Failure
  to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
  fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.

- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
  close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
  the first call.

Library
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- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder

- Brought platform.py in line with the 2.4 version, fixing support for
  newer Windows versions and a cache issue.

- Bug #950057: itertools.chain() and itertools.cycle() now handle
               exceptions immediately instead of waiting until the
               input source is updated.

- Bug #931848: Fix _sre.CODESIZE on 64-bit machines in UCS-4 mode.

- Bug #938076: Consider output encoding in XMLGenerator.

- Bug #936637: Properly delegate startElementNS in saxutils.XMLFilterBase.

- Bug #944082: Empty passwords in urllib2 are now supported.

- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
  for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
  type pattern with the same value exists.

- Bug #924361: Properly support normalization of empty unicode strings.

- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
  not taken into consideration when caching value.

- Bug #920575: A problem that _locale module segfaults on
  nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.

- Bug #883604: Fix Lib/test/test_strftime.py to escape characters from locale
  time values that might be mistaken as regex syntax.

- Bug #700055: .pth files can now have any type of line endings.

- Patch 817379: Allow absolute ftp paths in urllib2.

- Patch 711838: Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.

Windows
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- The Windows installer now includes tix, the Tk Interface eXtension,
  a powerful set of user  interface components that expands the capabilities
  of your Tcl/Tk and Python applications.

Build
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- Bug #929689: Don't define _XOPEN_SOURCE on UnixWare 7.1.4.