RELEASED: Python 2.1.3

[Guido van Rossum]

Today, April 8th 2002, we've released Python 2.1.3, the latest version
of Python 2.1.  This is not the latest and greatest release, but is
for people who want or need to run Python 2.1.  Anthony Baxter was the
2.1.3 releasemeister, for which I thank him profusely.  Great job,
Anthony!

The new release is available here:

    http://www.python.org/2.1.3/

(Note that we no longer release files via SourceForge -- it's a bit of
a hassle, and few people seem to download their files from there.)

This release has a small number of critical bug fixes that have come 
up since 2.1.2 was released, in particular one bug that caused Zope 
to crash under certain obscure circumstances.


What's New in Python 2.1.3?
---------------------------

Core

- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
  deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
  garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
  access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
  could access a pointer to freed memory.

- SF #457466: popenx() argument mangling hangs python (win9x only).
  Under certain circumstances, using any of the popen calls on win9x
  would cause python to hang.

Library

- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
  circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
  to the content handler implementation.  [SF bug #535474]

- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
  third party compression library used by some Python modules.  The
  hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
  Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.

Windows

- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
  equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.

- If you do what it takes to compile SSL support for Windows, a bug in
  httplib.py prevented SSL from working correctly.  That bug has been
  fixed, but note that SSL support on Windows is still not enabled in
  this release.


--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)