[lxml-dev] lxml 2.2beta4 - release candidate for 2.2 final

[Stefan Behnel]

Hi all,

here is another almost-final version of lxml 2.2. Call it a release
candidate, if you prefer. This release was necessary as the changelog was
getting way too long, and the (crash-)bugs that were fixed in this release
were too important to wait. So, updating is recommended.

http://codespeak.net/lxml/dev/
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/lxml/2.2beta4

I'm very happy to announce that this is the first release that fully
supports Python 3. The previous releases suffered from an annoying crash
bug in Cython that was uncovered by the exception handling changes in Py3.
This means that lxml now supports any officially released Python version
from 2.3.x through 3.0.1.

Note that the PDF documentation was broken in the last betas due to a
recent system update on my side. It's back up for beta4.

This release was built with revision "1796:cb0f315bb4f5" of the Cython 0.11
development branch.

Have fun,

Stefan


2.2beta4 (2009-02-27)
Features added

    * Support strings and instantiable Element classes as child arguments
      to the constructor of custom Element classes.
    * GZip compression support for serialisation to files and file-like
      objects.

Bugs fixed

    * Deep-copying an ElementTree copied neither its sibling PIs and
      comments nor its internal/external DTD subsets.
    * Soupparser failed on broken attributes without values.
    * Crash in XSLT when overwriting an already defined attribute using
      xsl:attribute.
    * Crash bug in exception handling code under Python 3. This was due to
      a problem in Cython, not lxml itself.
    * lxml.html.FormElement._name() failed for non top-level forms.
    * TAG special attribute in constructor of custom Element classes was
      evaluated incorrectly.

Other changes

    * Official support for Python 3.0.1.
    * Element.findtext() now returns an empty string instead of None for
      Elements without text content.