Python 3.8.8
Security
bpo-42967: Fix web cache poisoning vulnerability by defaulting the query args separator to &, and allowing the user to choose a custom separator.
bpo-42938: Avoid static buffers when computing the repr of ctypes.c_double and ctypes.c_longdouble values.
Core and Builtins
bpo-42819: readline: Explicitly disable bracketed paste in the interactive interpreter, even if it’s set in the inputrc, is enabled by default (eg GNU Readline 8.1), or a user calls readline.read_init_file(). The Python REPL has not implemented bracketed paste support. Also, bracketed mode writes the "\x1b[?2004h" escape sequence into stdout which causes test failures in applications that don’t support it. It can still be explicitly enabled by calling readline.parse_and_bind("set enable-bracketed-paste on"). Patch by Dustin Rodrigues.
Library
bpo-43108: Fixed a reference leak in the curses module. Patch by Pablo Galindo
bpo-42780: Fix os.set_inheritable() for O_PATH file descriptors on Linux.
bpo-41748: Fix HTMLParser parsing rules for element attributes containing commas with spaces. Patch by Karl Dubost.
bpo-42759: Fixed equality comparison of tkinter.Variable and tkinter.font.Font. Objects which belong to different Tcl interpreters are now always different, even if they have the same name.
bpo-23328: Allow / character in username, password fields on _PROXY envars.
bpo-42681: Fixed range checks for color and pair numbers in curses.
bpo-42531: importlib.resources.path() now works for packages missing the optional __file__ attribute (more specifically, packages whose __spec__.origin is None).
bpo-42388: Fix subprocess.check_output(…, input=None) behavior when text=True to be consistent with that of the documentation and universal_newlines=True.
bpo-42384: Make pdb populate sys.path[0] exactly the same as regular python execution.
bpo-42383: Fix pdb: previously pdb would fail to restart the debugging target if it was specified using a relative path and the current directory changed.
bpo-42318: Fixed support of non-BMP characters in tkinter on macOS.
bpo-42005: Fix CLI of cProfile and profile to catch BrokenPipeError.
bpo-41604: Don’t decrement the reference count of the previous user_ptr when set_panel_userptr fails.
bpo-26407: Unexpected errors in calling the __iter__ method are no longer masked by TypeError in csv.reader(), csv.writer.writerow() and csv.writer.writerows().
bpo-39068: Fix initialization race condition in a85encode() and b85encode() in base64. Patch by Brandon Stansbury.
bpo-36589: The curses.update_lines_cols() function now returns None instead of 1 on success.
bpo-33289: Correct call to tkinter.colorchooser to return RGB triplet of ints instead of floats. Patch by Cheryl Sabella.
Documentation
bpo-40304: Fix doc for type(name, bases, dict). Patch by Boris Verkhovskiy and Éric Araujo.
bpo-42811: Updated importlib.utils.resolve_name() doc to use __spec__.parent instead of __package__. (Thanks Yair Frid.)
Tests
bpo-42794: Update test_nntplib to use offical group name of news.aioe.org for testing. Patch by Dong-hee Na.
bpo-40810: In sqlite3, fix CheckTraceCallbackContent for SQLite pre 3.7.15.
Build
bpo-29076: Add fish shell support to macOS installer.
Windows
bpo-41837: Updated Windows installer to include OpenSSL 1.1.1i
bpo-42584: Upgrade Windows installer to use SQLite 3.34.0.
macOS
bpo-41837: Update macOS installer build to use OpenSSL 1.1.1i.
bpo-42584: Update macOS installer to use SQLite 3.34.0.
IDLE
bpo-43008: Make IDLE invoke sys.excepthook() in normal, 2-process mode. Patch by Ken Hilton.
bpo-33065: Fix problem debugging user classes with __repr__ method.
bpo-42508: Keep IDLE running on macOS. Remove obsolete workaround that prevented running files with shortcuts when using new universal2 installers built on macOS 11.
bpo-23544: Disable Debug=>Stack Viewer when user code is running or Debugger is active, to prevent hang or crash. Patch by Zackery Spytz.
bpo-32631: Finish zzdummy example extension module: make menu entries work; add docstrings and tests with 100% coverage.
Tools/Demos
bpo-42726: Fixed Python 3 compatibility issue with gdb/libpython.py handling of attribute dictionaries.
C API
bpo-43030: Fixed a compiler warning in Py_UNICODE_ISSPACE() on platforms with signed wchar_t.
bpo-40052: Fix an alignment build warning/error in function PyVectorcall_Function(). Patch by Andreas Schneider, Antoine Pitrou and Petr Viktorin.
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