RELEASE: 2.4 beta 1

Hi *,

me and Daniele, we just went through his series of patches (a loooot of
patches) and we're ready to release a beta version of the new psycopg.
Apart the usual changes and enhancements (detailed below) this is the
first version that supports Python 3 (thanks to, guess who? :)

Here are the download links:

http://www.psycopg.org/psycopg/tarballs/psycopg2-2.4-beta1.tar.gz
http://www.psycopg.org/psycopg/tarballs/psycopg2-2.4-beta1.tar.gz.asc

And the NEWS excerpt:

What's new in psycopg 2.4
-------------------------

* New features and changes:

- Added `register_composite()` function to cast PostgreSQL composite
types into Python tuples/namedtuples.
- More efficient iteration on named cursors.
- The build script refuses to guess values if pg_config is not found.
- Connections and cursors are weakly referenceable.
- Added 'b' and 't' mode to large objects: write can deal with both
bytes strings and unicode; read can return either bytes strings or
decoded unicode.
- COPY sends Unicode data to files implementing io.TextIOBase.
- The build script refuses to guess values if pg_config is not found.
- Improved PostgreSQL-Python encodings mapping. Added a few
missing encodings: EUC_CN, EUC_JIS_2004, ISO885910, ISO885916,
LATIN10, SHIFT_JIS_2004.
- Dropped repeated dictionary lookups with unicode query/parameters.
- Empty lists correctly roundtrip Python -> PostgreSQL -> Python.

* Bug fixes:

- Fixed adaptation of None in composite types (ticket #26). Bug
report by Karsten Hilbert.
- Fixed several reference leaks in less common code paths.
- Fixed segfault when a large object is closed and its connection no
more available.
- Added missing icon to ZPsycopgDA package, not available in Zope
2.12.9 (ticket #30). Bug report and patch by Pumukel.

Have fun,
federico

--
Federico Di Gregorio fog(at)initd(dot)org
In some countries (e.g., Germany) even many brands of toilet paper have
format A6. [http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-paper.html]