Psycopg 2.4 released

Psycopg is the most popular PostgreSQL adapter for the Python
programming language. At its core it fully implements the Python DB
API 2.0 specifications. Several extensions allow access to many of the
features offered by PostgreSQL.

Psycopg 2.4 has been released: further informations at
http://initd.org/psycopg/articles/2011/02/27/psycopg-24-released/

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

* New features and changes:

- Added support for Python 3.1 and 3.2. The conversion has also
brought several improvements:

- 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'.
- 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.

- Improvements to the named cusors:

- More efficient iteration on named cursors, fetching 'itersize'
records at time from the backend.
- The named cursors name can be an invalid identifier.

- Improvements in data handling:

- Added 'register_composite()' function to cast PostgreSQL
composite types into Python tuples/namedtuples.
- Adapt types 'bytearray' (from Python 2.6), 'memoryview' (from
Python 2.7) and other objects implementing the "Revised Buffer
Protocol" to 'bytea' data type.
- The 'hstore' adapter can work even when the data type is not
installed in the 'public' namespace.
- Raise a clean exception instead of returning bad data when
receiving bytea in 'hex' format and the client libpq can't parse
them.
- Empty lists correctly roundtrip Python -> PostgreSQL -> Python.

- Other changes:

- 'cursor.description' is provided as named tuples if available.
- The build script refuses to guess values if 'pg_config' is not
found.
- Connections and cursors are weakly referenceable.

* 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.
- Fixed conversion of negative infinity (ticket #40). Bug report and
patch by Marti Raudsepp.