# News

## Version 0.7.3

released Sun, 13 Jul 2025

This is a test-only changes release, removing some very old testing for reference counts, introduced in 2012, but which stopped working with Python 3.14 as it changed reference counting by introducing optimizations in some cases. No need to upgrade unless you want to make sure the test suite passes on 3.14, and no real failures are hidden by the broken reference testing.

Additionally, the release enables CI on Python 3.14, thanks Marcin Zajączkowski!

## Version 0.7.2

released Sun, 23 Feb 2025

Single-bugfix release: fixed the typing stub module. Nothing exercised it, and having been generated with pre-3.6 stubgen, it failed to work on modern versions. No tests failed (should add some), but the doc build by Sphinx failed accidentally since the failure to import (which was ignored) led to a missing title for the module, which Sphinx complained about. Quite funny :)

## Version 0.7.1

released Fri, 14 Feb 2025

Minor version, with a few test improvements, and updated documentation building dependencies. No user-visible changes otherwise.

Tested with CPython versions 3.7-3.13, and PyPy 3.7-3.10.

## Version 0.7.0

released Sun, 23 Apr 2023

Important: Python 3.7 is the minimum supported version, due to difficulty of testing old releases, and the fact that everything older has been deprecated a long time ago (e.g. 3.6 at the end of 2021).

Otherwise, a minor release:

- Improve error handling in some corner cases (not expected to have any real-life impact, but who knows).

- Improved testing coverage and test infrastructure.

- Modernise parts of the C code based on recent Python version guidelines.

- Add a simple security policy and contribution guidelines.

## Version 0.6.0

released Sun, 29 Nov 2020

Major release removing Python 2 support. This allow both code cleanup and new features, such as:

- Support for pathlib objects in `apply_to` and `has_extended` functions when running with Python 3.6 and newer.

- Use of built-in C API functions for bytes/unicode/pathlib conversion when dealing with file names, removing custom code (with the associated benefits).

Important API changes/bug fixes:

- Initialisation protocol has been changed, to disallow uninitialised objects; this means that `__new__` will always create valid objects, to prevent the need for checking initialisation status in all code paths; this also (implicitly) fixes memory leaks on re-initialisation (calling `__init__(…)` on an existing object) and segfaults (!) on non-initialised object attribute access. Note ACL re-initialisation is tricky and (still) leads to undefined behaviour of existing Entry objects pointing to it.

- Fix another bug in ACL re-initialisation where failures would result in invalid objects; now failed re-initialisation does not touch the original object.

- Restore `__setstate__`/`__getstate__` support on Linux; this was inadvertently removed due a typo(!) when adding support for it in FreeBSD. Pickle should work again for ACL instances, although not sure how stable this serialisation format actually is.

- Additionally, slightly change `__setstate__()` input to not allow Unicode, since the serialisation format is an opaque binary format.

- Fix (and change) entry qualifier (which is a user/group ID) behaviour: assume/require that uid_t/gid_t are unsigned types (they are with glibc, MacOS and FreeBSD at least; the standard doesn’t document the signedness), and convert parsing and returning the qualifier to behave accordingly. The breakage was most apparent on 32-bit architectures, in which context the problem was originally reported (see issue #13).

Minor improvements:

- Added a `data` keyword argument to `ACL()`, which allows restoring an ACL directly from a serialised form (as given by `__getstate__()`), which should simplify some uses cases (`a = ACL(); a.__set state__(…)`).

- When available, add the file path to I/O error messages, which should lead to easier debugging.

- The test suite has changed to `pytest`, which allows increased coverage via parameterisation.

## Version 0.5.4

released Thu, 14 Nov 2019

Maintenance release:

- Switch build system to Python 3 by default (can be overridden if needed).

- Internal improvements for better cpychecker support.

- Fix compatibility with PyPy.

- Test improvements (both local and on Travis), testing more variations (debug, PyPy).

- Improve test coverage, and allow gathering test coverage results.

- Drop support (well, drop testing) for Python lower than 2.7.

- Minor documentation improvements (closes #9, #12).

## Version 0.5.3

released Thu, 30 Apr 2015

FreeBSD fixes:

- Enable all FreeBSD versions after 7.x at level 2 (thanks to Garrett Cooper).

- Make test suite pass under FreeBSD, which has a stricter behaviour with regards to invalid ACLs (which we do exercise in the test suite), thanks again to Garret for the bug reports.

## Version 0.5.2

released Sat, 24 May 2014

No visible changes release: just fix tests when running under pypy.

## Version 0.5.1

released Sun, 13 May 2012

A bug-fix only release. Critical bugs (memory leaks and possible segmentation faults) have been fixed thanks to Dave Malcolm and his `cpychecker` tool. Additionally, some compatibility issues with Python 3.x have been fixed (str() methods returning bytes).

The documentation has been improved and changed from epydoc to sphinx; note however that the documentation is still auto-generated from the docstrings.

Project reorganisation: the project home page has been moved from SourceForge to GitHub.

## Version 0.5

released Sun, 27 Dec 2009

Added support for Python 3.x and improved support for Unicode filenames.

## Version 0.4

released Sat, 28 Jun 2008

### License

Starting with this version, pylibacl is licensed under LGPL 2.1, Febryary 1999 or any later versions (see README.rst and COPYING).

### Linux support

A few more Linux-specific functions:

- add the ACL.equiv_mode() method, which will return the equivalent octal mode if this is a basic ACL and raise an IOError exception otherwise

- add the acl_extended(…) function, which will check if an fd or path has an extended ACL

### FreeBSD support

FreeBSD 7.x will have almost all the acl manipulation functions that Linux has, with the exception of getstate/setstate. As a workaround, use the str() and ACL(text=…) methods to pass around textual representations.

### Interface

At module level there are now a few constants exported for easy-checking at runtime what features have been compiled in:

- `HAS_ACL_FROM_MODE`, denoting whether the ACL constructor supports the `mode=0xxx` parameter

- `HAS_ACL_CHECK`, denoting whether ACL instances support the `check()` method

- `HAS_ACL_ENTRY`, denoting whether ACL manipulation is possible and the Entry and Permset classes are available

- `HAS_EXTENEDED_CHECK`, denoting whether the `acl_extended()` function is supported

- `HAS_EQUIV_MODE`, denoting whether ACL instances support the `equiv_mode()` method

### Internals

Many functions have now unittests, which is a good thing.

## Version 0.3

released Sun, 21 Oct 2007

### Linux support

Under Linux, implement more functions from libacl:

- add `ACL(mode=...)`, implementing `acl_from_mode`.

- add `ACL.to_any_text()`, implementing `acl_to_any_text`.

- add ACL comparison, using `acl_cmp`.

- add `ACL.check()`, which is a more descriptive function than validate.