Python: Compression Speed and Codec Reliability Push
A coordinated hardening sweep fixed quadratic-time decompression and silent data loss in compression libraries, plus a cluster of East Asian codec bugs. Backports to 3.14 and 3.15 and related filesystem fixes make this a high-relevance stability update.
Duration: PT2M39S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from Python.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: Python
- Published: 2026-11-01T14:06:23Z
- Audio duration: PT2M39S
Transcript excerpt
This excerpt keeps the crawler page concise. Listen to the episode or use the RSS feed for the full update.
Good morning, it's Sunday, November 1st, 2026, and this is your Python developer briefing.
The lead signal is reliability under edge cases: slowdowns and silent errors in decompression, and broken state handling in East Asian text codecs, both fixed and backported for current releases.
First, compression. One-shot decompress functions in gzip, B-zip-2, L-Z-M-A and Z-standard handed each new decompressor all remaining input, so many concatenated members took quadratic time. PR 160311 now feeds members in chunks starting at one kilobyte and doubling, keeping single-member data to one call. Related…
Second, East Asian codecs. A series of fixes restores correct streaming behavior for H-Z and ISO 2022. PR 160186 fixes stream writer reset not writing the shift-back sequence to return to ASCII, and backports in PR 161069 and 161070 preserve encoder state across chunk boundaries and callbacks. Separately, PR 160188…
Third, a broader safety sweep. PR 160298 stops tar file extraction from applying hard-link ownership and timestamps through a symlink target outside the destination when falling back to a copy. PR 160507 fixes Windows path resolution for broken relative links through directory…
Als…
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