Python: XML Overhaul and a Security Patch Sweep
A single contributor drove nearly a dozen fixes and features into the XML ElementTree module, while a bundled library update and a decompression bounds fix each landed as coordinated backports across five and four branches respectively to close out security exposure.
Duration: PT2M44S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from Python.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: Python
- Published: 2026-09-01T13:09:42Z
- Audio duration: PT2M44S
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 September 1st, and today's codebase activity has two clear stories: a broad cleanup of Python's XML tooling, and a security patch rollout across multiple releases.
Serhiy Storchaka is behind a wave of ElementTree work this cycle. PR 156742 adds CDATA section support, PR 156719 preserves comments and processing instructions outside the root element, PR 156730 adds standalone document declaration support, and PR 156746 fixes a long-standing overflow error that broke parsing on…
The second theme is security patching done right. The bundled libexpat library jumped to version 2.8.4 to close three high-severity CVEs, and that fix, PR 156724, was immediately backported to the 3.13, 3.14, and 3.15 branches. Similarly, a zipfile fix bounding decompression output for bzip2, LZMA, and Zstandard…
A few other items worth flagging: PR 156298 adds a stop_exception parameter to iter and aiter, giving developers a cleaner way to end iteration when a callable raises rather than returns a sentinel. And PR 155862 fixes Flag enum subclasses that use a mixin, so custom bitwise operator overrides no longer get silently…
Going forward, expect more ElementTree PRs from Storchaka to land,…
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