Zope 2.3.1 final released

Zope 2.3.1 final has been released - you can download it from Zope.org:

http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.3.1/

Zope 2.3.1 contains fixes for a number of issues that have come up since 2.3.0, including the fixes for the issues addressed by the 02/23 and 03/08 hotfixes. It also contains a number of changes to address issues with ZCatalog. New data structures have been introduced to reduce the number of conflict errors caused by object indexing under some types of usage, and to reduce the amount of object database bloat that occurs when indexed objects change frequently.

The changes to ZCatalog have been designed so that newly created ZCatalog objects will take advantage of the new data structures. Existing ZCatalog objects will continue to work with the old data structures, but will not gain any of the benefits of the new code. It is possible to upgrade an existing ZCatalog object to use the new data structures by following the How-To at:

http://www.zope.org/Members/mcdonc/HowTos/UpgradeToNewCatalog

Many thanks go to those who helped exercise the new code and the catalog upgrade process during the beta cycle. Many thanks as well to Jim Fulton, Chris McDonough and Andreas Jung for their hard work and the prodigious amount of unit tests produced for the new (and old) Catalog code!

With the 2.3.1 release we have added a Linux Itanium binary distribution. Note that the Itanium binary is bundled with Python 2.0 instead of Python 1.5.2. This release (Zope-2.3.1-linux2-ia64-alpha.tgz) is named with "alpha" because it is the first for the platform. All unit tests pass and moderate testing has found no problems (actually, any problems you find are more likely to be issues with Zope on Python 2.0 rather than issues with the platform).

IMPORTANT NOTE for users of the source release or users of the "diff" update releases

Users of the Zope source releases should note that this release contains changes to C code. If you are using a source release (or the source diff update), be sure to run w_pcgi.py or wo_pcgi.py as appropriate before starting Zope to ensure that your binaries are rebuilt.

Also, there has been some recent work on getting Zope to run on the Mac OS X platform. As a result of this work, the names of certain C extension modules were changed to avoid symbol name clashes on systems with a global dynamic module namespace. The result of this is that if you install a diff update over an existing installation, you need to do a few things manually:

• If you are using a source release and apply the source update, visit the directories lib/python/BTrees and lib/python/Shared/DC/xml/pyexpat. In each, run make clean and remove any .so files in those directories before rebuilding the extensions.
• If you are running a binary release and have applied the diff update for your platform, before restarting Zope visit the lib/python/BTrees directory and remove any .so (or .pyd) files that do not have names beginning with an underscore and in the directory lib/python/Shared/DC/xml/pyexpat, remove the file pyexpat.so (or .pyd)

For more information on what is new in this release, see the CHANGES.txt and HISTORY.txt files for the release:

• http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.3.1/CHANGES.txt

Note that we have also posted "diff" updates as .tgz files that will let you easily upgrade an existing 2.3.x site. These updates are available for those currently using the 2.3.x source release or the 2.3.x binary releases.

To apply a differential update to your site:

• download the appropriate .tgz file from zope.org
• shutdown your Zope process
• copy the .tgz to your Zope directory and extract it
• run w_pcgi or wo_pcgi if you are not using a binary release
• restart your process