Changes

0.2.1 (2023-XX-XX)

  • FEATURE: Added support for fixed-length arrays of function pointers (for callback functions). Similar to individual function pointers in zugbruecke, the pointers can not be overwritten by DLL functions.

  • FIX: By value simple type members of structs passed as pointer / by reference were not synchronized correctly. This includes scalar integers and floats, individual c_char and c_wchar objects as well as c_char and c_wchar arrays, i.e. strings.

  • FIX: The type parser’s cache could, under certain circumstances, confuse fixed-length struct array types with their scalar base types.

  • FIX: Indicate Python 3.11 support in pyproject.toml.

  • DOCS: Updated benchmarks.

  • DOCS: Added notes on known CentOS issues.

  • DOCS: Added information on known symbolic link issues with certain versions of Wine, recently staging >=7.18, see #94.

  • DOCS: Many small fixes.

  • DEV: Added test for light-weight pointers, ctypes.byref. Those were previously supported but remained untested.

0.2.0 (2022-12-29)

CAUTION: A number changes at least partially BREAK BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY for certain use and edge cases.

The datatype parser and definition code was rewritten completely. It should work as before in almost all instances although unexpected breakages may occur.

If entire struct objects are synced via memsync directives, the struct types now have to be specified directly instead of their names as strings as before, breaking backwards compatibility for those use cases.

zugbruecke now follows the Python’s logging module’s log levels. Maximum logging output can now be achieved via logging.DEBUG or 10 as opposed to 100 in earlier versions. Log level 0 remains as “no logs” as per logging.NOTSET. This change may break debugging and development workflows.

This RELEASE FIXES A CRITICAL BUG where zugbruecke was falsely translating 64 bit integer types from the Unix side to 32 bit integer types on the Wine side.

  • FEATURE: Improved performance. With logging disabled, function calls carry 10% less overhead on average.

  • FEATURE: In memsync directives, ctypes types do not need to be specified by their name as strings anymore - plain ctypes fundamental types and structure types can be used instead. Strings remain valid specifications (only) for fundamental ctypes types for compatibility though.

  • FEATURE: memsync directives allow for more descriptive parameter names while the old single-character names remain valid for compatibility.

  • FEATURE: Added support for CPython 3.11, see #86 and #87.

  • FEATURE: Logging now relies on Python’s logging module’s log levels, i.e. NOTSET, DEBUG, INFO, WARNING, ERROR and CRITICAL. This change serves to work towards #84.

  • FEATURE: Log output has been divided into log levels, see #9.

  • FIX: Argtypes and restype would translate c_int64, c_uint64, c_long and c_ulong from the Unix side to their 32-bit equivalents, c_int32 and c_uint32, on the Wine side. This was due to c_long and c_ulong being 8 bytes long on Unix-like systems while they are 4 bytes long on Window, see #95.

  • FIX: Fixed-length c_char and c_wchar buffers passed by value within structures were not handled correctly, see #93.

  • FIX: The new argtypes and restype parser does not suffer from #61 anymore where earlier different structure types from different name spaces but with identical names would cause problems.

  • FIX: CI revealed that an issue similar to #50 returned as packages on Wine side can sometimes not be imported if they are symlinked. The new copy_modules configuration parameter can be used to indicate that a copy instead of symlinks is required. This problem is caused by Wine bug #54228 in Wine Staging >= 7.18, see #94.

  • FIX: If zugbruecke (and wenv) were installed into user site-packages, the installation would break, see #88.

  • FIX: If writing of logs to disk (log_write) was set to True during run-time, zugbruecke would crash, see #77.

  • FIX: Syncing entire structs via memsync was broken, see #92.

  • FIX: restype was explicitly assumed to be c_int. Now, if a user does not specify it, assumptions about it are left to ctypes on the Wine side, potentially getting closer to ctypes original behaviour.

  • FIX: restype would not throw an exception when by accident set to a list or tuple like original ctypes does.

  • DEPRECATED: Single-character parameter names in memsync directives.

  • DEPRECATED: ctypes fundamental types specified by name as strings in memsync directives.

  • DOCS: More detailed explanation of memsync, where it is needed and where it is not, among other improvements.

  • DOCS: Added explanation of handling of long integer types.

  • DOCS: Added explanation of handling of floating point types and the lack of “long double” as well as “half precision” support.

  • DOCS: Updated benchmarks.

  • DOCS: Removed old examples folder from project as its code was more than outdated and can now be found in the documentation, the test suite and/or the newly added benchmarks.

  • DEV: Added tests on custom types and array.array objects (standard library) as well as numpy.ndarray objects.

  • DEV: Added tests for 64 bit integer limits / overflows for win64.

  • DEV: Added tests on restype configuration errors.

  • DEV: Cleaned and clarified all tests. Renamed all tests to more meaningful names referring to the features that they are testing.

  • DEV: Test support library cleaned up, documented and typed.

  • DEV: New benchmark infrastructure similar to the test suite, allowing to easily add benchmarks. Their results now get automatically included into the project documentation.

0.1.0 (2022-09-11)

CAUTION: The module layout changed, effectively BREAKING BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY for all use-cases!

OLD

NEW

default session

import zugbruecke as ctypes

import zugbruecke.ctypes as ctypes

default session member

from zugbruecke import c_double

from zugbruecke.ctypes import c_double

ctypes session class

zugbruecke.session

zugbruecke.CtypesSession

Wine Python

wine-python

wenv python

Wine Pip

wine-pip

wenv pip

Wine Pytest

wine-pytest

wenv pytest

Wine Python shebang

#!/usr/bin/env wine-python

#!/usr/bin/env _wenv_python

configuration

{"version": "3.5.3"}

{"pythonversion": "3.7.4"}

Significant changes were mandatory for allowing to cleanup a lot of old code and to remove long-standing bugs. The main issue was that importing zugbruecke would implicitly start a new session. This could not be prohibited. With the new package layout, it becomes possible to import sub-modules of zugbruecke without implicitly starting a session. One of the more significant added benefits therefore is that this also allows much more fine-grained tests.

zugbruecke will use semantic versioning from now on. Breaking changes will be indicated by increasing the second version number, the minor version. Going for example from 0.0.x to 0.1.y or going from 0.1.x to 0.2.y therefore indicates a breaking change. For as long as zugbruecke has development status “alpha”, please expect more breaking changes to come.

  • CLI: The shell scripts wine-python, wine-pip and wine-pytest have been consolidated into a new Python package called wenv. One can now call wenv python, wenv pip and wenv pytest. This change was necessary for allowing a more generic interface to entry points of arbitrary third party packages. Run wenv help for more information. Changes related to wenv are now being tracked in wenv’s change log. wenv has considerably more features and configuration options compared to the previously provided shell scripts.

  • API: zugbruecke.current_session is no longer available. zugbruecke.ctypes on its own is now the default session. Besides, the class zugbruecke.session was renamed into zugbruecke.CtypesSession and has now a fully compatible ctypes drop-in replacement API as well. Both, zugbruecke.ctypes and custom sessions constructed from zugbruecke.CtypesSession now have methods and properties prefixed with zb_ for manipulating their configuration, termination and Wine-related tasks.

  • API: Configuration provided via environment variables is consistently preferred over everything else.

  • API: The set_parameter method, now renamed into zb_set_parameter, only accepts a single key-value pair instead of a dictionary.

  • API: The version configuration parameter for controlling the version of Wine Python has been renamed to pythonversion.

  • FEATURE: All configuration parameters can be overridden with individual environment variables.

  • FEATURE: Introduced new exception types specific to zugbruecke. Meaningful exception are now raised throughout the package.

  • FEATURE: Timeouts for start and stop of the server component can be configured.

  • FEATURE: Added support for CPython 3.10, see #75.

  • FEATURE: Added support for CPython 3.9, see #74.

  • FEATURE: Added support for CPython 3.8, see #56.

  • FEATURE: Dropped support for CPython <= 3.6.

  • FEATURE: Added support for Wine >= 6.0.

  • FEATURE: Dropped support for Wine <= 5, most prominently Wine 4.

  • FEATURE: zugbruecke.CtypesSession objects can be managed by context manager statements (with).

  • FIX: zugbruecke did not capture and forward data coming from Windows DLLs and binaries through stdout and stderr(running with Wine) most of the time.

  • FIX: A proper TimeoutError is raised (instead of a SyntaxError) if zugbruecke’s server component does not start.

  • FIX: zugbruecke did not actually check properly if its server component had terminated when a session was terminated. The reliability of relevant termination code has been significantly improved.

  • FIX: Methods from zugbruecke.ctypes.util (previously zugbruecke.util) are faster and a lot less error-prone, see #52.

  • FIX: zugbruecke.ctypes.CDLL does no longer fall back to Unix libraries if no corresponding DLL file could be found. For attaching to Unix libraries please use the original ctypes module instead, see #53.

  • FIX: Different structure types from different name spaces BUT identical names caused crashes, see #61.

  • FIX: zugbruecke raised TypeError if too many arguments were given to a configured cdll function (ctypes does not), see #62.

  • FIX: If a struct type was used in a function call with memsync first (before use in a function call without memsync), configuring (and calling) the function failed, see #63.

  • FIX: Path conversion would fail for Wine 5.13 and later.

  • FIX: Memory leak - sessions would collect all log data for as long as they were running, see #76.

  • DOCS: Hugely improved.

  • DOCS: Project mailing list and chat room.

  • DEV: New makefile structure.

  • DEV: All code is tested for both, 32bit (win32) and 64bit (win64) DLLs, see #58. Previously, only 32bit (win32) DLLs received regular testing.

  • DEV: All code is tested for both, the cdll/cdecl and windll/stdcall calling conventions (previously only windll/stdcall received regular testing), see #60.

  • DEV: zugbruecke is tested across all supported versions of CPython, both on Unix and on Wine side.

  • DEV: The configuration module was refactored and made clearer and faster, allowing to implement new options.

  • DEV: New debug mode, can be activated by setting the environment variable ZUGBRUECKE_DEBUG to 1.

  • DEV: Development dependency switch from unmaintained python-language-server to python-lsp-server.

  • DEV: Both code and branch coverage of zugbruecke can now be analyzed with coverage.

  • DEV: Moved from setuptools for packaging to pyproject.toml via flit.

  • DEV: Cleanup of docs folder structure.

  • DEV: Include logo in repo.

0.0.15 (2020-07-10)

  • FIX: CI tests failed due to dependency issue in Python 3.4, see issue #72.

0.0.14 (2019-05-21)

  • FIX: CI tests failed due to dependency link feature being dropped from pip, see issue #45.

0.0.13 (2019-02-03)

  • FIX: Documentation could (sometimes) not be built on readthedocs.org.

0.0.12 (2019-02-02)

  • FEATURE: Added support for CPython 3.7.

  • FEATURE: Added support for Wine 4.

  • FIX: Build folder was not automatically cleaned up before wheels were build, therefore they sometimes contained obsolete files & code.

  • FIX: Travis configuration was missing new Wine repository key, which was breaking builds.

  • DOCS: Lots of fixes in documentation.

  • DEV: New test script for easier development of new tests and features.

0.0.11 (2018-04-10)

CAUTION: This release features a significant re-implementation (with additional, new functionality) of the memory synchronization protocol, memsync. As a part of it, overcoming old limitations, its syntax changed - effectively BREAKING BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY in almost all cases. Please check the updated documentation, examples and tests for details.

  • API: memsync syntax for custom length functions has been changed. _f becomes obsolete. f expects a string, which can be parsed into a function.

  • API: memsync syntax for NULL-terminated strings (both c_char and c_wchar, i.e. Unicode, buffers) has been simplified: n must be set to True indicating a NULL-terminated string. l becomes optional in this context.

  • API: memsync syntax for Unicode strings (buffers) has been simplified: w must be set to True instead of the length of ctypes.c_wchar.

  • FEATURE: memsync can handle pointers to memory, which was allocated by a DLL, see issue #37.

  • FEATURE: memsync can target return values or elements within, see issue #40.

  • FEATURE: memsync can be applied to callback functions, see issue #41 - support at this stage is largely untested.

  • FEATURE: memsync became more memory efficient and slightly faster.

0.0.10 (2018-03-23)

  • FEATURE: Support for functions calculating the length of memory sections in memsync protocol, see issue #33.

  • FEATURE: Support for string buffers (and null-terminated strings), see issue #7.

  • FIX: memsync definition sometimes lost information during first call of function, second call subsequently failed, see issue #36.

0.0.9 (2018-03-21)

CAUTION: This release introduces a change in configuration parameter naming, BREAKING BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY in rare cases.

  • API: Renamed logwrite parameter & command line option into log_write.

  • FIX: Arch win64 was broken because of wrong download URL for embedded CPython for win64/amd64, see issue #27.

  • FIX: Function pointers in struct types were not handled, see issue #28.

  • FIX: memsync directives pointing to elements within structs were not handled properly, see issue #29.

  • FIX: Missing DLLs of type windll and oledll now raise OSError as expected, see issue #30.

  • FIX: Missing routines in DLLs now raise AttributeError as expected, see issue #31.

  • FIX: Wrong or unconfigured argtypes as well as wrong number of arguments do raise appropriate errors (ValueError, ArgumentError or TypeError), see issue #32.

  • DEV: Isolated argument packing and unpacking code, preparing to solve issue #25.

  • DEV: Reduced number of RPC servers to one per side (Unix and Wine).

0.0.8 (2018-03-18)

  • FEATURE: Support for structures and pointers as return values, see issue #14.

  • FEATURE: (Limited) support for call back functions (function pointers) as DLL argument types, see issues #3 and #4.

  • FIX: argtypes definitions (with one single argument) were not raising a TypeError like ctypes does if not passed as a tuple or list, see issue #21.

0.0.7 (2018-03-05)

  • FIX: Wine Python environment sometimes did, unintentionally, fall back to Python 2 and crash, see issue #20.

  • Confirmed: Support for Mac OS X, see issue #16.

0.0.6 (2017-12-06)

  • FEATURE: Remote-Procedure-Call (RPC) speedup due to removal of extra pickling step.

  • FIX: Added workaround for CPython issue 24960 (embedded zip file extracted into library folder) - was triggered by latest version of pluggy (dependency of pytest).

  • FIX: Preexisting installation of wine-python is now always being removed completely when required due to update or new installation.

  • DEV: Moved definition of development dependencies into setup.py.

0.0.5 (2017-11-13)

  • FEATURE: Support for light-weight pointers (ctypes.byref)

  • FIX: Elements within structures are properly synchronized even if they are not a pointer on their own.

  • FIX: Structure objects in arrays of structures are properly initialized.

  • FIX: Links in README.rst work when rendered on PyPI.

0.0.4 (2017-11-05)

  • FEATURE: Full support for multidimensional fixed length arrays.

0.0.3 (2017-11-02)

  • FEATURE: Fixed length 1D arrays.

  • DOCS: Lots of typos and grammar issues in documentation fixed.

  • DEV: Refactored argument packing and unpacking code.

  • DEV: Introduced Python’s any functions in a number of places.

  • DEV: Plenty of cleanups based on static code analysis.

0.0.2 (2017-07-28)

  • FEATURE: Added and confirmed CPython 3.4 compatibility.

  • DOCS: Added installation instructions to documentation.

0.0.1 (2017-07-28)

  • First official (pre-) release of zugbruecke.