[hpinson@indepthl.com]

Hi. I am unclear of the benefits of using Python 2.3.4 over Python 2.3.3

A micro release of Python is a bugfix release. Here are the NEWS entries for 2.3.4; whether you care about any of 'em is up to you: Core and builtins ----------------- - Bug #858016: isinstance() and issubclass() can have their second argument be a tuple whose nested depth is capped at the interpreter's recursion limit. Raises RuntimeError if the limit reached. - Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all cases. - Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy() assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in a release build. - Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior. - fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on the first call. Library ------- - Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder - Brought platform.py in line with the 2.4 version, fixing support for newer Windows versions and a cache issue. - Bug #950057: itertools.chain() and itertools.cycle() now handle exceptions immediately instead of waiting until the input source is updated. - Bug #931848: Fix _sre.CODESIZE on 64-bit machines in UCS-4 mode. - Bug #938076: Consider output encoding in XMLGenerator. - Bug #936637: Properly delegate startElementNS in saxutils.XMLFilterBase. - Bug #944082: Empty passwords in urllib2 are now supported. - Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different type pattern with the same value exists. - Bug #924361: Properly support normalization of empty unicode strings. - Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was not taken into consideration when caching value. - Bug #920575: A problem that _locale module segfaults on nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed. - Bug #883604: Fix Lib/test/test_strftime.py to escape characters from locale time values that might be mistaken as regex syntax. - Bug #700055: .pth files can now have any type of line endings. - Patch 817379: Allow absolute ftp paths in urllib2. - Patch 711838: Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2. Windows ------- - The Windows installer now includes tix, the Tk Interface eXtension, a powerful set of user interface components that expands the capabilities of your Tcl/Tk and Python applications. Build ----- - Bug #929689: Don't define _XOPEN_SOURCE on UnixWare 7.1.4.