Django 1.1.2 release notes

Welcome to Django 1.1.2!

This is the second “bugfix” release in the Django 1.1 series, improving the stability and performance of the Django 1.1 codebase.

Django 1.1.2 maintains backwards compatibility with Django 1.1.0, but contain a number of fixes and other improvements. Django 1.1.2 is a recommended upgrade for any development or deployment currently using or targeting Django 1.1.

For full details on the new features, backwards incompatibilities, and deprecated features in the 1.1 branch, see the Django 1.1 release notes.

Backwards-incompatible changes in 1.1.2

Test runner exit status code

The exit status code of the test runners (tests/runtests.py and python manage.py test) no longer represents the number of failed tests, since a failure of 256 or more tests resulted in a wrong exit status code. The exit status code for the test runner is now 0 for success (no failing tests) and 1 for any number of test failures. If needed, the number of test failures can be found at the end of the test runner’s output.

Cookie encoding

To fix bugs with cookies in Internet Explorer, Safari, and possibly other browsers, our encoding of cookie values was changed so that the characters comma and semi-colon are treated as non-safe characters, and are therefore encoded as \054 and \073 respectively. This could produce backwards incompatibilities, especially if you are storing comma or semi-colon in cookies and have JavaScript code that parses and manipulates cookie values client-side.

One new feature

Ordinarily, a point release would not include new features, but in the case of Django 1.1.2, we have made an exception to this rule. Django 1.2 (the next major release of Django) will contain a feature that will improve protection against Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks. This feature requires the use of a new csrf_token template tag in all forms that Django renders.

To make it easier to support both 1.1.X and 1.2.X versions of Django with the same templates, we have decided to introduce the csrf_token template tag to the 1.1.X branch. In the 1.1.X branch, csrf_token does nothing - it has no effect on templates or form processing. However, it means that the same template will work with Django 1.2.