Release Notes for The Debugging Book

This book comes with version numbers; these correspond to the version numbers in the Python pip package.

Current Version (in progress)

This is the version we are preparing for the next release (e.g. what you get when you check out the latest version from the GitHub repo). Major changes will show up here as we make them.

• In notebooks under Python 3.12, automatic garbage collection would cause a method _clean_thread_parent_frames() to be executed with certain functions, interfering with tracing and dynamic analysis. This is now disabled.

Version 1.3.2 (also released 2025-01-16)

• More minor fixes to Learning from Failures, thanks to Laura Plein

Version 1.3.1 (released 2025-01-16)

• Set up such that manual installation of showast is no longer required
• Minor fixes to Learning from Failures, thanks to Laura Plein

Version 1.3 (released 2025-01-13)

• New chapter on Learning from Failures, joining machine learning and debugging
• Updates to requirements.txt, using the latest and greatest third-party modules
• Python 3.9 is no longer supported.

Note that after installation via pip, you may have to install our updated showast module:

$ pip install 'showast@git+https://github.com/andreas-zeller/show_ast.git@andreas'

Version 1.2.3 (released 2024-11-09)

• Work around an error in the showast module, occurring in notebooks running Python 3.12 and later

Version 1.2.2 (released 2023-11-13)

• Importing book classes from third-party code would accidentally set a fixed random seed, making all further random decisions deterministic (i.e. produce the same result every time). This is now fixed.
• Minor updates to Python package requirements.

Version 1.2.1 (released 2023-10-24)

• This version fixes a typo in the setup.py requirements.

Version 1.2 (released 2023-10-24)

• For announcements, we now use Mastodon (@TheDebuggingBook@mastodon.social) instead of X. Follow us on Mastodon!
• We fixed several typos throughout the book, using the awesome LTeX grammar/spell checker.
• Regular tests ensure that the code runs on Python 3.9, 3.10, 3.11, and 3.12.

Version 1.1.2 (released 2023-01-03)

• More fixes in DynamicInvariants, now allowing access to functions defined outside the current module
• Minor improvements to build system and static type checkers
• Updated ChangeCounter to work with recent PyDriller versions

Version 1.1.1 (released 2023-01-02)

• Class diagrams are now simplified, as we skip non-public methods defined in other chapters.
• Fixed an error in Slicer, reporting an unused variable _data.
• Fixed an error in DynamicInvariants, reversing the order of function arguments in mined invariants
• Made browser header colors reflect menu colors.

Version 1.1 (released 2021-10-14)

• We now support (but also require) Python 3.9 or later. Earlier versions still required Python 3.6 due to some outdated modules such as astor and enforce we depended upon (and now don't anymore).
• We made an optimization in DeltaDebugger.dd() to distribute changes more evenly over the input space. This will change dd() results in some cases, but overall improve performance. Thanks to Olad Chitil and Joanna Sharrad for reporting this!
• We fixed two issues in DeltaDebugger.dd(), specifically

#45 and #46. Thanks to @TheSilvus for reporting this!

• We added missing dependencies to the debuggingbook pip package (Issue #44) such that pip install debuggingbook also installs all the packages it depends upon. Thanks to @TheSilvus for reporting this!
• We fixed a warning '.gitignore is a symbolic link' during git checkout (Issue #43) Thanks to @rjc for reporting this!

Version 1.0.1 (released 2021-06-08)

• Typos and other minor fixes.

Version 1.0 (released 2021-06-01)

• First complete version.

Version 0.9.0 (released 2021-10-23)

• Initial beta version.