Changelog for Falcon 3.1.2

.. falcon-release: 2023-12-04

Summary

This is a minor point release fixing a couple of high impact bugs, as well as publishing binary wheels for the recently released CPython 3.12.

Falcon is now supported (including binary wheels) on CPython 3.12. A couple of remaining stdlib deprecations from 3.11 and 3.12 will be addressed in Falcon 4.0.
As with the previous release, Python 3.5 & 3.6 remain deprecated and will no longer be supported in Falcon 4.0.
EOL Python 3.7 will no longer be actively supported in 4.0, but the framework should still continue to install from source. We may remove the support for 3.7 altogether later in the 4.x series if we are faced with incompatible ecosystem changes in typing, Cython, etc.

Some essential files were unintentionally omitted from the source distribution archive, rendering it unsuitable to run the test suite off. This has been fixed, and the sdist tarball should now be usable as a base for packaging Falcon in OS distributions. (#2051 <https://github.com/falconry/falcon/issues/2051>__)
:ref:WebSocket <ws> implementation has been fixed to properly handle :class:~falcon.HTTPError and :class:~falcon.HTTPStatus exceptions raised by custom :func:error handlers <falcon.asgi.App.add_error_handler>. The WebSocket connection is now correctly closed with an appropriate code instead of bubbling up an unhandled error to the application server. (#2146 <https://github.com/falconry/falcon/issues/2146>__)
Falcon's :class:~falcon.testing.TestClient mimics the behavior of real WSGI servers (and the WSGI spec) by presenting the PATH_INFO CGI variable already in the percent-decoded form. However, the client also used to indiscriminately set the non-standard RAW_URI CGI variable to /, which made writing tests for apps :ref:decoding raw URL path <raw_url_path_recipe> cumbersome. This has been fixed, and the raw path of a simulated request is now preserved in RAW_URI. (#2157 <https://github.com/falconry/falcon/issues/2157>__)

Many thanks to those who contributed to this bugfix release: