Cocotb

This is a maintenance release in the 1.9 release series.

**Bugfixes**
* Better handle errors happening during the startup phase.
* Fix toplevel discovery in Questa and Modelsim.


**Changes**
* Python 3.13 is now supported.

**Deprecations and Removals**
* The RTL_LIBRARY and TOPLEVEL_LIBRARY Makefile variables were merged into TOPLEVEL_LIBRARY. Update all uses of RTL_LIBRARY.


Thanks to our users who helped us with high-quality bug reports and debugging.

This is a maintenance release in the 1.9 release series.

**Bugfixes**
* Improve the Verilator Makefile to pass on --trace at runtime as well. ([4088](https://github.com/cocotb/cocotb/issues/4088))
* Pass EXTRA_ARGS in the Verilator Makefile to both the compilation and the simulation step.

**Changes**
* Support setuptools 72.2.0

Thanks to our users who helped us with high-quality bug reports and debugging.

Release notes: https://docs.cocotb.org/en/v1.9.0/release_notes.html
Release announcement: https://www.cocotb.org/2024/07/14/v.1.9.0
PyPI release: https://pypi.org/project/cocotb/1.9.0

This is a maintenance release in the 1.8 release series.

**Changes**
* Python 3.12 is now supported.

**Bugfixes**
* Fix incorrect cleanup of pending Tasks (queued by [cocotb.start_soon()](https://docs.cocotb.org/en/stable/library_reference.html#cocotb.start_soon) but not started yet) when a test ends. ([3354](https://github.com/cocotb/cocotb/issues/3354))

Thanks to our users who helped us with high-quality bug reports and debugging.

Release notes: https://docs.cocotb.org/en/v1.8.0/release_notes.html
Release announcement: https://www.cocotb.org/2023/06/15/v1.8.0.html
PyPI release: https://pypi.org/project/cocotb/1.8.0

This is a maintenance release in the 1.7 release series.

**Changes**
* Python 3.11 is now supported.
* find_libpython, a library to find (as the name indicates) libpython, is now a dependency of cocotb. Its latest version resolves an issue for users on RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 and Python 3.8, where the correct Python library would not be detected. (3097)

**Bugfixes**
* Fixed a segmentation fault in Aldec Riviera-PRO that prevented mixed-language simulation from running. (3078).

Thanks to our users who helped us with high-quality bug reports and debugging.