Misc/NEWS - platform/external/python/cpython2 - Gitiles

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 Python News
 +++++++++++

 (editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)

 What's New in Python 3.0a5?
 ===========================

 *Release date: XX-XXX-2008*

 Core and Builtins
 -----------------

 - Bug #2565: The repr() of type objects now calls them 'class',
   not 'type' - whether they are builtin types or not.

 - The command line processing was converted to pass Unicode strings
   through as unmodified as possible; as a consequence, the C API
   related to command line arguments was changed to use wchar_t.

 Extension Modules
 -----------------

 Library
 -------

 - The bundled libffi copy is now in sync with the recently released
   libffi3.0.5 version, apart from some small changes to
   Modules/_ctypes/libffi/configure.ac.

 Build
 -----

 - Issue #2544: On HP-UX systems, use 'gcc -shared' for linking when
   gcc is used as compiler.

 What's New in Python 3.0a4?
 ===========================

 *Release date: 02-Apr-2008*

 Core and Builtins
 -----------------

 - Bug #2301: Don't try decoding the source code into the original
   encoding for syntax errors.

 Extension Modules
 -----------------

 - The dl module was removed, use the ctypes module instead.

 - Use wchar_t functions in _locale module.

 Library
 -------

 - The class distutils.commands.build_py.build_py_2to3 can be used
   as a build_py replacement to automatically run 2to3 on modules
   that are going to be installed.

 - A new pickle protocol (protocol 3) is added with explicit support
   for bytes.  This is the default protocol.  It intentionally cannot
   be unpickled by Python 2.x.

 - When a pickle written by Python 2.x contains an (8-bit) str
   instance, this is now decoded to a (Unicode) str instance.  The
   encoding used to do this defaults to ASCII, but can be overridden
   via two new keyword arguments to the Unpickler class.  Previously
   this would create bytes instances, which is usually wrong: str
   instances are often used to pickle attribute names etc., and text is
   more common than binary data anyway.

 - Default to ASCII as the locale.getpreferredencoding, if the POSIX
   system doesn't support CODESET and LANG isn't set or doesn't
   allow deduction of an encoding.

 - Issue #1202: zlib.crc32 and zlib.adler32 now return an unsigned value.

 - Issue #719888: Updated tokenize to use a bytes API. generate_tokens has been
   renamed tokenize and now works with bytes rather than strings. A new
   detect_encoding function has been added for determining source file encoding
   according to PEP-0263. Token sequences returned by tokenize always start
   with an ENCODING token which specifies the encoding used to decode the file.
   This token is used to encode the output of untokenize back to bytes.

 What's New in Python 3.0a3?
 ===========================

 *Release date: 29-Feb-2008*

 Core and Builtins
 -----------------

 - Issue #2282: io.TextIOWrapper was not overriding seekable() from io.IOBase.

 - Issue #2115: Important speedup in setting __slot__ attributes.  Also
   prevent a possible crash: an Abstract Base Class would try to access a slot
   on a registered virtual subclass.

 - Fixed repr() and str() of complex numbers with infinity or nan as real or
   imaginary part.

 - Clear all free list during a gc.collect() of the highest generation in order
   to allow pymalloc to free more arenas. Python may give back memory to the
   OS earlier.

 - Issue #2045: Fix an infinite recursion triggered when printing a subclass of
   collections.defaultdict, if its default_factory is set to a bound method.

 - Fixed a minor memory leak in dictobject.c. The content of the free
   list was not freed on interpreter shutdown.

 - Limit free list of method and builtin function objects to 256 entries
   each.

 - Patch #1953: Added ``sys._compact_freelists()`` and the C API functions
   ``PyInt_CompactFreeList`` and ``PyFloat_CompactFreeList``
   to compact the internal free lists of pre-allocted ints and floats.

 - Bug #1983: Fixed return type of fork(), fork1() and forkpty() calls.
   Python expected the return type int but the fork familie returns pi_t.

 - Issue #1678380: Fix a bug that identifies 0j and -0j when they appear
   in the same code unit.

 - Issue #2025 :  Add tuple.count() and tuple.index() methods to comply with
   the collections.Sequence API.

 - Fixed multiple reinitialization of the Python interpreter. The small int
   list in longobject.c has caused a seg fault during the third finalization.

 - Issue #1973: bytes.fromhex('') raises SystemError

 - Issue #1771: remove cmp parameter from sorted() and list.sort()

 - Issue #1969: split and rsplit in bytearray are inconsistent

 - map() and no longer accepts None for the first argument.
   Use zip() instead.

 - Issue #1769: Now int("- 1") is not allowed any more.

 - Object/longobject.c: long(float('nan')) raises an OverflowError instead
   of returning 0.

 - Issue #1762972: __file__ points to the source file instead of the pyc/pyo
   file if the py file exists.

 - Issue #1393: object_richcompare() returns NotImplemented instead of
   False if the objects aren't equal, to give the other side a chance.

 - Issue #1692: Interpreter was not displaying location of SyntaxError.

 - Improve some exception messages when Windows fails to load an extension
   module. Now we get for example '%1 is not a valid Win32 application' instead
   of 'error code 193'.  Also use Unicode strings to deal with non-English
   locales.

 - Issue #1587: Added instancemethod wrapper for PyCFunctions. The Python C API
   has gained a new type *PyInstanceMethod_Type* and the functions
   *PyInstanceMethod_Check(o)*, *PyInstanceMethod_New(func)* and
   *PyInstanceMethod_Function(im)*.

 - Constants gc.DEBUG_OBJECT and gc.DEBUG_INSTANCE have been removed from the
   gc module; gc.DEBUG_COLLECTABLE or gc.DEBUG_UNCOLLECTABLE are now enough to
   print the corresponding list of objects considered by the garbage collector.

 - Issue #1573: Improper use of the keyword-only syntax makes the parser crash.

 - Issue #1564: The set implementation should special-case PyUnicode instead
   of PyString.

 - Patch #1031213: Decode source line in SyntaxErrors back to its
   original source encoding.

 - inspect.getsource() includes the decorators again.

 - Bug #1713: posixpath.ismount() claims symlink to a mountpoint is a
   mountpoint.

 - Fix utf-8-sig incremental decoder, which didn't recognise a BOM when the
   first chunk fed to the decoder started with a BOM, but was longer than 3
   bytes.


 Extension Modules
 -----------------

 - Code for itertools ifilter(), imap(), and izip() moved to bultins and
   renamed to filter(), map(), and zip().  Also, renamed izip_longest()
   to zip_longest() and ifilterfalse() to filterfalse().

 - Issue #1762972: Readded the reload() function as imp.reload()

 - Bug #2111: mmap segfaults when trying to write a block opened with PROT_READ

 - #2063: correct order of utime and stime in os.times() result on Windows.


 Library
 -------

 - Weakref dictionaries now inherit from MutableMapping.
   XXX their API still needs to be modernized (i.e. eliminate the iter methods).

 - Created new UserDict class in collections module.  This one inherits from and
   complies with the MutableMapping ABC.  Also, moved UserString and UserList
   to the collections module.  The MutableUserString class was removed.

 - Removed UserDict.DictMixin.  Replaced all its uses with
   collections.MutableMapping.

 - Issue #1703: getpass() should flush after writing prompt.

 - Issue #1585: IDLE uses non-existent xrange() function.

 - Issue #1578: Problems in win_getpass.

 Build
 -----

 - Renamed --enable-unicode configure flag to --with-wide-unicode, since
   Unicode strings can't be disabled anymore.


 C API
 -----

 - Issue #1629: Renamed Py_Size, Py_Type and Py_Refcnt to Py_SIZE,
   Py_TYPE and Py_REFCNT.

 - New API PyImport_ImportModuleNoBlock(), works like PyImport_ImportModule()
   but won't block on the import lock (returning an error instead).


 What's New in Python 3.0a2?
 ===========================

 *Release date: 07-Dec-2007*

 (Note: this list is incomplete.)

 Core and Builtins
 -----------------

 - str8 now has the same construction signature as bytes.

 - Comparisons between str and str8 now return False/True for ==/!=.  sqlite3
   returns str8 when recreating on object from it's __conform__ value.  The
   struct module returns str8 for all string-related formats.  This was true
   before this change, but becomes more apparent thanks to string comparisons
   always being False.

 - Replaced `PyFile_FromFile()` with `PyFile_FromFd(fd, name. mode, buffer,
   encoding, newline)`

 - Fixed `imp.find_module()` to obey the -*- coding: -*- header.

 - Changed `__file__` and `co_filename` to unicode. The path names are decoded
   with `Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding` and a new API method
   `PyUnicode_DecodeFSDefault(char*)` was added.

 - io.open() and _fileio.FileIO have grown a new argument closefd. A false
   value disables the closing of the file descriptor.

 - Added a new option -b to issues warnings (-bb for errors) about certain
   operations between bytes/buffer and str like str(b'') and comparsion.

 - The standards streams sys.stdin, stdout and stderr may be None when the
   when the C runtime library returns an invalid file descriptor for the
   streams (fileno(stdin) < 0). For now this happens only for Windows GUI
   apps and scripts started with `pythonw.exe`.

 - Added PCbuild9 directory for VS 2008.

 - Renamed structmember.h WRITE_RESTRICTED to PY_WRITE_RESTRICTED to work
   around a name clash with VS 2008 on Windows.

 - Unbound methods are gone for good. ClassObject.method returns an ordinary
   function object, instance.method still returns a bound method object.
   The API of bound methods is cleaned up, too. The im_class attribute is
   removed and im_func + im_self are renamed to __func__ and __self__. The
   factory PyMethod_New takes only func and instance as argument.

 - intobject.h is no longer included by Python.h. The remains were moved
   to longobject.h. It still exists to define several aliases from PyInt_
   to PyLong_ functions.

 - Removed sys.maxint, use sys.maxsize instead.


 Extension Modules
 -----------------

 - The `hotshot` profiler has been removed; use `cProfile` instead.


 Library
 -------

 - When loading an external file using testfile(), the passed-in encoding
   argument was being ignored if __loader__ is defined and forcing the source to
   be UTF-8.

 - The methods `os.tmpnam()`, `os.tempnam()` and `os.tmpfile()` have been
   removed in favor of the tempfile module.

 - Removed the 'new' module.

 - Removed all types from the 'types' module that are easily accessable through
   builtins.


 What's New in Python 3.0a1?
 ==========================

 *Release date: 31-Aug-2007*

 Core and Builtins
 -----------------

 - PEP 3131: Support non-ASCII identifiers.

 - PEP 3120: Change default encoding to UTF-8.

 - PEP 3123: Use proper C inheritance for PyObject.

 - Removed the __oct__ and __hex__ special methods and added a bin()
   builtin function.

 - PEP 3127: octal literals now start with "0o". Old-style octal literals
   are invalid. There are binary literals with a prefix of "0b".
   This also affects int(x, 0).

 - None, True, False are now keywords.

 - PEP 3119: isinstance() and issubclass() can be overridden.

 - Remove BaseException.message.

 - Remove tuple parameter unpacking (PEP 3113).

 - Remove the f_restricted attribute from frames.  This naturally leads to the
   removal of PyEval_GetRestricted() and PyFrame_IsRestricted().

 - PEP 3132 was accepted. That means that you can do ``a, *b = range(5)``
   to assign 0 to a and [1, 2, 3, 4] to b.

 - range() now returns an iterator rather than a list.  Floats are not allowed.
   xrange() is no longer defined.

 - Patch #1660500: hide iteration variable in list comps, add set comps
   and use common code to handle compilation of iterative expressions

 - By default, != returns the opposite of ==, unless the latter returns
   NotImplemented.

 - Patch #1680961: sys.exitfunc has been removed and replaced with a private
   C-level API.

 - PEP 3115: new metaclasses: the metaclass is now specified as a
   keyword arg in the class statement, which can now use the full syntax of
   a parameter list. Also, the metaclass can implement a __prepare__ function
   which will be called to create the dictionary for the new class namespace.

 - The long-deprecated argument "pend" of PyFloat_FromString() has been
   removed.

 - The dir() function has been extended to call the __dir__() method on
   its argument, if it exists. If not, it will work like before. This allows
   customizing the output of dir() in the presence of a __getattr__().

 - Removed support for __members__ and __methods__.

 - Removed indexing/slicing on BaseException.

 - input() became raw_input(): the name input() now implements the
   functionality formerly known as raw_input(); the name raw_input()
   is no longer defined.

 - Classes listed in an 'except' clause must inherit from BaseException.

 - PEP 3106: dict.iterkeys(), .iteritems(), .itervalues() are now gone;
   and .keys(), .items(), .values() return dict views, which behave
   like sets.

 - PEP 3105: print is now a function.  Also (not in the PEP) the
   'softspace' attribute of files is now gone (since print() doesn't use
   it).  A side effect of this change is that you can get incomplete
   output lines in interactive sessions:

   >>> print(42, end="")
   42>>>

   We may be able to fix this after the I/O library rewrite.

 - PEP 3102: keyword-only arguments.

 - Int/Long unification is complete.  The 'long' built-in type
   and literals with trailing 'L' or 'l' have been removed.
   Performance may be sub-optimal (haven't really benchmarked).

 - 'except E, V' must now be spelled as 'except E as V' and deletes V
   at the end of the except clause; V must be a simple name.

 - Added function annotations per PEP 3107.

 - Added nonlocal declaration from PEP 3104

   >>> def f(x):
   ...     def inc():
   ...         nonlocal x
   ...         x += 1
   ...         return x
   ...     return inc
   ...
   >>> inc = f(0)
   >>> inc()
   1
   >>> inc()
   2

 - Moved intern() to sys.intern().

 - exec is now a function.

 - Renamed nb_nonzero to nb_bool and __nonzero__ to __bool__.

 - Classic classes are a thing of the past.  All classes are new style.

 - Exceptions *must* derive from BaseException.

 - Integer division always returns a float.  The -Q option is no more.
   All the following are gone:
    * PyNumber_Divide and PyNumber_InPlaceDivide
    * __div__, __rdiv__, and __idiv__
    * nb_divide, nb_inplace_divide
    * operator.div, operator.idiv, operator.__div__, operator.__idiv__
   (Only __truediv__ and __floordiv__ remain, not sure how to handle them
    if we want to re-use __div__ and friends.  If we do, it will make
    it harder to write code for both 2.x and 3.x.)

 - 'as' and 'with' are keywords.

 - Absolute import is the default behavior for 'import foo' etc.

 - Removed support for syntax:
   backticks (ie, `x`), <>

 - Removed these Python builtins:
   apply(), callable(), coerce(), execfile(), file(), reduce(), reload()

 - Removed these Python methods:
   {}.has_key

 - Removed these opcodes:
   BINARY_DIVIDE, INPLACE_DIVIDE, UNARY_CONVERT

 - Remove C API support for restricted execution.

 - zip(), map() and filter() now return iterators, behaving like their
   itertools counterparts. This also affect map()'s behavior on
   sequences of unequal length -- it now stops after the shortest one
   is exhausted.

 - Additions:
   set literals, set comprehensions, ellipsis literal.

 - Added class decorators per PEP 3129.


 Extension Modules
 -----------------

 - Remove the imageop module.  Obsolete long with its unit tests becoming
   useless from the removal of rgbimg and imgfile.

 - Removed these attributes from Python modules:
   * operator module: div, idiv, __div__, __idiv__, isCallable, sequenceIncludes
   * sys module: exc_clear(), exc_type, exc_value, exc_traceback


 Library
 -------

 - Remove the compiler package.  Use of the _ast module and (an eventual)
   AST -> bytecode mechanism.

 - Removed these modules:
   * audiodev, Bastion, bsddb185, exceptions, linuxaudiodev,
     md5, MimeWriter, mimify, popen2,
     rexec, sets, sha, stringold, strop, sunaudiodev, timing, xmllib.

 - Moved these modules to Tools/Demos:
   * toaiff

 - Remove obsolete IRIX modules: al/AL, cd/CD, cddb, cdplayer, cl/CL, DEVICE,
   ERRNO, FILE, fl/FL, flp, fm, GET, gl/GL, GLWS, IN, imgfile, IOCTL, jpeg,
   panel, panelparser, readcd, sgi, sv/SV, torgb, WAIT.

 - Remove obsolete functions:
   * commands.getstatus(), os.popen*,

 - Remove functions in the string module that are also string methods;
   Remove string.{letters, lowercase, uppercase}.

 - Remove support for long obsolete platforms: plat-aix3, plat-irix5.

 - Remove xmlrpclib.SlowParser.  It was based on xmllib.

 - Patch #1680961: atexit has been reimplemented in C.

 - Add new codecs for UTF-32, UTF-32-LE and UTF-32-BE.


 Build
 -----

 C API
 -----

 - Removed these Python slots:
   __coerce__, __div__, __idiv__, __rdiv__

 - Removed these C APIs:
   PyNumber_Coerce(), PyNumber_CoerceEx(), PyMember_Get, PyMember_Set

 - Removed these C slots/fields:
   nb_divide, nb_inplace_divide

 - Removed these macros:
   staticforward, statichere, PyArg_GetInt, PyArg_NoArgs, _PyObject_Del

 - Removed these typedefs:
   intargfunc, intintargfunc, intobjargproc, intintobjargproc,
   getreadbufferproc, getwritebufferproc, getsegcountproc, getcharbufferproc,
   memberlist


 Tests
 -----

 - Removed test.testall as test.regrtest replaces it.


 Documentation
 -------------

 Mac
 ---

 - The cfmfile was removed.


 Platforms
 ---------

 - Support for BeOS and AtheOS was removed (according to PEP 11).

 - Support for RiscOS, Irix, Tru64 was removed (alledgedly).


 Tools/Demos
 -----------

 **(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**
	+++++++++++
	Python News
	+++++++++++

	(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)

	What's New in Python 3.0a5?
	===========================

	Release date: XX-XXX-2008

	Core and Builtins
	-----------------

	- Bug #2565: The repr() of type objects now calls them 'class',
	not 'type' - whether they are builtin types or not.

	- The command line processing was converted to pass Unicode strings
	through as unmodified as possible; as a consequence, the C API
	related to command line arguments was changed to use wchar_t.

	Extension Modules
	-----------------

	Library
	-------

	- The bundled libffi copy is now in sync with the recently released
	libffi3.0.5 version, apart from some small changes to
	Modules/_ctypes/libffi/configure.ac.

	Build
	-----

	- Issue #2544: On HP-UX systems, use 'gcc -shared' for linking when
	gcc is used as compiler.

	What's New in Python 3.0a4?
	===========================

	Release date: 02-Apr-2008

	Core and Builtins
	-----------------

	- Bug #2301: Don't try decoding the source code into the original
	encoding for syntax errors.

	Extension Modules
	-----------------

	- The dl module was removed, use the ctypes module instead.

	- Use wchar_t functions in _locale module.

	Library
	-------

	- The class distutils.commands.build_py.build_py_2to3 can be used
	as a build_py replacement to automatically run 2to3 on modules
	that are going to be installed.

	- A new pickle protocol (protocol 3) is added with explicit support
	for bytes. This is the default protocol. It intentionally cannot
	be unpickled by Python 2.x.

	- When a pickle written by Python 2.x contains an (8-bit) str
	instance, this is now decoded to a (Unicode) str instance. The
	encoding used to do this defaults to ASCII, but can be overridden
	via two new keyword arguments to the Unpickler class. Previously
	this would create bytes instances, which is usually wrong: str
	instances are often used to pickle attribute names etc., and text is
	more common than binary data anyway.

	- Default to ASCII as the locale.getpreferredencoding, if the POSIX
	system doesn't support CODESET and LANG isn't set or doesn't
	allow deduction of an encoding.

	- Issue #1202: zlib.crc32 and zlib.adler32 now return an unsigned value.

	- Issue #719888: Updated tokenize to use a bytes API. generate_tokens has been
	renamed tokenize and now works with bytes rather than strings. A new
	detect_encoding function has been added for determining source file encoding
	according to PEP-0263. Token sequences returned by tokenize always start
	with an ENCODING token which specifies the encoding used to decode the file.
	This token is used to encode the output of untokenize back to bytes.

	What's New in Python 3.0a3?
	===========================

	Release date: 29-Feb-2008

	Core and Builtins
	-----------------

	- Issue #2282: io.TextIOWrapper was not overriding seekable() from io.IOBase.

	- Issue #2115: Important speedup in setting __slot__ attributes. Also
	prevent a possible crash: an Abstract Base Class would try to access a slot
	on a registered virtual subclass.

	- Fixed repr() and str() of complex numbers with infinity or nan as real or
	imaginary part.

	- Clear all free list during a gc.collect() of the highest generation in order
	to allow pymalloc to free more arenas. Python may give back memory to the
	OS earlier.

	- Issue #2045: Fix an infinite recursion triggered when printing a subclass of
	collections.defaultdict, if its default_factory is set to a bound method.

	- Fixed a minor memory leak in dictobject.c. The content of the free
	list was not freed on interpreter shutdown.

	- Limit free list of method and builtin function objects to 256 entries
	each.

	- Patch #1953: Added ``sys._compact_freelists()`` and the C API functions
	``PyInt_CompactFreeList`` and ``PyFloat_CompactFreeList``
	to compact the internal free lists of pre-allocted ints and floats.

	- Bug #1983: Fixed return type of fork(), fork1() and forkpty() calls.
	Python expected the return type int but the fork familie returns pi_t.

	- Issue #1678380: Fix a bug that identifies 0j and -0j when they appear
	in the same code unit.

	- Issue #2025 : Add tuple.count() and tuple.index() methods to comply with
	the collections.Sequence API.

	- Fixed multiple reinitialization of the Python interpreter. The small int
	list in longobject.c has caused a seg fault during the third finalization.

	- Issue #1973: bytes.fromhex('') raises SystemError

	- Issue #1771: remove cmp parameter from sorted() and list.sort()

	- Issue #1969: split and rsplit in bytearray are inconsistent

	- map() and no longer accepts None for the first argument.
	Use zip() instead.

	- Issue #1769: Now int("- 1") is not allowed any more.

	- Object/longobject.c: long(float('nan')) raises an OverflowError instead
	of returning 0.

	- Issue #1762972: __file__ points to the source file instead of the pyc/pyo
	file if the py file exists.

	- Issue #1393: object_richcompare() returns NotImplemented instead of
	False if the objects aren't equal, to give the other side a chance.

	- Issue #1692: Interpreter was not displaying location of SyntaxError.

	- Improve some exception messages when Windows fails to load an extension
	module. Now we get for example '%1 is not a valid Win32 application' instead
	of 'error code 193'. Also use Unicode strings to deal with non-English
	locales.

	- Issue #1587: Added instancemethod wrapper for PyCFunctions. The Python C API
	has gained a new type PyInstanceMethod_Type and the functions
	PyInstanceMethod_Check(o), PyInstanceMethod_New(func) and
	PyInstanceMethod_Function(im).

	- Constants gc.DEBUG_OBJECT and gc.DEBUG_INSTANCE have been removed from the
	gc module; gc.DEBUG_COLLECTABLE or gc.DEBUG_UNCOLLECTABLE are now enough to
	print the corresponding list of objects considered by the garbage collector.

	- Issue #1573: Improper use of the keyword-only syntax makes the parser crash.

	- Issue #1564: The set implementation should special-case PyUnicode instead
	of PyString.

	- Patch #1031213: Decode source line in SyntaxErrors back to its
	original source encoding.

	- inspect.getsource() includes the decorators again.

	- Bug #1713: posixpath.ismount() claims symlink to a mountpoint is a
	mountpoint.

	- Fix utf-8-sig incremental decoder, which didn't recognise a BOM when the
	first chunk fed to the decoder started with a BOM, but was longer than 3
	bytes.


	Extension Modules
	-----------------

	- Code for itertools ifilter(), imap(), and izip() moved to bultins and
	renamed to filter(), map(), and zip(). Also, renamed izip_longest()
	to zip_longest() and ifilterfalse() to filterfalse().

	- Issue #1762972: Readded the reload() function as imp.reload()

	- Bug #2111: mmap segfaults when trying to write a block opened with PROT_READ

	- #2063: correct order of utime and stime in os.times() result on Windows.


	Library
	-------

	- Weakref dictionaries now inherit from MutableMapping.
	XXX their API still needs to be modernized (i.e. eliminate the iter methods).

	- Created new UserDict class in collections module. This one inherits from and
	complies with the MutableMapping ABC. Also, moved UserString and UserList
	to the collections module. The MutableUserString class was removed.

	- Removed UserDict.DictMixin. Replaced all its uses with
	collections.MutableMapping.

	- Issue #1703: getpass() should flush after writing prompt.

	- Issue #1585: IDLE uses non-existent xrange() function.

	- Issue #1578: Problems in win_getpass.

	Build
	-----

	- Renamed --enable-unicode configure flag to --with-wide-unicode, since
	Unicode strings can't be disabled anymore.


	C API
	-----

	- Issue #1629: Renamed Py_Size, Py_Type and Py_Refcnt to Py_SIZE,
	Py_TYPE and Py_REFCNT.

	- New API PyImport_ImportModuleNoBlock(), works like PyImport_ImportModule()
	but won't block on the import lock (returning an error instead).


	What's New in Python 3.0a2?
	===========================

	Release date: 07-Dec-2007

	(Note: this list is incomplete.)

	Core and Builtins
	-----------------

	- str8 now has the same construction signature as bytes.

	- Comparisons between str and str8 now return False/True for ==/!=. sqlite3
	returns str8 when recreating on object from it's __conform__ value. The
	struct module returns str8 for all string-related formats. This was true
	before this change, but becomes more apparent thanks to string comparisons
	always being False.

	- Replaced `PyFile_FromFile()` with `PyFile_FromFd(fd, name. mode, buffer,
	encoding, newline)`

	- Fixed `imp.find_module()` to obey the -- coding: -- header.

	- Changed `__file__` and `co_filename` to unicode. The path names are decoded
	with `Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding` and a new API method
	`PyUnicode_DecodeFSDefault(char*)` was added.

	- io.open() and _fileio.FileIO have grown a new argument closefd. A false
	value disables the closing of the file descriptor.

	- Added a new option -b to issues warnings (-bb for errors) about certain
	operations between bytes/buffer and str like str(b'') and comparsion.

	- The standards streams sys.stdin, stdout and stderr may be None when the
	when the C runtime library returns an invalid file descriptor for the
	streams (fileno(stdin) < 0). For now this happens only for Windows GUI
	apps and scripts started with `pythonw.exe`.

	- Added PCbuild9 directory for VS 2008.

	- Renamed structmember.h WRITE_RESTRICTED to PY_WRITE_RESTRICTED to work
	around a name clash with VS 2008 on Windows.

	- Unbound methods are gone for good. ClassObject.method returns an ordinary
	function object, instance.method still returns a bound method object.
	The API of bound methods is cleaned up, too. The im_class attribute is
	removed and im_func + im_self are renamed to __func__ and __self__. The
	factory PyMethod_New takes only func and instance as argument.

	- intobject.h is no longer included by Python.h. The remains were moved
	to longobject.h. It still exists to define several aliases from PyInt_
	to PyLong_ functions.

	- Removed sys.maxint, use sys.maxsize instead.


	Extension Modules
	-----------------

	- The `hotshot` profiler has been removed; use `cProfile` instead.


	Library
	-------

	- When loading an external file using testfile(), the passed-in encoding
	argument was being ignored if __loader__ is defined and forcing the source to
	be UTF-8.

	- The methods `os.tmpnam()`, `os.tempnam()` and `os.tmpfile()` have been
	removed in favor of the tempfile module.

	- Removed the 'new' module.

	- Removed all types from the 'types' module that are easily accessable through
	builtins.


	What's New in Python 3.0a1?
	==========================

	Release date: 31-Aug-2007

	Core and Builtins
	-----------------

	- PEP 3131: Support non-ASCII identifiers.

	- PEP 3120: Change default encoding to UTF-8.

	- PEP 3123: Use proper C inheritance for PyObject.

	- Removed the __oct__ and __hex__ special methods and added a bin()
	builtin function.

	- PEP 3127: octal literals now start with "0o". Old-style octal literals
	are invalid. There are binary literals with a prefix of "0b".
	This also affects int(x, 0).

	- None, True, False are now keywords.

	- PEP 3119: isinstance() and issubclass() can be overridden.

	- Remove BaseException.message.

	- Remove tuple parameter unpacking (PEP 3113).

	- Remove the f_restricted attribute from frames. This naturally leads to the
	removal of PyEval_GetRestricted() and PyFrame_IsRestricted().

	- PEP 3132 was accepted. That means that you can do ``a, *b = range(5)``
	to assign 0 to a and [1, 2, 3, 4] to b.

	- range() now returns an iterator rather than a list. Floats are not allowed.
	xrange() is no longer defined.

	- Patch #1660500: hide iteration variable in list comps, add set comps
	and use common code to handle compilation of iterative expressions

	- By default, != returns the opposite of ==, unless the latter returns
	NotImplemented.

	- Patch #1680961: sys.exitfunc has been removed and replaced with a private
	C-level API.

	- PEP 3115: new metaclasses: the metaclass is now specified as a
	keyword arg in the class statement, which can now use the full syntax of
	a parameter list. Also, the metaclass can implement a __prepare__ function
	which will be called to create the dictionary for the new class namespace.

	- The long-deprecated argument "pend" of PyFloat_FromString() has been
	removed.

	- The dir() function has been extended to call the __dir__() method on
	its argument, if it exists. If not, it will work like before. This allows
	customizing the output of dir() in the presence of a __getattr__().

	- Removed support for __members__ and __methods__.

	- Removed indexing/slicing on BaseException.

	- input() became raw_input(): the name input() now implements the
	functionality formerly known as raw_input(); the name raw_input()
	is no longer defined.

	- Classes listed in an 'except' clause must inherit from BaseException.

	- PEP 3106: dict.iterkeys(), .iteritems(), .itervalues() are now gone;
	and .keys(), .items(), .values() return dict views, which behave
	like sets.

	- PEP 3105: print is now a function. Also (not in the PEP) the
	'softspace' attribute of files is now gone (since print() doesn't use
	it). A side effect of this change is that you can get incomplete
	output lines in interactive sessions:

	>>> print(42, end="")
	42>>>

	We may be able to fix this after the I/O library rewrite.

	- PEP 3102: keyword-only arguments.

	- Int/Long unification is complete. The 'long' built-in type
	and literals with trailing 'L' or 'l' have been removed.
	Performance may be sub-optimal (haven't really benchmarked).

	- 'except E, V' must now be spelled as 'except E as V' and deletes V
	at the end of the except clause; V must be a simple name.

	- Added function annotations per PEP 3107.

	- Added nonlocal declaration from PEP 3104

	>>> def f(x):
	... def inc():
	... nonlocal x
	... x += 1
	... return x
	... return inc
	...
	>>> inc = f(0)
	>>> inc()
	1
	>>> inc()
	2

	- Moved intern() to sys.intern().

	- exec is now a function.

	- Renamed nb_nonzero to nb_bool and __nonzero__ to __bool__.

	- Classic classes are a thing of the past. All classes are new style.

	- Exceptions must derive from BaseException.

	- Integer division always returns a float. The -Q option is no more.
	All the following are gone:
	* PyNumber_Divide and PyNumber_InPlaceDivide
	* __div__, __rdiv__, and __idiv__
	* nb_divide, nb_inplace_divide
	* operator.div, operator.idiv, operator.__div__, operator.__idiv__
	(Only __truediv__ and __floordiv__ remain, not sure how to handle them
	if we want to re-use __div__ and friends. If we do, it will make
	it harder to write code for both 2.x and 3.x.)

	- 'as' and 'with' are keywords.

	- Absolute import is the default behavior for 'import foo' etc.

	- Removed support for syntax:
	backticks (ie, `x`), <>

	- Removed these Python builtins:
	apply(), callable(), coerce(), execfile(), file(), reduce(), reload()

	- Removed these Python methods:
	{}.has_key

	- Removed these opcodes:
	BINARY_DIVIDE, INPLACE_DIVIDE, UNARY_CONVERT

	- Remove C API support for restricted execution.

	- zip(), map() and filter() now return iterators, behaving like their
	itertools counterparts. This also affect map()'s behavior on
	sequences of unequal length -- it now stops after the shortest one
	is exhausted.

	- Additions:
	set literals, set comprehensions, ellipsis literal.

	- Added class decorators per PEP 3129.


	Extension Modules
	-----------------

	- Remove the imageop module. Obsolete long with its unit tests becoming
	useless from the removal of rgbimg and imgfile.

	- Removed these attributes from Python modules:
	* operator module: div, idiv, __div__, __idiv__, isCallable, sequenceIncludes
	* sys module: exc_clear(), exc_type, exc_value, exc_traceback


	Library
	-------

	- Remove the compiler package. Use of the _ast module and (an eventual)
	AST -> bytecode mechanism.

	- Removed these modules:
	* audiodev, Bastion, bsddb185, exceptions, linuxaudiodev,
	md5, MimeWriter, mimify, popen2,
	rexec, sets, sha, stringold, strop, sunaudiodev, timing, xmllib.

	- Moved these modules to Tools/Demos:
	* toaiff

	- Remove obsolete IRIX modules: al/AL, cd/CD, cddb, cdplayer, cl/CL, DEVICE,
	ERRNO, FILE, fl/FL, flp, fm, GET, gl/GL, GLWS, IN, imgfile, IOCTL, jpeg,
	panel, panelparser, readcd, sgi, sv/SV, torgb, WAIT.

	- Remove obsolete functions:
	* commands.getstatus(), os.popen*,

	- Remove functions in the string module that are also string methods;
	Remove string.{letters, lowercase, uppercase}.

	- Remove support for long obsolete platforms: plat-aix3, plat-irix5.

	- Remove xmlrpclib.SlowParser. It was based on xmllib.

	- Patch #1680961: atexit has been reimplemented in C.

	- Add new codecs for UTF-32, UTF-32-LE and UTF-32-BE.


	Build
	-----

	C API
	-----

	- Removed these Python slots:
	__coerce__, __div__, __idiv__, __rdiv__

	- Removed these C APIs:
	PyNumber_Coerce(), PyNumber_CoerceEx(), PyMember_Get, PyMember_Set

	- Removed these C slots/fields:
	nb_divide, nb_inplace_divide

	- Removed these macros:
	staticforward, statichere, PyArg_GetInt, PyArg_NoArgs, _PyObject_Del

	- Removed these typedefs:
	intargfunc, intintargfunc, intobjargproc, intintobjargproc,
	getreadbufferproc, getwritebufferproc, getsegcountproc, getcharbufferproc,
	memberlist


	Tests
	-----

	- Removed test.testall as test.regrtest replaces it.


	Documentation
	-------------

	Mac
	---

	- The cfmfile was removed.


	Platforms
	---------

	- Support for BeOS and AtheOS was removed (according to PEP 11).

	- Support for RiscOS, Irix, Tru64 was removed (alledgedly).


	Tools/Demos
	-----------

	(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)