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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Neal Norwitz0023a2f2006-02-27 23:24:48 +000015- CO_GENERATOR_ALLOWED is no longer defined, this behavior is the default.
16 The name was removed from Include/code.h.
17
Neal Norwitzeb651252006-02-27 16:47:12 +000018- PEP 308: conditional expressions were added (x if cond else y).
19
Guido van Rossum1968ad32006-02-25 22:38:04 +000020- Patch 1433928:
21 - The copy module now "copies" function objects (as atomic objects).
22 - dict.__getitem__ now looks for a __missing__ hook before raising
23 KeyError.
24
Guido van Rossumc2e20742006-02-27 22:32:47 +000025- PEP 343: with statement implemented.
26
Marc-André Lemburgfe4b34c2006-02-19 15:22:22 +000027- Fix the encodings package codec search function to only search
28 inside its own package. Fixes problem reported in patch #1433198.
29
30 Note: Codec packages should implement and register their own
31 codec search function. PEP 100 has the details.
32
Martin v. Löwis18e16552006-02-15 17:27:45 +000033- PEP 353: Using ssize_t as the index type.
34
Neal Norwitzfc76d632006-01-10 06:03:13 +000035- Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
36 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
37 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
38
Neal Norwitz671b9e32006-01-09 07:07:12 +000039- Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
40 configure would break checking curses.h.
41
Georg Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000042- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
43 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
44
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000045- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
46
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000047- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
48
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000049- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
50
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000051- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
52 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
53
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000054- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
55 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number
56 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
57
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000058- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
59 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000060 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000061
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000062- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
63 now encodes backslash correctly.
64
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000065- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
66
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000067- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
68 and long longs.
69
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000070- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
71 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
72 message in this case.
73
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000074- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
75 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
76 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
77 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
78 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
79
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000080- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000081
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000082- Speed up some Unicode operations.
83
Martin v. Löwisbd260da2006-02-26 19:42:26 +000084- A new AST parser implementation was completed. The abstract
85 syntax tree is available for read-only (non-compile) access
Martin v. Löwis577b5b92006-02-27 15:23:19 +000086 to Python code; an _ast module was added.
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000087
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000088- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000089 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
90
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000091- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
92
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000093- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
94 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
95
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000096- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
97
98- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
99
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +0000100- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
101 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
102 was empty.
103
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +0000104- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
105 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
106
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +0000107- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +0000108 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +0000109
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +0000110- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
111 codes.
112
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +0000113- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
114 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
115 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
116
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +0000117- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
118 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
119
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +0000120- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +0000121 (fixes bug #1119418).
122
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +0000123- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
124
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +0000125- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
126 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
127
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +0000128- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
129 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
130 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
131
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000132- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
133
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000134- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
135 reference counts in some error exit cases.
136
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000137- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
138 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
139 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
140 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
141 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
142 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
143 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
144 realloc.
145
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000146- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
147 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
148
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000149- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
150 like their int counterparts.
151
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000152- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
153 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
154 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
155 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
156 for a longer write-up of the problem).
157
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000158- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
159 serializing floats.
160
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000161- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
162 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
163 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
164
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000165- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
166 278.
167
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000168- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
169 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
170 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
171 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000172 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000173 PyNumber_*().
174 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
175
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000176- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
177 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
178 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
179 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
180
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000181- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
182 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
183 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
184 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
185 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
186
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000187- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
188 disabled caused a crash.
189
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000190- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
191 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
192
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000193- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000194 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
195
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000196- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
197
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000198- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000199 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
200 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
201 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000202
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000203- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
204
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000205- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
206 returning None.
207
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000208- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000209 ('\') with a specific error message.
210
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000211- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
212
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000213- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
214 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
215
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000216- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000217 an ferror() call.
218
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000219- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
220 list.sort().
221
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000222- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
223 (2+3) --> (5).
224
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000225- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
226
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000227- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
228 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000229
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000230- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
231 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
232 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
233
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000234- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
235 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
236 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
237
Tim Petersf4e69282006-02-27 17:15:31 +0000238- Patch #1413181: changed ``PyThreadState_Delete()`` to forget about the
239 current thread state when the auto-GIL-state machinery knows about
240 it (since the thread state is being deleted, continuing to remember it
241 can't help, but can hurt if another thread happens to get created with
242 the same thread id).
243
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000244Extension Modules
245-----------------
246
Guido van Rossum1968ad32006-02-25 22:38:04 +0000247- Patch 1433928: Added a new type, defaultdict, to the collections module.
248 This uses the new __missing__ hook behavior added to dict (see above).
249
Georg Brandldbd83392006-02-20 09:42:33 +0000250- Bug #854823: socketmodule now builds on Sun platforms even when
251 INET_ADDRSTRLEN is not defined.
252
Georg Brandlf4f44152006-02-18 22:29:33 +0000253- Patch #1393157: os.startfile() now has an optional argument to specify
254 a "command verb" to invoke on the file.
255
Neal Norwitz082b2df2006-02-07 07:04:46 +0000256- Bug #876637, prevent stack corruption when socket descriptor
257 is larger than FD_SETSIZE.
258
Neal Norwitz0e6bc8c2006-02-05 05:45:43 +0000259- Patch #1407135, bug #1424041: harmonize mmap behavior of anonymous memory.
260 mmap.mmap(-1, size) now returns anonymous memory in both Unix and Windows.
261 mmap.mmap(0, size) should not be used on Windows for anonymous memory.
262
Martin v. Löwis57a34e82006-02-04 19:12:37 +0000263- Patch #1422385: The nis module now supports access to domains other
264 than the system default domain.
265
Martin v. Löwis14694662006-02-03 12:54:16 +0000266- Use Win32 API to implement os.stat/fstat. As a result, subsecond timestamps
267 are reported, the limit on path name lengths is removed, and stat reports
268 WindowsError now (instead of OSError).
269
Gregory P. Smithcfc4a8d2006-01-29 19:46:23 +0000270- Add bsddb.db.DBEnv.set_tx_timestamp allowing time based database recovery.
271
Neal Norwitz62a21122006-01-25 05:21:55 +0000272- Bug #1413192, fix seg fault in bsddb if a transaction was deleted
273 before the env.
274
Martin v. Löwis11017b12006-01-14 18:12:57 +0000275- Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
276
Neal Norwitz3b4fff82006-01-11 08:54:45 +0000277- Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
278
Neal Norwitz88bbd732006-01-10 07:05:44 +0000279- Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
280 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
281 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
282
Neal Norwitz5e3d8622006-01-09 06:24:35 +0000283- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
284 without prior setting of the userptr.
285
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000286- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
287
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000288- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
289
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000290- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
291 problem on AIX.
292
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000293- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
294
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000295- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
296
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000297- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
298
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000299- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
300 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
301
Gregory P. Smithe101df92006-01-24 20:09:45 +0000302- Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using
303 BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1.
304
305- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4
306
307- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000308
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000309- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
310 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
311
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000312- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
313
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000314- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
315 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
316
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000317- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
318 returns in cStringIO.c.
319
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000320- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
321 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
322
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000323- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
324
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000325- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
326
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000327- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
328 the file system encoding.
329
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000330- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
331 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000332
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000333- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
334
335- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000336 line without newlines.
337
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000338- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
339 on Windows.
340
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000341- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000342 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
343
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000344- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
345 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
346 for large or negative values.
347
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000348- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000349 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000350
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000351- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
352
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000353- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
354 if available on the platform.
355
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000356- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
357 available on the platform.
358
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000359- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
360 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
361
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000362- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
363
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000364- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
365 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
366 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
367
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000368- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
369
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000370- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
371 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
372
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000373- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000374 file size.
375
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000376- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
377
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000378- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
379 {remove_history,replace_history}
380
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000381- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
382 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000383
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000384- stat_float_times is now True.
385
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000386- array.array objects are now picklable.
387
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000388- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
389 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
390
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000391- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
392 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
393 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
394
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000395- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
396 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000397
398Library
399-------
400
Martin v. Löwis415ed932006-02-27 19:56:30 +0000401- The compiler package now supports future imports after the module docstring.
402
Georg Brandl8f7c54e2006-02-20 08:40:38 +0000403- Bug #1413790: zipfile now sanitizes absolute archive names that are
404 not allowed by the specs.
405
406- Bug #1413790: zipfile now sanitizes absolute archive names that are
407 not allowed by the specs.
408
Georg Brandlc98eeed2006-02-19 14:57:47 +0000409- Patch #1215184: FileInput now can be given an opening hook which can
410 be used to control how files are opened.
411
Georg Brandlc029f872006-02-19 14:12:34 +0000412- Patch #1212287: fileinput.input() now has a mode parameter for
413 specifying the file mode input files should be opened with.
414
Georg Brandl67e9fb92006-02-19 13:56:17 +0000415- Patch #1215184: fileinput now has a fileno() function for getting the
416 current file number.
417
Georg Brandl602b9ba2006-02-19 13:26:36 +0000418- Patch #1349274: gettext.install() now optionally installs additional
419 translation functions other than _() in the builtin namespace.
420
Georg Brandle4662172006-02-19 09:51:27 +0000421- Patch #1337756: fileinput now accepts Unicode filenames.
422
Georg Brandl7b4e7c22006-02-18 21:10:56 +0000423- Patch #1373643: The chunk module can now read chunks larger than
424 two gigabytes.
425
Georg Brandl21dd1af2006-02-17 13:35:13 +0000426- Patch #1417555: SimpleHTTPServer now returns Last-Modified headers.
427
Georg Brandlbd3bc4d2006-02-17 09:52:53 +0000428- Bug #1430298: It is now possible to send a mail with an empty
429 return address using smtplib.
430
Georg Brandl0e1abe22006-02-17 09:48:14 +0000431- Bug #1432260: The names of lambda functions are now properly displayed
432 in pydoc.
Georg Brandl501dd0d2006-02-17 09:45:40 +0000433
Martin v. Löwis00756902006-02-05 17:09:41 +0000434- Patch #1412872: zipfile now sets the creator system to 3 (Unix)
435 unless the system is Win32.
436
Tim Petersda1329b2006-02-27 16:50:01 +0000437- Patch #1349118: urllib now supports user:pass@ style proxy
Martin v. Löwis3e865952006-01-24 15:51:21 +0000438 specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols
439 are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections.
440
Georg Brandl531ceba2006-01-21 07:20:56 +0000441- Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications.
442
443- Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.
Georg Brandl89f35ac2006-01-20 17:24:23 +0000444
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000445- Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
446
Neal Norwitzf60cd472006-01-14 07:05:13 +0000447- Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
Georg Brandl45ab2332006-01-13 17:05:56 +0000448 any more.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000449
Georg Brandl4edd9892006-01-13 16:59:46 +0000450- Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
451 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000452
Martin v. Löwis412ed3b2006-01-08 10:45:39 +0000453- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
454
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000455- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
456
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000457- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
458 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
459 LoadError subclasses IOError.
460
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000461- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000462 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
463 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
464 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
465 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
466
467 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
468 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
469 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
470 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
471 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000472
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000473- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
474 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
475 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
476
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000477- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
478
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000479- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
480
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000481- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
482 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
483 illegal argument)
484
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000485- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
486 is an error in the format string.
487
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000488- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
489
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000490- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000491 "parent" argument.
492
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000493- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
494 for padding.
495
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000496- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
497 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
498
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000499- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
500 to get the correct encoding.
501
502- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
503 languages.
504
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000505- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
506
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000507- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
508
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000509- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
510
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000511- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
512 functionality.
513
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000514- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
515
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000516- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
517 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
518
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000519- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
520 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
521 match the Content-Length header.
522
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000523- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
524
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000525- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
526 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000527 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000528
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000529- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
530
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000531- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
532
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000533- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
534 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
535
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000536- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
537 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
538 Tkdnd.
539
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000540- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
541 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
542
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000543- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
544 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
545
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000546- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000547 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
548
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000549- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
550 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
551
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000552- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
553 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
554
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000555- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000556 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000557
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000558- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
559
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000560- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
561 error messages.
562
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000563- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
564
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000565- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
566 Bug #1224621.
567
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000568- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
569 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
570 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
571 terminates by raising StopIteration.
572
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000573- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
574
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000575- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
576 component of the path.
577
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000578- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
579 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
580 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
581 class at all.
582
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000583- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
584 files to PyPI.
585
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000586- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
587 them to PyPI.
588
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000589- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
590 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
591 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
592 work as expected.
593
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000594- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
595 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
596
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000597- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000598 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
599
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000600- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
601
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000602- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
603 to build.
604
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000605- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
606 symbolic links on Windows.
607
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000608- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000609 profile.py if available.
610
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000611- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
612
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000613- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
614 in LWPCookieJar.
615
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000616- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
617
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000618- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
619
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000620- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
621
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000622- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
623
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000624- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
625
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000626- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
627
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000628- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
629
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000630- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
631
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000632- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
633 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
634 be exploited in various ways.
635
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000636- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000637 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
638
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000639- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
640 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
641
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000642- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000643 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
644
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000645- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
646
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000647- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
648
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000649- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
650
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000651- Enhancements to the csv module:
652
653 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000654 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000655 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000656 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
657 reporting.
658 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
659 dictates.
660 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000661 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000662 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000663 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
664 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000665 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
666 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000667 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000668 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
669 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
670 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
671 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
672 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
673 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
674 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
675 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
676 without first creating a dialect class.
677 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
678 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
679 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000680 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000681 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
682 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000683 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
684 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
685 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
686 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000687 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
688 This has been fixed.
689
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000690- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
691 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
692 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
693 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
694
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000695- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
696
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000697- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
698 (Bug #951915).
699
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000700- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
701 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
702 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000703 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000704
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000705- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
706
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000707- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
708 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
709
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000710- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
711
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000712- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
713
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000714- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
715
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000716- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
717
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000718- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
719
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000720- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
721 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
722 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
723
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000724- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000725 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000726
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000727- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
728 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
729 tokenizer with very long source lines.
730
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000731- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
732 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
733 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000734
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000735- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
736 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000737
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000738- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
739 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
740
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000741- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
742 correctly.
743
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000744- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
745 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
746 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
747 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
748 between two lines.
749
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000750- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
751 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
752 handlers.
753
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000754- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000755 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
756 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000757
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000758- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
759 considering it exactly like a '*'.
760
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000761- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
762 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000763
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000764- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
765
Gustavo Niemeyer548148812006-01-31 18:34:13 +0000766- Patch #1413711: Certain patterns of differences were making difflib
767 touch the recursion limit.
768
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000769Build
770-----
771
Martin v. Löwis86d66262006-02-17 08:40:11 +0000772- Patch #1432345: Make python compile on DragonFly.
773
Martin v. Löwis856bf9a2006-02-14 20:42:55 +0000774- Build support for Win64-AMD64 was added.
775
Martin v. Löwisa55e55e2006-02-11 15:55:14 +0000776- Patch #1428494: Prefer linking against ncursesw over ncurses library.
777
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000778- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
779
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000780- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
781 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
782
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000783- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
784
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000785- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
786 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
787
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000788- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
789 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
790
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000791- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
792 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
793 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000794 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000795
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000796- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
797 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
798 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
799
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000800- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
801
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000802- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
803 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
804
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000805- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
806 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
807 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
808 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
809 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
810 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
811 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
812 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
813
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000814- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
815 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
816 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
817 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
818
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000819C API
820-----
821
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000822- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
823
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000824- Removed PyRange_New().
825
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000826- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
827 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
828 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
829 mappings.
830
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000831
832Tests
833-----
834
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000835- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000836
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000837- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
838 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
839
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000840
841Documentation
842-------------
843
Georg Brandl8cb30772006-01-20 09:34:29 +0000844- Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.
845
Georg Brandla3a93ae2006-01-20 09:14:36 +0000846- Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
847 values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
848
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000849- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
850
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000851- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
852
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000853- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
854
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000855- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
856
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000857- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
858
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000859- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
860
861- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
862
863- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
864
865- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
866
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000867- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
868 Closes bug #1166582.
869
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000870- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
871 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
872 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
873
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000874Mac
875---
876
877
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000878New platforms
879-------------
880
881- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
882
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000883
884Tools/Demos
885-----------
886
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000887- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
888 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
889 source files that need an encoding declaration.
890 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
891
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000892- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
893
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000894- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000895
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000896- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
897 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000898
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000899What's New in Python 2.4 final?
900===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000901
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000902*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000903
904Core and builtins
905-----------------
906
907- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
908 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
909 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
910
911
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000912What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
913==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000914
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000915*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000916
917Core and builtins
918-----------------
919
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000920- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
921 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
922 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
923
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000924
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000925Library
926-------
927
928- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
929 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
930 raised is re-raised.
931
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000932- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
933 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
934
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000935- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
936 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
937 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
938 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
939 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
940 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
941 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
942 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
943 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
944 by the slice are recomputed now.
945
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000946- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000947
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000948Build
949-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000950
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000951- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
952 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
953 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000954
955C API
956-----
957
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000958- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
959
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000960
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000961What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
962================================
963
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000964*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000965
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000966License
967-------
968
969The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
970is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
971changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
972Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
973intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
974durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
975the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
976License::
977
978 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
979
980says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
981to Python 2.1.1.
982
983The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
984License Version 2.
985
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000986Core and builtins
987-----------------
988
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000989- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
990 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
991 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
992 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
993 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
994 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
995 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000996 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000997 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
998 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
999
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +00001000- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001001
1002Extension Modules
1003-----------------
1004
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +00001005- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
1006 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
1007 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
1008 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001009
1010Library
1011-------
1012
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +00001013- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
1014 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
1015 returned.
1016
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +00001017- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
1018
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +00001019- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
1020 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
1021
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +00001022- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
1023
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +00001024- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
1025 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001026
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +00001027- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
1028
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +00001029- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
1030
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +00001031- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +00001032 the source code is updated and reloaded.
1033
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001034Build
1035-----
1036
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +00001037- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001038
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001039What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
1040================================
1041
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +00001042*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001043
1044Core and builtins
1045-----------------
1046
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001047- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +00001048 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
1049
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +00001050- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
1051 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
1052 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
1053 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
1054
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001055- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
1056 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
1057
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +00001058- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
1059 constant.
1060
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001061- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
1062 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
1063 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
1064 large), and to anomalies such as
1065 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
1066 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
1067 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
1068 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001069
1070Extension modules
1071-----------------
1072
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +00001073- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
1074 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001075 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
1076 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
1077 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001078
1079Library
1080-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001081
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001082- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001083 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001084 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
1085 --swig-cpp.
1086
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +00001087- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
1088 it is set.
1089
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +00001090- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +00001091
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +00001092- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
1093 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
1094 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
1095 Closes bug #1039270.
1096
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001097- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +00001098
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +00001099 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001100 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
1101 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
1102 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
1103 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
1104 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
1105 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
1106 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
1107 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
1108 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
1109 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
1110 + Updates to documentation.
1111
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +00001112- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
1113 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
1114 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
1115 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
1116
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001117- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001118
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +00001119- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
1120 applications should use the getmember function.
1121
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +00001122- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
1123
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +00001124- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
1125 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
1126 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
1127 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
1128 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
1129 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
1130 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
1131 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
1132 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
1133
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001134- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
1135 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +00001136 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001137
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001138- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
1139 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
1140 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
1141 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
1142 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
1143 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
1144 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
1145 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001146
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001147- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1148 the new public features (of which there are many).
1149
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001150- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001151 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1152 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1153 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1154 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001155 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001156
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001157- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1158
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001159- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1160 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1161 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1162 options.
1163
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001164- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1165 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1166 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1167 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1168 conditions under which non-string values work.
1169
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001170Build
1171-----
1172
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001173- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1174 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1175 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1176
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001177- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1178 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1179 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1180 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1181 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001182
1183C API
1184-----
1185
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001186- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1187 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1188
1189- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1190
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001191- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1192 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1193 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1194 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1195 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1196 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1197 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1198 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1199 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1200
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001201- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1202
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001203- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1204 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1205 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001206
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001207Tests
1208-----
1209
1210- test__locale ported to unittest
1211
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001212Mac
1213---
1214
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001215- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1216 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1217 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001218
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001219Tools/Demos
1220-----------
1221
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001222- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1223 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1224 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1225 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1226 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001227
1228
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001229What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1230=================================
1231
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001232*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001233
1234Core and builtins
1235-----------------
1236
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001237- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001238 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1239
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001240- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1241 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1242 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1243 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1244 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1245 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1246 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1247 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001248 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1249 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1250 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1251 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1252 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001253
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001254- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1255 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1256 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1257 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1258 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1259
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001260- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1261
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001262- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1263 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1264
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001265- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1266 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1267 modified the list.
1268
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001269- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1270 functions is now writable.
1271
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001272- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1273 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1274 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1275 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1276
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001277- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1278 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1279 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1280 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1281 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001282
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001283- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1284 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1285
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001286Extension modules
1287-----------------
1288
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001289- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1290
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001291- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1292 data.
1293
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001294- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1295 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1296 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1297 supposed to have been truncated away.
1298
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001299- Added socket.socketpair().
1300
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001301- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1302 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1303
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001304- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001305 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1306
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001307Library
1308-------
1309
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001310- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001311 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001312
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001313- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1314 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1315
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001316- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1317 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1318
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001319- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1320
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001321- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1322 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001323
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001324- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1325 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1326
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001327- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1328
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001329- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1330
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001331- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1332
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001333- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1334 Percivall.
1335
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001336- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1337 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1338
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001339- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1340 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1341 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001342 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001343
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001344- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1345 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1346 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1347 and exponent.
1348
1349- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1350
1351- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001352 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001353 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1354
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001355- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1356 to the readline module.
1357
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001358- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001359 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1360 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001361
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001362- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1363 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1364 contains symlinks.
1365
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001366- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1367 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1368
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001369- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1370 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1371 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1372
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001373- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1374 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1375 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1376 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1377 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1378 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1379 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1380 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1381 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1382 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1383 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1384 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1385 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1386
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001387- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1388
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001389Tools/Demos
1390-----------
1391
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001392- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1393 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1394
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001395- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1396
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001397Build
1398-----
1399
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001400- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1401 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1402 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1403 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1404 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1405 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1406 plans to do so.
1407
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001408- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1409 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1410
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001411- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1412 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1413
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001414- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1415 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1416
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001417- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1418 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1419
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001420- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1421 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1422
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001423C API
1424-----
1425
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001426..
1427
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001428Documentation
1429-------------
1430
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001431- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1432 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1433
1434- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1435 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1436 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001437
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001438New platforms
1439-------------
1440
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001441- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1442
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001443Tests
1444-----
1445
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001446..
1447
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001448Windows
1449-------
1450
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001451- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1452 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1453 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1454 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1455 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1456 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1457 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1458 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1459 the problem.
1460
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001461Mac
1462---
1463
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001464..
1465
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001466
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001467What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1468=================================
1469
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001470*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001471
1472Core and builtins
1473-----------------
1474
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001475- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1476 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1477 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1478 sensitive code.
1479
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001480- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001481 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001482
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001483 @staticmethod
1484 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001485
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001486 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001487
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001488- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1489 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1490 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1491 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1492 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1493 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1494 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1495 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1496 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1497 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1498 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1499
1500 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1501 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1502 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1503 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1504 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1505 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1506 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1507
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001508- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1509 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1510
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001511- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001512 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001513
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001514- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001515 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001516 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1517
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001518- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001519 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1520 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1521
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001522- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1523 types that support garbage collection.
1524
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001525- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1526
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001527- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1528 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1529 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1530 Jython.
1531
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001532- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1533
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001534- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1535 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1536
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001537- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1538 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1539 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001540
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001541- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1542 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1543 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1544
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001545Extension modules
1546-----------------
1547
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001548- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1549
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001550Library
1551-------
1552
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001553- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1554 TIS-620
1555
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001556- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1557 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1558 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1559 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1560 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1561 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1562 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1563 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1564 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1565 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1566
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001567- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1568
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001569- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1570 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1571 same as when the argument is omitted).
1572 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1573
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001574- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1575
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001576- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1577 schemes are offered.
1578
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001579- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1580
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001581- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1582 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1583 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1584
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001585- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1586
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001587- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1588 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1589
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001590- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1591 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1592 when dummy_threading is being used.
1593
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001594- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1595 from a tarfile.
1596
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001597- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001598 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001599
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001600- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1601 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1602 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1603 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1604
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001605- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1606 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1607
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001608- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1609 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1610 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1611 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1612 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1613 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1614 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1615 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1616 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1617 by some other method in progress).
1618
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001619- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1620 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1621 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001622
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001623- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1624
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001625- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1626 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1627 AM Kuchling.
1628
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001629- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1630 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1631 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1632
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001633- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1634 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1635 instead of unsigned.
1636
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001637- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001638 no longer part of the public API.
1639
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001640- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1641 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1642 string methods of the same name).
1643
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001644- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001645 SF patch 945642.
1646
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001647- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1648
1649 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1650
1651 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1652 DocTestSuites.
1653
1654- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1655 that provide thread-local data.
1656
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001657- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1658 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1659
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001660- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1661
1662- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1663 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1664 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1665
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001666- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1667
1668 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1669 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1670 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001671
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001672 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1673 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1674 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1675 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1676
1677 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1678 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1679
1680 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1681 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1682 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1683 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1684
1685 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1686 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1687 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1688 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1689 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1690
1691 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1692 wrapping help output.
1693
1694 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1695 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1696 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001697
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001698C API
1699-----
1700
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001701- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1702 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1703 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1704 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1705 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1706 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1707 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1708 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1709 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1710 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1711 its visible semantics have not changed.
1712
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001713- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1714 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1715
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001716Documentation
1717-------------
1718
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001719- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001720
1721 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001722 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001723
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001724 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001725
1726 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1727
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001728- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001729
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001730Tests
1731-----
1732
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001733- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001734 platforms that use the Makefile.
1735
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001736- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1737 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1738 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1739
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001740
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001741What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1742=================================
1743
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001744*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001745
1746Core and builtins
1747-----------------
1748
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001749- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1750 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1751 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1752 objects now (one object instead of three).
1753
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001754- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1755 Windows DLLs.
1756
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001757- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1758 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001759
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001760- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1761 a new .pyc magic.
1762
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001763- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1764 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1765 be there.
1766
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001767- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1768 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1769 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1770
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001771- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1772 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1773 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1774
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001775- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1776
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001777- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1778 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1779 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001780
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001781- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1782 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1783
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001784- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1785
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001786- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001787 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001788
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001789- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1790
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001791- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1792
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001793- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1794 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1795
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001796- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1797 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1798 Fixes bug #858016 .
1799
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001800- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1801 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1802 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1803
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001804- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1805 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1806 improves their performance (about 35%).
1807
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001808- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1809 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1810 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1811
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001812- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1813 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1814 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1815 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1816
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001817- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1818 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001819 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001820 length is not known).
1821
1822- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1823 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001824 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1825 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001826 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1827
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001828- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1829 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1830
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001831- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1832 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1833 keyword arguments.
1834
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001835- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1836 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1837 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1838
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001839- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1840 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1841 cases.
1842
1843- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1844 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1845 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1846 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1847 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1848 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1849 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1850 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1851 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1852 a release build.
1853
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001854- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1855 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1856
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001857- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001858 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001859
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001860- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1861 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1862 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1863 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1864 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1865 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1866 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1867 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1868 destroyed.
1869
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001870- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1871 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1872 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1873 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1874 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1875 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1876 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1877 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1878
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001879- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1880 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1881 character other than a space.
1882
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001883- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1884 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1885 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1886 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1887 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1888 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1889 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1890 attributes with the same name.
1891
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001892- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1893 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1894 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1895 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1896 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1897 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1898 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1899 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1900 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1901 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1902 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1903 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1904 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1905 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001906
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001907- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1908 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1909 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1910 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1911 This has been repaired.
1912
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001913- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1914
1915- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1916
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001917- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1918 over a sequence.
1919
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001920- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001921 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001922
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001923- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1924
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001925- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1926 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1927 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1928 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1929 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1930 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1931 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1932 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1933
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001934- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1935 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1936 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1937
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001938- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1939 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1940 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1941 freelist.
1942
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001943- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1944 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1945
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001946- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1947 number.
1948
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001949- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1950 a TypeError exception.
1951
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001952- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1953 820195.
1954
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001955- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1956 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1957 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1958
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001959- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001960 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1961 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001962
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001963- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1964 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1965 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1966
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001967- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1968 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001969 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001970
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001971- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001972 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1973 the first call.
1974
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001975
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001976Extension modules
1977-----------------
1978
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001979- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1980 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1981
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001982- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1983 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1984 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1985 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1986 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1987 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1988 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001989
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001990- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1991
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001992- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1993
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001994- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1995 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1996
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001997- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1998 fewer false positives.
1999
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00002000- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
2001 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
2002
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002003- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00002004 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
2005
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00002006- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002007 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00002008 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00002009 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
2010 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00002011
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00002012- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
2013 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
2014 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
2015 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
2016
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00002017- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
2018 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
2019 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
2020 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
2021 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
2022 #897625.
2023
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00002024- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
2025 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
2026
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00002027- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
2028 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
2029 and pops on either side of the deque.
2030
2031- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
2032 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
2033
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00002034- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
2035 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
2036 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
2037 other functions that expect a function argument.
2038
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00002039- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
2040
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002041- os.getsid was added.
2042
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00002043- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
2044 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
2045 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
2046
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00002047- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
2048
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00002049- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
2050
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00002051- readline.clear_history was added.
2052
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00002053- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
2054
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00002055- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
2056
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00002057- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
2058
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00002059- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
2060
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00002061- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
2062
2063- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
2064
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00002065- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
2066
2067- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
2068
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002069- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
2070 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
2071 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
2072
2073- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
2074 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
2075 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
2076 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
2077 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
2078 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
2079 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
2080
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00002081- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
2082 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
2083 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
2084 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002085
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002086- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002087 iterators from a single iterable.
2088
2089- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
2090 of raising a TypeError exception.
2091
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00002092- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
2093 as parameter.
2094
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002095Library
2096-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00002097
Armin Rigoa871ef22006-02-08 12:53:56 +00002098- Added a new module: cProfile, a C profiler with the same interface as the
2099 profile module. cProfile avoids some of the drawbacks of the hotshot
2100 profiler and provides a bit more information than the other two profilers.
2101 Based on "lsprof" (patch #1212837).
2102
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00002103- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
2104
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00002105- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
2106 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
2107 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002108
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00002109- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
2110 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
2111 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00002112
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00002113- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00002114
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00002115- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
2116 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00002117
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00002118- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
2119 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
2120
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002121- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
2122
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002123- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002124 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002125
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002126- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00002127 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002128
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00002129- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
2130
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00002131- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
2132 on cygwin and mingw32.
2133
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00002134- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
2135
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00002136- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
2137 module.
2138
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00002139- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
2140 installation scheme for all platforms.
2141
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002142- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00002143 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002144
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002145- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
2146 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
2147 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
2148
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00002149- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
2150 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2151 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2152
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002153- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2154
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002155- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2156
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002157- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2158 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2159
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002160- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2161 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2162 type pattern with the same value exists.
2163
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002164- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2165 when run from the command prompt).
2166
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002167- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2168 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2169
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002170- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2171 default sort).
2172
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002173- Added global runctx function to profile module
2174
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002175- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2176
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002177- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2178
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002179- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2180
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002181- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002182 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2183 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2184 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2185 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2186 accordingly.
2187
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002188- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2189 decoding standards.
2190
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002191- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2192 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2193 called for all requests.
2194
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002195- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2196 they are passed to the compiler.
2197
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002198- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2199 indent, width and depth.
2200
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002201- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2202 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2203
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002204- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2205 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2206
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002207- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2208
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002209- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2210
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002211- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2212
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002213- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2214 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2215
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002216- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002217 for better performance.
2218
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002219- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002220
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002221- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2222 a string).
2223
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002224- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2225
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002226- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2227
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002228- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2229
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002230- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2231
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002232- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2233 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2234 list of fieldnames.
2235
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002236- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2237 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2238
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002239- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2240
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002241- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2242 empty lists.
2243
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002244- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2245 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2246 and shelves.
2247
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002248- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2249 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2250
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002251- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002252 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2253 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002254
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002255- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2256 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002257 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002258
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002259- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002260 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2261 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2262
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002263- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2264 and removed in Py2.4.
2265
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002266- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2267
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002268- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2269
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002270Tools/Demos
2271-----------
2272
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002273- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2274 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2275
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002276- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2277
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002278- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2279 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2280 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2281 destination in situations where both files are given.
2282
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002283- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2284 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2285 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2286 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2287
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002288- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2289
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002290- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2291 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2292 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2293 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2294 now.
2295
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002296- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2297 in effect
2298
2299- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2300 C-c C-h
2301
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002302- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2303 -d option was given.
2304
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002305Build
2306-----
2307
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002308- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2309 build under OS X.
2310
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002311- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2312 --enable-profiling.
2313
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002314- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2315 is configured --with-tsc.
2316
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002317- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2318 on AMD64.
2319
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002320- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2321 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2322
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002323- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2324 removed.
2325
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002326- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2327 supported (see PEP 11).
2328
2329- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2330
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002331- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2332
2333- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2334 (see PEP 11).
2335
2336- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2337 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2338
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002339C API
2340-----
2341
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002342- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2343 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2344 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2345
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002346- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2347 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2348 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2349 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2350
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002351- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2352 generator objects.
2353
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002354- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2355 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002356 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2357 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002358
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002359- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2360 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2361
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002362- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2363 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2364 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2365 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2366 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2367
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002368- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2369 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2370 about 10% faster.
2371
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002372- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2373 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2374
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002375- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2376 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2377 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2378 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2379
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002380Windows
2381-------
2382
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002383- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2384 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2385 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2386 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2387
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002388- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2389 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2390 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2391
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002392
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002393What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2394===============================
2395
2396*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2397
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002398IDLE
2399----
2400
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002401- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2402 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2403 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2404 context-menu actions.
2405
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002406- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2407 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2408 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2409 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2410 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2411 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2412 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2413 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2414 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2415
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002416
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002417What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2418=============================================
2419
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002420*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002421
2422Core and builtins
2423-----------------
2424
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002425- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002426 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002427 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2428
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002429Extension modules
2430-----------------
2431
2432- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2433 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2434 than once. This has been fixed.
2435
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002436- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2437 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2438 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2439 call.
2440
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002441- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2442
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002443Library
2444-------
2445
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002446- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2447 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2448
2449- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2450 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2451 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2452 restored.
2453
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002454IDLE
2455----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002456
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002457- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002458
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002459Build
2460-----
2461
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002462- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2463 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2464
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002465C API
2466-----
2467
2468Windows
2469-------
2470
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002471- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2472 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2473
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002474- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2475
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002476Mac
2477---
2478
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002479- Various fixes to pimp.
2480
2481- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2482
2483- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2484 more problems than it solves.
2485
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002486
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002487What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2488=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002489
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002490*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2491
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002492Core and builtins
2493-----------------
2494
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002495- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2496 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2497
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002498- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2499 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002500 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002501
2502- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2503 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2504 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002505 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002506
2507- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2508 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002509
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002510- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2511 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2512 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2513
2514- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002515 770247.
2516
2517- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002518
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002519Extension modules
2520-----------------
2521
2522- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2523 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2524
2525- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2526
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002527- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2528
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002529- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2530 contained within the _strptime module.
2531
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002532- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2533 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2534
2535- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002536 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2537
2538- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2539 the find_class attribute, if present.
2540
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002541- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002542
2543 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2544 (SF bug 763298).
2545
2546 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002547 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2548 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2549 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002550
2551 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2552
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002553Library
2554-------
2555
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002556- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2557
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002558- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2559 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2560 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2561 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2562 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2563 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2564 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2565 or Tester().
2566
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002567- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2568 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2569 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2570 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2571 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2572 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2573 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2574 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2575 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002576
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002577 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002578
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002579- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2580 weren't before was an oversight.
2581
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002582- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2583 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2584
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002585- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2586 when there are no lines.
2587
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002588- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2589 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2590
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002591- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2592 to child processes.
2593
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002594- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2595
2596- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2597
2598- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2599 xmlrpclib.
2600
2601- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2602 responses.
2603
2604- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2605 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2606
2607- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2608 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2609 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2610
2611- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2612 used as patterns.
2613
2614- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2615 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2616 than Tk 8.3.
2617
2618- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2619
2620- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002621
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002622Tools/Demos
2623-----------
2624
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002625- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2626
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002627- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2628
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002629- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002630
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002631Build
2632-----
2633
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002634- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2635
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002636- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2637
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002638- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2639 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002640
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002641- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2642 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2643 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002644
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002645C API
2646-----
2647
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002648- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2649 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2650
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002651Windows
2652-------
2653
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002654- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2655 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2656 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2657 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2658 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2659 Python exception ::
2660
2661 thread.error: can't start new thread
2662
2663 is raised now.
2664
2665- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2666 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2667 instead of from DLL teardown.
2668
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002669Mac
2670---
2671
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002672- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002673 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002674 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2675 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2676 the executable in the bundle.
2677
2678- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002679
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002680- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2681
2682- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2683 on Panther.
2684
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002685What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2686================================
2687
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002688*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002689
2690Core and builtins
2691-----------------
2692
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002693- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2694 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2695 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2696 with the -i option.
2697
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002698- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2699 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2700
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002701- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2702 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2703
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002704- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2705 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2706 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2707 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2708 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2709 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2710 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2711 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2712 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2713 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2714 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2715 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2716 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002717
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002718- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2719 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2720 embedded in a lambda expression.
2721
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002722- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2723 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2724 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2725 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2726 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2727
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002728- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2729 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2730 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2731
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002732- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2733 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2734
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002735- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2736 It's writable again.
2737
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002738- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2739 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2740 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002741 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002742
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002743- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2744 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2745 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2746
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002747Extension modules
2748-----------------
2749
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002750- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2751 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2752
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002753- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2754 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2755 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2756 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2757
2758- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2759 collection.
2760
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002761- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2762 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2763 unique within a single program run.
2764
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002765- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2766 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2767
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002768- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2769 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2770
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002771- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2772 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002773
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002774- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2775
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002776- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2777 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2778
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002779- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2780 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2781 for many BSD-derived systems.
2782
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002783
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002784Library
2785-------
2786
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002787- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2788 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2789 primary ones:
2790
2791 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2792 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2793 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2794
2795 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2796 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2797 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2798 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2799 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2800 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2801
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002802- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2803 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2804 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2805 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2806 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2807 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2808 argument.
2809
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002810- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2811 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2812 in the archive.
2813
2814- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2815 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2816
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002817- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2818 569574).
2819
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002820- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2821 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2822 no more.
2823
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002824- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2825 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2826 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2827 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2828 code coverage.
2829
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002830- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2831 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2832 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002833 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2834 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002835
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002836- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2837 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2838 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002839 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002840
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002841- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2842
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002843- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2844 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2845 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2846 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2847
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002848- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2849 handling.
2850
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002851- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2852 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2853
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002854- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2855 in socket.py.
2856
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002857- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2858
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002859- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2860 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2861 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2862 opener with proxy support.
2863
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002864- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2865
2866- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2867
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002868Tools/Demos
2869-----------
2870
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002871- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2872
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002873- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2874
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002875- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2876 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002877
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002878- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2879 files.
2880
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002881Build
2882-----
2883
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002884- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002885 different root directory.
2886
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002887C API
2888-----
2889
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002890- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2891 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2892 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2893 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2894 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2895 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2896 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2897 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2898 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2899 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2900
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002901- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2902 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2903 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2904 from Python.
2905
2906
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002907New platforms
2908-------------
2909
2910None this time.
2911
2912Tests
2913-----
2914
2915- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2916 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2917
2918Windows
2919-------
2920
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002921- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2922
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002923- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2924 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2925 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2926 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2927 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2928 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2929 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2930 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2931 that's what it's for.
2932
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002933Mac
2934---
2935
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002936- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2937 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2938 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2939 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002940- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2941 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2942- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002943
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002944SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2945------------------------------------
2946
2947430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2948598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2949622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2950661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2951683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2952697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2953713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2954724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2955727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2956729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2957730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2958731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2959732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2960733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2961735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2962740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2963744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2964745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2965747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2966749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2967751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2968753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2969755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2970757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2971760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2972
2973
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002974What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2975================================
2976
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002977*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002978
2979Core and builtins
2980-----------------
2981
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002982- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2983 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2984
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002985- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2986 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2987 and cannot be strings).
2988
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002989- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2990 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2991 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2992 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2993
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002994- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2995 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2996 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2997 Python itself.
2998
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002999- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
3000 the referenced object, if it has one.
3001
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00003002- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
3003 the thread started at
3004 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
3005
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00003006- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
3007 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
3008 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
3009 placed on a list index.
3010
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00003011- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
3012 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
3013 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
3014 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
3015
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003016- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
3017 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
3018 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
3019 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
3020 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
3021 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
3022 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
3023
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00003024- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
3025 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
3026 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
3027 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
3028 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
3029
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00003030- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
3031 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00003032
3033- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
3034 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
3035 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
3036 #693195.)
3037
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00003038- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
3039 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003040
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00003041- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00003042 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00003043 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
3044 interpreter executions, would fail.
3045
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003046- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00003047 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00003048 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003049
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003050Extension modules
3051-----------------
3052
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00003053- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
3054 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
3055 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
3056 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
3057
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00003058- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
3059 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
3060
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00003061- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
3062 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
3063 and Greg Chapman.)
3064
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003065- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
3066 recursively.
3067
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00003068- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00003069 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
3070 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
3071 leaks.
3072
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00003073- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
3074
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00003075- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
3076 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
3077 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
3078 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
3079 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
3080 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
3081 #705836.
3082
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00003083- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00003084 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
3085
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00003086- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
3087 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
3088 See SF bug #692416.
3089
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00003090- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
3091 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
3092
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00003093- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
3094 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
3095 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003096
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003097- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00003098 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
3099 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
3100
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00003101- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
3102 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
3103 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
3104 timeouts to work properly.
3105
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003106Library
3107-------
3108
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003109- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
3110 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
3111 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
3112 future release.
3113
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00003114- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
3115 for querying platform dependent features.
3116
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00003117- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00003118
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00003119- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
3120 pickle protocol versions.
3121
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00003122- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
3123 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
3124 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
3125
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00003126- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
3127
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00003128- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
3129 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
3130 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
3131 modules.
3132
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00003133- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
3134 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
3135 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
3136
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003137- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
3138 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
3139
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00003140- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
3141 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
3142 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
3143
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003144- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00003145 MS Office extensions.
3146
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00003147- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
3148 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
3149
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00003150- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3151 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3152
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003153- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3154 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3155 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3156 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3157 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3158 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3159
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003160- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3161 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3162 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003163
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003164- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3165 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3166 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3167
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003168- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3169
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003170- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3171 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3172 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3173
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003174Tools/Demos
3175-----------
3176
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003177- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3178 See the module docstring for details.
3179
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003180Build
3181-----
3182
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003183- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3184 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003185
3186C API
3187-----
3188
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003189- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3190
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003191- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3192 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3193 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3194
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003195- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3196 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003197
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003198 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3199 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3200 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003201
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003202- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003203 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3204
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003205- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3206 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3207 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003208
3209New platforms
3210-------------
3211
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003212None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003213
3214Tests
3215-----
3216
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003217- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3218 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003219
3220Windows
3221-------
3222
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003223- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3224 function.
3225
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003226- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3227 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003228
3229Mac
3230---
3231
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003232- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3233 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003234
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003235- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3236 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003237
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003238- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3239 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3240 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003241
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003242- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003243 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3244 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003245
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003246- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3247 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003248
3249
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003250What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3251=================================
3252
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003253*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003254
3255Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003256-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003257
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003258- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3259 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3260 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3261
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003262- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3263 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3264 (SF patch #664376.)
3265
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003266- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3267 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3268 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3269 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3270 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3271 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003272 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003273
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003274- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3275 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3276 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3277 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003278 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003279
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003280- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3281 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3282 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3283 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3284 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3285 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3286 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3287 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3288 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3289 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3290 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3291
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003292- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3293 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3294 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3295 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3296 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3297 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3298
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003299- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3300 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3301
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003302- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3303 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3304 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3305 case.)
3306
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003307- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3308 passed as unicode strings.
3309
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003310- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3311 See SF bug #683467.
3312
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003313- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3314 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3315
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003316- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3317
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003318- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3319
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003320- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3321 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3322 arguments.
3323
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003324- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3325 See SF bug #667147.
3326
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003327- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003328 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003329 See SF bug #676155.
3330
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003331- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003332 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003333 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3334 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3335 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3336 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3337 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3338 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003339
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003340Extension modules
3341-----------------
3342
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003343- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3344 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3345 tp_as_number pointer.
3346
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003347- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3348 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3349 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3350 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3351 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3352
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003353- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3354
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003355- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3356
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003357- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003358 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003359 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3360 patch #678531.)
3361
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003362- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3363 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3364
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003365- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3366 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3367
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003368- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3369
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003370- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3371 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3372 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3373
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003374- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3375
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003376- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3377 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3378
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003379- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003380
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003381- datetime changes:
3382
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003383 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3384
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003385 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3386 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3387 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3388 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3389 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3390 now.
3391
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003392 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003393 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3394 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003395
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003396 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003397 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003398 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3399 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3400 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3401 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003402
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003403 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3404 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3405 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003406 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3407
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003408 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3409 by a later example coded by Guido.
3410
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003411 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003412 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3413 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3414 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003415 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3416 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3417
3418 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3419 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3420 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3421 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3422 tzinfo subclass instance.
3423
3424 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3425 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3426 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3427 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3428 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3429 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3430 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3431 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003432
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003433 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3434 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3435 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3436 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3437 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003438 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3439
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003440 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003441
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003442 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3443 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3444 as a naive datetime object.
3445
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003446 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3447 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3448 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3449
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003450 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3451 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3452 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3453 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3454 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3455 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3456 comparison.
3457
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003458 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3459 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3460 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3461 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003462 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003463
3464 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003465
3466 and ::
3467
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003468 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3469
3470 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3471 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3472 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3473 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3474
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003475 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3476 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3477 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3478 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3479 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3480
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003481 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3482 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003483 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3484 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003485
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003486Library
3487-------
3488
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003489- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3490 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3491
3492- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3493 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3494 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3495 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3496 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3497 See PEP 307 for details.
3498
3499- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3500 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3501
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003502- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3503 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003504 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003505 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3506 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003507 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003508
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003509- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3510 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3511
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003512- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3513 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3514 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3515
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003516- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3517
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003518- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3519 exception.
3520
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003521- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3522 class.
3523
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003524- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3525 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3526 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3527
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003528- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3529 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3530
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003531- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003532 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3533 See SF bug #659228.
3534
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003535- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3536 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3537 See SF patch #651082.
3538
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003539- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003540
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003541- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3542 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3543
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003544- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003545 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003546
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003547- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3548 DOS paths from other platforms.
3549
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003550Tools/Demos
3551-----------
3552
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003553- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3554 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3555 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3556 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3557 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3558 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3559 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3560 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3561 example:
3562
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003563 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3564 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003565
3566 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3567
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003568
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003569Build
3570-----
3571
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003572- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3573 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3574 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003575 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3576
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003577 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3578
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003579- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3580 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3581 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3582 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3583 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3584 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3585 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3586 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3587 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3588
3589- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3590 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3591 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3592 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3593
3594- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3595 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3596
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003597C API
3598-----
3599
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003600- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3601 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003602
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003603- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3604 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3605 tp_as_number pointer.
3606
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003607- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3608 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3609 (SF #681367)
3610
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003611- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3612 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3613 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3614 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003615
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003616Tests
3617-----
3618
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003619- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003620 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3621 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3622 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3623 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3624 pydoc.)
3625
3626- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3627
3628- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003629
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003630Windows
3631-------
3632
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003633- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3634 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3635 time).
3636
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003637- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3638 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3639
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003640- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3641 release without strong cryptography.
3642
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003643- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003644 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003645
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003646- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3647 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3648
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003649Mac
3650---
3651
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003652- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3653 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003654
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003655- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3656 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3657 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003658
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003659- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3660 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003661
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003662- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3663 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3664 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3665 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003666
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003667- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003668 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3669 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3670 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003671
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003672
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003673What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003674=================================
3675
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003676*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003677
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003678Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003679--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003680
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003681- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3682
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003683- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3684 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003685 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003686 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003687 a different meaning than before.
3688
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003689- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003690 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003691 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003692
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003693- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003694 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003695 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003696
3697- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3698 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3699 and deallocation.
3700
3701- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3702 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3703
3704- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3705 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3706 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3707 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3708 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3709
3710- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3711 now detected by the garbage collector.
3712
3713- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3714 [SF bug 519621]
3715
3716- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3717 identifier.
3718
3719- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3720 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3721 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3722 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3723 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3724 [SF bug 563060]
3725
3726- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3727 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3728 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3729 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3730 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3731
3732- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3733 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3734 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3735
3736- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3737
3738- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3739 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3740 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3741 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3742 state of the slots would be lost.)
3743
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003744Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003745-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003746
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003747- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003748 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3749 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3750 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3751 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003752 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3753 Jython 2.1.
3754
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003755- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003756 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003757 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3758 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3759 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3760 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3761 these, see PEP 302.
3762
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003763- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3764 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3765 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3766
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003767- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3768 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3769 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3770
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003771- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3772 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3773 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3774
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003775- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3776 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3777 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3778 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3779 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3780 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3781 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3782 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3783 releases or implementations.
3784
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003785- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003786 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3787 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003788
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003789- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3790 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3791
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003792- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3793 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3794 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3795
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003796- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3797 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3798
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003799- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3800 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003801 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3802 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003803
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003804- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3805 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3806 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3807 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3808 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3809
3810 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3811 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3812 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3813 pattern.
3814
3815 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3816 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3817 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3818 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3819
3820 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3821 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3822 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3823 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3824 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3825 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3826
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003827- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3828 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3829 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3830 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3831 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3832 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3833 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3834 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003835
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003836- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3837 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3838 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3839 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3840 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003841 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3842 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3843 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3844 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3845 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3846 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3847 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003848
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003849- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3850 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3851
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003852- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3853 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3854 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3855 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3856 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3857 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3858 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3859 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3860 to Zack Weinberg!
3861
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003862- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3863 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3864 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3865 type. This has been fixed now.
3866
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003867- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3868 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3869 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3870
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003871- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3872 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3873 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3874 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3875 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3876 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3877 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3878 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003879 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003880
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003881- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3882 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3883 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003884
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003885- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3886 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3887 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3888 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3889 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3890 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3891 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3892 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003893 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003894 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3895 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3896
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003897- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3898 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3899 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3900 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3901 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3902 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3903 this.)
3904
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003905- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3906 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003907 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003908 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003909 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3910 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003911 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3912 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003913
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003914- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3915 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3916 currently running.
3917
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003918- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3919 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3920 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3921 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3922
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003923- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3924 as directory names.
3925
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003926- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3927 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3928
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003929- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3930 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3931
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003932- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003933 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3934 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003935
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003936- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3937 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3938 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3939 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3940 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3941
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003942- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3943 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3944 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3945 removed.
3946
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003947- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3948 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3949 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3950
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003951- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3952 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3953 to __debug__.
3954
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003955- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3956 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3957 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3958
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003959- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3960 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3961 deprecated now.
3962
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003963- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3964 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3965 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003966
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003967- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3968 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3969 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3970 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3971 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003972
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003973- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3974 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3975
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003976- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3977 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3978 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003979 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003980 is backward compatible.
3981
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003982- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3983 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3984 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3985 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3986 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3987
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003988- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3989 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3990 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3991 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3992 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3993 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003994
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003995- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3996 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3997
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003998- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3999 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
4000
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004001- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
4002 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
4003 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
4004 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
4005 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
4006
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00004007- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
4008 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
4009 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
4010
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004011- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00004012 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
4013
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00004014- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
4015 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
4016 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00004017
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00004018- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
4019 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
4020
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00004021- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
4022 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
4023 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
4024
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00004025- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
4026
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004027Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004028-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004029
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00004030- Added three operators to the operator module:
4031 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
4032 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
4033 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
4034
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00004035- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
4036
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00004037- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
4038 archives.
4039
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004040- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
4041 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
4042 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
4043
4044 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
4045
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004046- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
4047 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
4048 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00004049 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004050
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00004051- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
4052 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
4053 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
4054 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00004055 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
4056 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
4057 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
4058 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00004059
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00004060- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
4061 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00004062
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00004063- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
4064
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00004065- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
4066 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
4067
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00004068- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
4069 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
4070 supported.
4071
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00004072- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
4073
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00004074- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
4075 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00004076
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00004077- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
4078 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
4079
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00004080- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
4081
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004082- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
4083 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
4084
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00004085- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
4086 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
4087 functions but callable type objects.
4088
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004089- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004090 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004091 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004092
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00004093- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
4094 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00004095
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00004096- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
4097 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00004098
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00004099- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
4100 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
4101 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
4102 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
4103
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00004104- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
4105 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00004106
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00004107- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
4108 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
4109 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
4110 and __imul__.
4111
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00004112- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00004113 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
4114 is called.
4115
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00004116- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
4117 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
4118 interpreter was compiled.
4119
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004120- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
4121 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
4122 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004123 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004124 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
4125 1, not 2.
4126
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00004127- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
4128 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
4129 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
4130 limit.
4131
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00004132- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
4133 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
4134 bug #623464.
4135
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00004136- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
4137 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
4138 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
4139 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
4140
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004141Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004142-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004143
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00004144- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
4145
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00004146- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
4147 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
4148 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
4149 with Python 2.3a2.
4150
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004151- os.path exposes getctime.
4152
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004153- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004154 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004155 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004156 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004157 unit tests of floating point results.
4158
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004159- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4160 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4161 has been increased.
4162
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004163- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4164 executed.
4165
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004166- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4167 postinstallation script.
4168
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004169- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4170 test the current module.
4171
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004172- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004173 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4174 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4175 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4176 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4177
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004178- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004179 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004180 Ward's Optik package.
4181
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004182- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4183 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4184 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4185 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4186
4187- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4188 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004189 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004190
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004191- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4192 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4193 shelf are binary pickles.
4194
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004195- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4196 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4197
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004198- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4199 modules are iterators now.
4200
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004201- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4202 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4203 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4204 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4205 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4206 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004207
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004208- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4209 with their entity value.
4210
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004211- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4212
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004213- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4214 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004215
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004216- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4217 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004218 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004219
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004220- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4221 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4222 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4223 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4224 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4225 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4226 main():
4227
4228 import locale
4229 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4230
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004231- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4232 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4233
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004234- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4235 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4236 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4237 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4238 to the new standard.
4239
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004240- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4241 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4242 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4243 an extension to the database.
4244
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004245- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4246 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4247 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4248 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004249 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004250
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004251- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004252 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004253
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004254- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4255 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4256 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4257 bounded integers.
4258
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004259- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4260 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4261 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4262 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4263 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4264 in existence.
4265
4266 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4267 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4268 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4269 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4270 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4271 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4272
4273 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4274 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4275 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4276 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4277
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004278- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4279 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4280 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4281
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004282- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4283
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004284- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4285 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4286 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4287 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4288
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004289- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4290 argument.
4291
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004292- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4293 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4294 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4295 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4296 [SF patch 560794].
4297
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004298- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4299 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4300 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004301 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4302 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4303 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004304
4305- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4306 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004307
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004308- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4309 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4310 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4311 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004312
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004313- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4314 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4315 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4316 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4317 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4318
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004319- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004320
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004321- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4322
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004323- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4324 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4325 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4326 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4327 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4328 identical to None.
4329
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004330- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4331 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4332 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4333 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4334 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4335 results now.
4336
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004337- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4338 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4339
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004340- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4341 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4342 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4343 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4344 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4345 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4346 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4347 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4348
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004349- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4350
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004351- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4352 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4353
4354- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4355 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4356 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4357 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4358 and other systems.
4359
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004360- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4361 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4362 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4363 UTF-16 is a 2-byte encoding and the C lib's line reading APIs don't
Marc-André Lemburg4179a012002-04-05 12:15:05 +00004364 work well with these.
4365
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004366- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4367
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004368- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004369 connections.
4370
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004371- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4372 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4373 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4374
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004375- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4376 sets
4377
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004378- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4379 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4380 name.
4381
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004382- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4383 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4384 passed in.
4385
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004386- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004387 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004388 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4389 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004390
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004391- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4392
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004393- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4394
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004395- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4396 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4397 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4398
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004399- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4400 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4401 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4402 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004403 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004404
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004405- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004406 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004407 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004408
4409- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4410 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4411 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4412
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004413- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004414 the value of its expression argument.
4415
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004416- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4417 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4418 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4419
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004420- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4421 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4422 skipstone browser was included.
4423
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004424- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4425 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4426
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004427Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004428-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004429
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004430- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4431 names in addition to accepting file names.
4432
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004433- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4434 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4435 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4436 still used and useful.)
4437
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004438- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4439 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4440 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4441 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004442
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004443- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4444 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4445 the generated binary.
4446
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004447Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004448-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004449
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004450- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4451
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004452- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4453 except in the hands of experts.
4454
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004455- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004456 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4457 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4458 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004459
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004460- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4461 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4462 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4463 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4464 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4465 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4466 builds.
4467
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004468- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4469 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4470 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4471 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4472 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4473 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4474 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4475 new type.
4476
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004477- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004478
4479 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4480 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4481 positive infinities.
4482
4483 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4484 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4485 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4486 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4487 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4488 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4489 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4490
4491 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4492
4493 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4494
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004495- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4496 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4497 size of the executable.
4498
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004499- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4500 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4501 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4502 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004503
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004504- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4505
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004506- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4507 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4508 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004509
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004510- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4511 well as Unix.
4512
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004513- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4514 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4515 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4516 modules in the README file for details.
4517
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004518C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004519-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004520
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004521- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4522 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004523 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004524 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004525 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004526
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004527- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4528 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4529 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4530 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4531 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4532 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004533 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004534 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4535 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4536 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4537 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4538 aligned.)
4539
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004540- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4541 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4542 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4543
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004544- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4545 level.
4546
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004547- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4548 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4549 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4550 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4551 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4552
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004553- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4554 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4555 code.
4556
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004557- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4558 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4559 adjusting for negative indices.
4560
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004561- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4562 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4563 object.
4564
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004565- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4566 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4567 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4568
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004569- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4570 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004571
4572- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4573
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004574- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4575 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4576 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4577 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4578
4579- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4580
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004581- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004582
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004583- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004584 without going through the buffer API.
4585
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004586- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004587
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004588- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4589 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4590 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4591 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4592
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004593- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4594 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4595
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004596- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004597 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4598
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004599New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004600-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004601
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004602- OpenVMS is now supported.
4603
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004604- AtheOS is now supported.
4605
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004606- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4607
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004608- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4609
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004610Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004611-----
4612
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004613- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4614 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4615 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004616
4617Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004618-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004619
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004620- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4621 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4622 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4623 bugs.
4624 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004625 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004626 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4627 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004628 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004629
4630- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004631 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004632
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004633- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4634 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4635
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004636- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4637 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004638 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004639 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4640
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004641- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4642 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4643 use files" uninstall option).
4644
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004645- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4646
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004647- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4648 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4649
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004650- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4651 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4652 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4653
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004654- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4655 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4656 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4657 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4658 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004659 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4660 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4661 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004662
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004663- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004664 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004665 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4666 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4667 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4668 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4669 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4670 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4671 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4672 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4673 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4674 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4675 work around.
4676
4677- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4678 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4679 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4680 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4681 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4682 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4683 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4684 specified with O_CREAT too).
4685
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004686Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004687----
4688
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004689- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004690
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004691- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4692 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4693 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4694
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004695- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4696 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4697 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4698
4699- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4700 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4701 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4702 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4703 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4704 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4705 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4706 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004707
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004708- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4709 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4710 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004711
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004712- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4713 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4714 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4715 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4716 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004717
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004718- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4719 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4720 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004721
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004722- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4723 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004724
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004725- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4726 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4727 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4728 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4729 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004730
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004731- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4732 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4733 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4734
4735- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4736 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4737 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004738
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004739- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4740 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4741 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4742 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004743 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004744
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004745- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4746 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004747
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004748- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4749 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004750
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004751- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004752 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004753 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4754 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004755
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004756
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004757What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004758===============================
4759
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004760*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4761
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004762Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004763--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004764
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004765- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4766 with a custom metaclass.
4767
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004768Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004769-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004770
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004771- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4772 are proxies.
4773
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004774Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004775-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004776
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004777- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4778 very short strings.
4779
4780- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4781 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4782 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4783 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4784 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4785
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004786Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004787-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004788
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004789- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4790 close or delete time).
4791
4792- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4793 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4794
4795- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4796
4797- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004798 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004799
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004800Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004801-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004802
4803Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004804-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004805
4806C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004807-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004808
4809New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004810-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004811
4812Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004813-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004814
4815Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004816-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004817
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004818- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4819
4820- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4821 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4822
4823- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4824 deleted at process exit time.
4825
4826- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4827 in backslash.
4828
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004829Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004830----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004831
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004832- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4833 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4834 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4835
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004836
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004837What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004838===========================
4839
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004840*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4841
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004842Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004843--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004844
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004845- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4846 been extensively updated. See
4847
4848 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4849
4850 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4851
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004852- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4853 deleted!
4854
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004855- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4856 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4857 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4858 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4859 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4860
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004861- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4862
4863 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4864 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4865
4866 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4867 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4868 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4869 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4870 supported anyway.
4871
4872 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4873 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4874
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004875- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4876 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4877 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4878 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4879 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004880
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004881- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4882 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4883 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4884
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004885Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004886-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004887
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004888- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4889 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4890 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4891 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4892 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4893 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004894 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4895 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4896 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4897 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004898
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004899- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4900 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4901 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4902
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004903Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004904-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004905
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004906- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4907
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004908Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004909-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004910
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004911- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4912 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4913 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4914 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4915 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4916 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4917
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004918- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4919
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004920- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4921
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004922- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4923
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004924- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4925 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4926 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4927
4928- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4929
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004930Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004931-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004932
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004933- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4934 off a search on Google.
4935
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004936Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004937-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004938
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004939- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4940 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4941 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4942 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4943 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4944 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4945 other platforms should do likewise.
4946
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004947- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4948 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4949 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4950
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004951C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004952-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004953
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004954- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4955 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4956 producing key-value pairs.
4957
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004958- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004959 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004960 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4961 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4962 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4963 previously went unchallenged.
4964
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004965New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004966-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004967
4968Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004969-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004970
4971Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004972-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004973
4974Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004975----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004976
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004977- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4978 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004979
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004980- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4981 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4982 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4983 home.
4984
4985
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004986What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004987===========================
4988
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004989*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4990
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004991Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004992--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004993
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004994- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4995 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004996
4997 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004998 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004999
5000 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
5001 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005002 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00005003 This needs to be documented.
5004
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00005005- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
5006 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
5007
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00005008- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
5009 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
5010 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
5011
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00005012- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
5013 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
5014
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005015- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
5016 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
5017 class forbids it).
5018
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00005019- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
5020 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
5021 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
5022
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005023- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
5024
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005025Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005026-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005027
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00005028- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
5029 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005030 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00005031
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005032- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
5033 (like 1 + '').
5034
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005035Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005036-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005037
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005038- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
5039 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
5040 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
5041 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005042 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005043 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
5044
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00005045- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
5046 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
5047 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
5048 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
5049
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005050- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
5051 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005052 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
5053 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
5054 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005055
5056- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
5057 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005058
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00005059- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
5060 bytes on its input.
5061
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005062Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005063-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005064
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005065- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00005066 convenience function.
5067
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005068- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
5069 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
5070 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005071 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
5072 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
5073 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
5074 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
5075 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
5076 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005077
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00005078- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
5079 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
5080 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
5081 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
5082
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00005083- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
5084 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
5085 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
5086
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005087- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
5088 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
5089 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
5090 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
5091
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005092- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
5093 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005094 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005095 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
5096 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
5097 new -l and -e options.
5098
5099- statcache is now deprecated.
5100
5101- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
5102 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005103 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005104 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
5105 time properly taken into account.
5106
5107- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
5108 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
5109 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
5110 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
5111
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005112Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005113-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005114
5115Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005116-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005117
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005118- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
5119 is built with libdb3 if available.
5120
5121- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
5122
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005123C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005124-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005125
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00005126- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
5127 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
5128 PySequence_Size().
5129
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005130- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
5131
5132- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
5133 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
5134 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
5135
5136- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
5137 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
5138
5139- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
5140 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
5141
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005142New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005143-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005144
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005145- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
5146 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
5147
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00005148- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
5149 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
5150
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005151- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5152
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005153Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005154-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005155
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005156- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5157 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5158
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005159Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005160-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005161
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005162Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005163----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005164
5165- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5166 removed completely in the next release.
5167
5168- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5169 OSX.
5170
5171- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5172 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5173
5174- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5175
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005176
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005177What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005178===========================
5179
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005180*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5181
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005182Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005183--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005184
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005185- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005186 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005187 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005188 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5189 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005190 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5191 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005192 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5193 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005194
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005195- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5196 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5197
5198- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5199 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5200
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005201Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005202-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005203
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005204- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5205 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5206 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5207 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5208 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5209 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5210 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5211 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5212
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005213- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5214 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5215 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5216 example).
5217
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005218- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005219 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005220 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005221 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005222
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005223- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5224 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5225 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005226 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005227
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005228- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5229 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5230 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5231 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5232 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5233 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5234
5235 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5236
5237 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5238
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005239Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005240-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005241
5242- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5243
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005244- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5245
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005246- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5247 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005248
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005249- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5250 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5251 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5252 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5253 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5254 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005255 attributes.
5256
5257- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5258 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5259 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005260
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005261- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5262 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5263 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005264
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005265- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5266 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5267 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005268 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5269 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5270
5271- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5272 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005273
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005274Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005275-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005276
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005277- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5278 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5279
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005280- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5281 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5282 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5283 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5284
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005285- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5286 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5287 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5288 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5289
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005290 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5291 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5292 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5293 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5294 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5295 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5296 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5297 without losing information).
5298
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005299- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005300 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5301 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5302 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5303 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5304 module).
5305
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005306 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005307 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5308 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5309 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5310 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005311
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005312- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005313 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5314 encoding.
5315
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005316- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5317 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5318
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005319- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005320 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5321
5322- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5323 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5324 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5325 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5326
5327- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5328
5329- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5330 ON, and OFF.
5331
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005332- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5333 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5334
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005335Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005336-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005337
5338- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5339 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5340 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005341
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005342- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5343 been added: -X and -E.
5344
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005345Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005346-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005347
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005348- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5349 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5350
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005351C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005352-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005353
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005354- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5355 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5356 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5357 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5358 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5359
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005360- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5361 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5362 as long) arguments.
5363
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005364- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5365 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5366 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5367 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5368 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5369 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5370
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005371- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5372 input.
5373
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005374New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005375-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005376
5377Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005378-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005379
5380Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005381-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005382
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005383- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5384 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5385 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5386
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005387- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5388 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5389 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005390 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005391
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005392 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5393 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5394 import signal
5395 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005396
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005397 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005398 while 1:
5399 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005400 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005401 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5402 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5403 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5404 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005405
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005406
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005407What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5408===========================
5409
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005410*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5411
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005412Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005413--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005414
5415- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5416 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5417 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5418
5419- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5420 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5421 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5422 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5423 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5424 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5425 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005426
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005427- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005428 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005429 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5430 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5431 associate a docstring with a property.
5432
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005433- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5434 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5435 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5436 other built-in object types.
5437
5438- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5439 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5440 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5441 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5442 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5443
5444- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5445 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5446
5447- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5448 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005449 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005450 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5451 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5452 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5453 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5454 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5455
5456- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5457 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5458 class.
5459
5460- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5461 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5462 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5463 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5464
5465- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5466 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5467 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5468 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5469
5470- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5471 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5472
5473- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5474 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5475 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5476 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5477 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005478 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005479 with the same value as s.
5480
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005481- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5482
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005483Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005484----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005485
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005486- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5487
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005488- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5489 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5490 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5491 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5492 objects.
5493
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005494- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5495 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005496 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5497 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5498
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005499- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5500 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5501 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5502
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005503Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005504-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005505
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005506- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5507 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5508 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5509 by the instances.
5510
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005511- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5512 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5513 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5514
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005515- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5516 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5517 before the entire comparison is complete.
5518
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005519- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5520 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5521 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5522
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005523- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5524 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5525 getwriter().
5526
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005527- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5528 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5529
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005530- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005531 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5532 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5533
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005534- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5535 iterable object.
5536
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005537- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5538 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005539
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005540- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5541 authentication.
5542
5543- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5544 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005545
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005546- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005547 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5548 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5549 a sample driver.)
5550
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005551Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005552-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005553
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005554- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5555 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5556 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5557 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5558 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5559 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5560 kernel has large file support.
5561
5562- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5563 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5564 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5565 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5566 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5567
5568- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5569 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5570 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5571
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005572C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005573-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005574
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005575- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5576 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5577
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005578New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005579-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005580
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005581- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5582 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5583
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005584Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005585-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005586
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005587- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5588 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5589 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5590 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5591 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5592
5593- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5594 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5595 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5596 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5597
5598- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5599 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5600
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005601Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005602-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005603
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005604- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005605 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5606 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005607
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005608
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005609What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5610===========================
5611
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005612*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5613
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005614Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005615----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005616
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005617- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5618 big to represent as a C double.
5619
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005620- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5621 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5622 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5623 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5624 restriction).
5625
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005626- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5627 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5628 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5629 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5630 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5631
5632 >>> dir([])
5633 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5634 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5635 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5636 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5637 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5638 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5639 'reverse', 'sort']
5640
5641 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5642
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005643- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005644 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5645 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5646 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5647 OverflowError exception.
5648
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005649- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005650 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005651 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5652 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5653 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5654 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5655 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005656 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005657 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5658 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5659
5660 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5661 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5662 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5663 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005664
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005665- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005666 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5667 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5668 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5669 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5670 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5671 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5672 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5673 once it is created.
5674
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005675- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5676 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5677 (key, value) pairs.
5678
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005679- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005680 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5681 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5682
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005683- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5684 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5685 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5686 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5687 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005688
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005689- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005690 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5691 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5692
5693 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5694
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005695- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005696 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5697
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005698Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005699-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005700
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005701- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005702 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5703 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005704
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005705- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5706 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5707 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5708 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5709 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5710 in this area anymore).
5711
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005712- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5713 threading.Timer.
5714
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005715- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5716 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5717
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005718- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005719 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5720
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005721- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005722 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5723 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5724 converted to Python longs.
5725
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005726- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005727 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5728
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005729- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5730 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5731 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5732
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005733Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005734-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005735
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005736- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5737 division operators as per PEP 238.
5738
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005739Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005740-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005741
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005742- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5743 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5744 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5745 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5746
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005747C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005748-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005749
5750- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005751
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005752- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5753 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005754 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005755
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005756 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5757 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005758 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005759 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005760
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005761- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005762 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5763 module:
5764
5765 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005766
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005767 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5768 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005769
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005770 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5771 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005772
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005773 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5774
5775 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5776
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005777- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005778 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5779 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5780 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005781
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005782New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005783-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005784
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005785- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5786 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5787 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5788 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5789 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005790
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005791Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005792-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005793
5794Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005795-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005796
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005797- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5798 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5799 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5800 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005801 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5802 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5803 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5804 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5805 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005806
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005807- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005808 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5809
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005810
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005811What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5812===========================
5813
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005814*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5815
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005816Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005817-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005818
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005819- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5820 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5821
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005822- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5823 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5824 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005825
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005826- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5827 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5828 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5829 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005830
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005831- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5832
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005833- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005834
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005835Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005836-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005837
5838- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005839 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005840 the module docstring for details.
5841
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005842Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005843-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005844
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005845- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005846 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5847 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5848 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005849
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005850- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5851 Nick Mathewson.
5852
5853Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005854----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005855
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005856- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5857 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5858 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5859 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5860 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5861 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5862 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5863 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5864
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005865- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5866 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5867 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5868 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5869
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005870- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5871 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5872 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5873 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5874 come a long way).
5875
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005876- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5877 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5878 write filters for these warnings).
5879
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005880- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5881 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5882 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5883 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5884 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5885
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005886- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5887 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5888 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5889 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5890 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5891 older distribution.
5892
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005893Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005894-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005895
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005896- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5897 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005898 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005899
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005900- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5901 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5902 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5903
5904- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5905
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005906- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5907
5908- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5909
5910- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5911
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005912- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005913
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005914- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5915
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005916New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005917-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005918
5919C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005920-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005921
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005922- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5923 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5924 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5925 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5926 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5927 against buffer overruns.
5928
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005929- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005930 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5931 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005932 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5933 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5934 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5935
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005936- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5937 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5938 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5939 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5940 deprecated.
5941
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005942Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005943-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005944
5945- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5946 relevant is found.
5947
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005948
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005949What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005950===========================
5951
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005952*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5953
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005954Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005955----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005956
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005957- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5958 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5959 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5960 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5961 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5962 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5963 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5964 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005965 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005966 repaired.
5967
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005968- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005969 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005970 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5971 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5972 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5973 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5974 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5975 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5976 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5977 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5978
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005979- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5980 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5981 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5982 leading BMO character).
5983
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005984- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5985 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5986 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5987
5988 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5989 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5990 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005991
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005992 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5993 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5994 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5995 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5996 for various simple to use conversions.
5997
5998 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5999 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
6000
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006001 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6002 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
6003 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
6004 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
6005 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6006 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
6007 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6008 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
6009 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6010 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
6011 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6012 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
6013 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6014 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
6015 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00006016
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006017- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
6018 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
6019 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006020 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006021 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006022
6023 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006024 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
6025 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
6026 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
6027 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
6028 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006029 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
6030 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006031
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006032 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
6033 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
6034 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006035 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006036
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00006037- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
6038 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
6039 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
6040 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
6041 floating arithmetic,
6042
6043 x = 9007199254740992.0
6044 print long(x)
6045
6046 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
6047 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
6048 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
6049 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
6050 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
6051 functions are of good quality).
6052
6053 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
6054 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
6055 algorithms to break.
6056
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00006057- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
6058 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
6059 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
6060 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
6061 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
6062 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
6063 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
6064 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
6065 order.
6066
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006067- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
6068 operation along the most common code paths.
6069
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006070- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
6071 the same as dict.has_key(x).
6072
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00006073- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
6074 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
6075 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
6076 {}.update(UserDict())
6077
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006078- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
6079 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
6080 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
6081 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
6082 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
6083 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
6084 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
6085 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
6086
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006087- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00006088 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006089
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006090 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00006091 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
6092 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00006093 join() method of strings
6094 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006095 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
6096 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006097 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00006098 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006099
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00006100- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
6101 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
6102
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006103- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
6104 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
6105
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00006106- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
6107 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
6108 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
6109 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
6110
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006111- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
6112 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006113 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006114 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
6115 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00006116
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00006117- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
6118
6119
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006120Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006121-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006122
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006123- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006124 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006125 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
6126 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
6127
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00006128- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
6129 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
6130
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00006131- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
6132 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
6133 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
6134 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
6135
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00006136- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
6137 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
6138 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
6139
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00006140- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
6141
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00006142- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
6143
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00006144- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
6145 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
6146 that are still imported into string.py).
6147
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006148- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
6149
6150- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6151 Now it does.
6152
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006153- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6154
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006155- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6156 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6157 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6158 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6159 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006160 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6161 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006162
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006163- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6164 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6165 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6166 'help(object)'.
6167
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006168Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006169-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006170
6171- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006172 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006173 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6174 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6175
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006176- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006177 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6178 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006179
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006180C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006181-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006182
6183- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6184 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006185
6186----
6187
6188**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**