blob: 48c5ae8dd5de33c9384cfe15ef9438d9b83e4709 [file] [log] [blame]
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
Georg Brandl533ff6f2006-03-08 18:09:27 +000015- Patch #1434038: property() now uses the getter's docstring if there is
16 no "doc" argument given. This makes it possible to legitimately use
17 property() as a decorator to produce a read-only property.
18
Guido van Rossum9aa37ab2006-03-07 18:54:08 +000019- PEP 357, patch 1436368: add an __index__ method to int/long and a matching
20 nb_index slot to the PyNumberMethods struct. The slot is consulted instead
21 of requiring an int or long in slicing and a few other contexts, enabling
22 other objects (e.g. Numeric Python's integers) to be used as slice indices.
23
Neal Norwitz995acdf2006-03-07 05:01:00 +000024- Fixed various bugs reported by Coverity's Prevent tool.
25
Brett Cannonbf364092006-03-01 04:25:17 +000026- PEP 352, patch #1104669: Make exceptions new-style objects. Introduced the
27 new exception base class, BaseException, which has a new message attribute.
28 KeyboardInterrupt and SystemExit to directly inherit from BaseException now.
29 Raising a string exception now raises a DeprecationWarning.
30
Thomas Woutersfb609f42006-02-28 16:37:25 +000031- Patch #1438387, PEP 328: relative and absolute imports. Imports can now be
32 explicitly relative, using 'from .module import name' to mean 'from the same
33 package as this module is in. Imports without dots still default to the
34 old relative-then-absolute, unless 'from __future__ import
35 absolute_import' is used.
36
Brett Cannona7446e32006-02-27 23:39:10 +000037- Properly check if 'warnings' raises an exception (usually when a filter set
38 to "error" is triggered) when raising a warning for raising string
39 exceptions.
40
Neal Norwitz0023a2f2006-02-27 23:24:48 +000041- CO_GENERATOR_ALLOWED is no longer defined, this behavior is the default.
42 The name was removed from Include/code.h.
43
Neal Norwitzeb651252006-02-27 16:47:12 +000044- PEP 308: conditional expressions were added (x if cond else y).
45
Guido van Rossum1968ad32006-02-25 22:38:04 +000046- Patch 1433928:
47 - The copy module now "copies" function objects (as atomic objects).
48 - dict.__getitem__ now looks for a __missing__ hook before raising
49 KeyError.
50
Tim Peters84ef21c2006-02-28 20:39:06 +000051- PEP 343: with statement implemented. Needs ``from __future__ import
52 with_statement``. Use of 'with' as a variable will generate a warning.
53 Use of 'as' as a variable will also generate a warning (unless it's
Neal Norwitz055ec242006-02-28 20:06:49 +000054 part of an import statement).
Guido van Rossum1a5e21e2006-02-28 21:57:43 +000055 The following objects have __context__ methods:
56 - The built-in file type.
57 - The thread.LockType type.
58 - The following types defined by the threading module:
59 Lock, RLock, Condition, Semaphore, BoundedSemaphore.
60 - The decimal.Context class.
Guido van Rossumc2e20742006-02-27 22:32:47 +000061
Marc-André Lemburgfe4b34c2006-02-19 15:22:22 +000062- Fix the encodings package codec search function to only search
63 inside its own package. Fixes problem reported in patch #1433198.
64
65 Note: Codec packages should implement and register their own
66 codec search function. PEP 100 has the details.
67
Martin v. Löwis18e16552006-02-15 17:27:45 +000068- PEP 353: Using ssize_t as the index type.
69
Neal Norwitzfc76d632006-01-10 06:03:13 +000070- Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
71 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
72 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
73
Neal Norwitz671b9e32006-01-09 07:07:12 +000074- Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
75 configure would break checking curses.h.
76
Georg Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000077- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
78 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
79
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000080- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
81
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000082- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
83
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000084- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
85
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000086- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
87 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
88
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000089- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
Barry Warsawd3c38ff2006-03-07 09:46:03 +000090 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.subversion. Build number
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000091 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
92
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000093- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
94 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000095 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000096
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000097- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
98 now encodes backslash correctly.
99
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +0000100- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
101
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +0000102- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
103 and long longs.
104
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +0000105- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
106 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
107 message in this case.
108
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +0000109- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
110 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
111 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
112 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
113 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
114
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000115- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +0000116
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000117- Speed up some Unicode operations.
118
Martin v. Löwisbd260da2006-02-26 19:42:26 +0000119- A new AST parser implementation was completed. The abstract
120 syntax tree is available for read-only (non-compile) access
Martin v. Löwis577b5b92006-02-27 15:23:19 +0000121 to Python code; an _ast module was added.
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000122
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +0000123- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +0000124 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
125
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +0000126- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
127
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +0000128- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
129 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
130
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +0000131- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
132
133- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
134
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +0000135- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
136 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
137 was empty.
138
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +0000139- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
140 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
141
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +0000142- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +0000143 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +0000144
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +0000145- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
146 codes.
147
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +0000148- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
149 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
150 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
151
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +0000152- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
153 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
154
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +0000155- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +0000156 (fixes bug #1119418).
157
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +0000158- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
159
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +0000160- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
161 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
162
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +0000163- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
164 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
165 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
166
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000167- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
168
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000169- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
170 reference counts in some error exit cases.
171
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000172- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
173 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
174 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
175 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
176 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
177 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
178 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
179 realloc.
180
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000181- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
182 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
183
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000184- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
185 like their int counterparts.
186
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000187- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
188 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
189 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
190 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
191 for a longer write-up of the problem).
192
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000193- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
194 serializing floats.
195
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000196- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
197 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
198 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
199
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000200- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
201 278.
202
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000203- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
204 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
205 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
206 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000207 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000208 PyNumber_*().
209 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
210
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000211- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
212 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
213 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
214 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
215
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000216- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
217 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
218 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
219 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
220 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
221
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000222- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
223 disabled caused a crash.
224
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000225- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
226 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
227
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000228- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000229 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
230
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000231- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
232
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000233- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000234 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
235 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
236 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000237
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000238- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
239
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000240- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
241 returning None.
242
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000243- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000244 ('\') with a specific error message.
245
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000246- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
247
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000248- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
249 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
250
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000251- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000252 an ferror() call.
253
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000254- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
255 list.sort().
256
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000257- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
258 (2+3) --> (5).
259
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000260- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
261
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000262- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
263 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000264
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000265- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
266 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
267 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
268
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000269- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
270 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
271 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
272
Tim Petersf4e69282006-02-27 17:15:31 +0000273- Patch #1413181: changed ``PyThreadState_Delete()`` to forget about the
274 current thread state when the auto-GIL-state machinery knows about
275 it (since the thread state is being deleted, continuing to remember it
276 can't help, but can hurt if another thread happens to get created with
277 the same thread id).
278
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000279Extension Modules
280-----------------
281
Martin v. Löwis480f1bb2006-03-09 23:38:20 +0000282- The unicodedata module was updated to the 4.1 version of the Unicode
283 database. The 3.2 version is still available as unicodedata.db_3_2_0
284 for applications that require this specific version (such as IDNA).
285
Neal Norwitzb62c4332006-03-04 18:35:47 +0000286- The timing module is no longer built by default. It was deprecated
287 in PEP 4 in Python 2.0 or earlier.
288
Guido van Rossum1968ad32006-02-25 22:38:04 +0000289- Patch 1433928: Added a new type, defaultdict, to the collections module.
290 This uses the new __missing__ hook behavior added to dict (see above).
291
Georg Brandldbd83392006-02-20 09:42:33 +0000292- Bug #854823: socketmodule now builds on Sun platforms even when
293 INET_ADDRSTRLEN is not defined.
294
Georg Brandlf4f44152006-02-18 22:29:33 +0000295- Patch #1393157: os.startfile() now has an optional argument to specify
296 a "command verb" to invoke on the file.
297
Neal Norwitz082b2df2006-02-07 07:04:46 +0000298- Bug #876637, prevent stack corruption when socket descriptor
299 is larger than FD_SETSIZE.
300
Neal Norwitz0e6bc8c2006-02-05 05:45:43 +0000301- Patch #1407135, bug #1424041: harmonize mmap behavior of anonymous memory.
302 mmap.mmap(-1, size) now returns anonymous memory in both Unix and Windows.
303 mmap.mmap(0, size) should not be used on Windows for anonymous memory.
304
Martin v. Löwis57a34e82006-02-04 19:12:37 +0000305- Patch #1422385: The nis module now supports access to domains other
306 than the system default domain.
307
Martin v. Löwis14694662006-02-03 12:54:16 +0000308- Use Win32 API to implement os.stat/fstat. As a result, subsecond timestamps
309 are reported, the limit on path name lengths is removed, and stat reports
310 WindowsError now (instead of OSError).
311
Gregory P. Smithcfc4a8d2006-01-29 19:46:23 +0000312- Add bsddb.db.DBEnv.set_tx_timestamp allowing time based database recovery.
313
Neal Norwitz62a21122006-01-25 05:21:55 +0000314- Bug #1413192, fix seg fault in bsddb if a transaction was deleted
315 before the env.
316
Martin v. Löwis11017b12006-01-14 18:12:57 +0000317- Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
318
Neal Norwitz3b4fff82006-01-11 08:54:45 +0000319- Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
320
Neal Norwitz88bbd732006-01-10 07:05:44 +0000321- Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
322 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
323 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
324
Neal Norwitz5e3d8622006-01-09 06:24:35 +0000325- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
326 without prior setting of the userptr.
327
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000328- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
329
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000330- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
331
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000332- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
333 problem on AIX.
334
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000335- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
336
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000337- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
338
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000339- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
340
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000341- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
342 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
343
Gregory P. Smithe101df92006-01-24 20:09:45 +0000344- Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using
345 BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1.
346
347- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4
348
349- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000350
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000351- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
352 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
353
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000354- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
355
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000356- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
357 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
358
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000359- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
360 returns in cStringIO.c.
361
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000362- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
363 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
364
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000365- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
366
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000367- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
368
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000369- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
370 the file system encoding.
371
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000372- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
373 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000374
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000375- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
376
377- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000378 line without newlines.
379
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000380- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
381 on Windows.
382
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000383- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000384 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
385
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000386- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
387 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
388 for large or negative values.
389
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000390- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000391 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000392
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000393- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
394
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000395- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
396 if available on the platform.
397
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000398- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
399 available on the platform.
400
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000401- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
402 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
403
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000404- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
405
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000406- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
407 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
408 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
409
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000410- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
411
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000412- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
413 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
414
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000415- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000416 file size.
417
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000418- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
419
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000420- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
421 {remove_history,replace_history}
422
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000423- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
424 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000425
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000426- stat_float_times is now True.
427
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000428- array.array objects are now picklable.
429
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000430- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
431 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
432
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000433- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
434 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
435 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
436
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000437- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
438 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000439
440Library
441-------
442
Martin v. Löwis04824ce2006-03-10 21:26:16 +0000443- A regrtest option -w was added to re-run failed tests in verbose mode.
444
Georg Brandle2b46772006-03-09 23:22:43 +0000445- Patch #1446372: quit and exit can now be called from the interactive
446 interpreter to exit.
447
Barry Warsawd3c38ff2006-03-07 09:46:03 +0000448- The function get_count() has been added to the gc module, and gc.collect()
449 grew an optional 'generation' argument.
450
Martin v. Löwisfbab90e2006-03-05 13:36:04 +0000451- A library msilib to generate Windows Installer files, and a distutils
452 command bdist_msi have been added.
453
Guido van Rossum1a5e21e2006-02-28 21:57:43 +0000454- PEP 343: new module contextlib.py defines decorator @contextmanager
455 and helpful context managers nested() and closing().
456
Martin v. Löwis415ed932006-02-27 19:56:30 +0000457- The compiler package now supports future imports after the module docstring.
458
Georg Brandl8f7c54e2006-02-20 08:40:38 +0000459- Bug #1413790: zipfile now sanitizes absolute archive names that are
460 not allowed by the specs.
461
Georg Brandlc98eeed2006-02-19 14:57:47 +0000462- Patch #1215184: FileInput now can be given an opening hook which can
463 be used to control how files are opened.
464
Georg Brandlc029f872006-02-19 14:12:34 +0000465- Patch #1212287: fileinput.input() now has a mode parameter for
466 specifying the file mode input files should be opened with.
467
Georg Brandl67e9fb92006-02-19 13:56:17 +0000468- Patch #1215184: fileinput now has a fileno() function for getting the
469 current file number.
470
Georg Brandl602b9ba2006-02-19 13:26:36 +0000471- Patch #1349274: gettext.install() now optionally installs additional
472 translation functions other than _() in the builtin namespace.
473
Georg Brandle4662172006-02-19 09:51:27 +0000474- Patch #1337756: fileinput now accepts Unicode filenames.
475
Georg Brandl7b4e7c22006-02-18 21:10:56 +0000476- Patch #1373643: The chunk module can now read chunks larger than
477 two gigabytes.
478
Georg Brandl21dd1af2006-02-17 13:35:13 +0000479- Patch #1417555: SimpleHTTPServer now returns Last-Modified headers.
480
Georg Brandlbd3bc4d2006-02-17 09:52:53 +0000481- Bug #1430298: It is now possible to send a mail with an empty
482 return address using smtplib.
483
Georg Brandl0e1abe22006-02-17 09:48:14 +0000484- Bug #1432260: The names of lambda functions are now properly displayed
485 in pydoc.
Georg Brandl501dd0d2006-02-17 09:45:40 +0000486
Martin v. Löwis00756902006-02-05 17:09:41 +0000487- Patch #1412872: zipfile now sets the creator system to 3 (Unix)
488 unless the system is Win32.
489
Tim Petersda1329b2006-02-27 16:50:01 +0000490- Patch #1349118: urllib now supports user:pass@ style proxy
Martin v. Löwis3e865952006-01-24 15:51:21 +0000491 specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols
492 are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections.
493
Georg Brandl531ceba2006-01-21 07:20:56 +0000494- Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications.
495
496- Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.
Georg Brandl89f35ac2006-01-20 17:24:23 +0000497
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000498- Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
499
Neal Norwitzf60cd472006-01-14 07:05:13 +0000500- Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
Georg Brandl45ab2332006-01-13 17:05:56 +0000501 any more.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000502
Georg Brandl4edd9892006-01-13 16:59:46 +0000503- Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
504 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000505
Martin v. Löwis412ed3b2006-01-08 10:45:39 +0000506- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
507
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000508- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
509
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000510- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
511 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
512 LoadError subclasses IOError.
513
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000514- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000515 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
516 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
517 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
518 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
519
520 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
521 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
522 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
523 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
524 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000525
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000526- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
527 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
528 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
529
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000530- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
531
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000532- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
533
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000534- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
535 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
536 illegal argument)
537
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000538- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
539 is an error in the format string.
540
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000541- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
542
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000543- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000544 "parent" argument.
545
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000546- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
547 for padding.
548
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000549- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
550 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
551
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000552- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
553 to get the correct encoding.
554
555- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
556 languages.
557
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000558- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
559
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000560- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
561
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000562- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
563
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000564- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
565 functionality.
566
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000567- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
568
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000569- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
570 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
571
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000572- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
573 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
574 match the Content-Length header.
575
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000576- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
577
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000578- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
579 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000580 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000581
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000582- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
583
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000584- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
585
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000586- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
587 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
588
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000589- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
590 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
591 Tkdnd.
592
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000593- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
594 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
595
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000596- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
597 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
598
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000599- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000600 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
601
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000602- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
603 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
604
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000605- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
606 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
607
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000608- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000609 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000610
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000611- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
612
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000613- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
614 error messages.
615
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000616- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
617
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000618- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
619 Bug #1224621.
620
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000621- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
622 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
623 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
624 terminates by raising StopIteration.
625
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000626- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
627
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000628- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
629 component of the path.
630
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000631- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
632 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
633 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
634 class at all.
635
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000636- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
637 files to PyPI.
638
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000639- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
640 them to PyPI.
641
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000642- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
643 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
644 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
645 work as expected.
646
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000647- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
648 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
649
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000650- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000651 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
652
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000653- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
654
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000655- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
656 to build.
657
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000658- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
659 symbolic links on Windows.
660
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000661- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000662 profile.py if available.
663
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000664- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
665
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000666- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
667 in LWPCookieJar.
668
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000669- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
670
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000671- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
672
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000673- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
674
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000675- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
676
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000677- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
678
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000679- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
680
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000681- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
682
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000683- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
684
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000685- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
686 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
687 be exploited in various ways.
688
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000689- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000690 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
691
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000692- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
693 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
694
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000695- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000696 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
697
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000698- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
699
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000700- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
701
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000702- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
703
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000704- Enhancements to the csv module:
705
706 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000707 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000708 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000709 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
710 reporting.
711 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
712 dictates.
713 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000714 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000715 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000716 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
717 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000718 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
719 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000720 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000721 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
722 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
723 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
724 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
725 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
726 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
727 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
728 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
729 without first creating a dialect class.
730 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
731 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
732 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000733 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000734 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
735 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000736 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
737 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
738 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
739 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000740 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
741 This has been fixed.
742
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000743- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
744 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
745 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
746 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
747
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000748- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
749
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000750- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
751 (Bug #951915).
752
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000753- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
754 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
755 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000756 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000757
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000758- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
759
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000760- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
761 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
762
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000763- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
764
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000765- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
766
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000767- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
768
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000769- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
770
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000771- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
772
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000773- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
774 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
775 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
776
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000777- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000778 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000779
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000780- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
781 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
782 tokenizer with very long source lines.
783
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000784- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
785 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
786 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000787
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000788- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
789 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000790
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000791- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
792 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
793
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000794- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
795 correctly.
796
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000797- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
798 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
799 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
800 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
801 between two lines.
802
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000803- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
804 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
805 handlers.
806
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000807- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000808 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
809 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000810
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000811- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
812 considering it exactly like a '*'.
813
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000814- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
815 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000816
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000817- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
818
Gustavo Niemeyer548148812006-01-31 18:34:13 +0000819- Patch #1413711: Certain patterns of differences were making difflib
820 touch the recursion limit.
821
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000822Build
823-----
824
Martin v. Löwis86d66262006-02-17 08:40:11 +0000825- Patch #1432345: Make python compile on DragonFly.
826
Martin v. Löwis856bf9a2006-02-14 20:42:55 +0000827- Build support for Win64-AMD64 was added.
828
Martin v. Löwisa55e55e2006-02-11 15:55:14 +0000829- Patch #1428494: Prefer linking against ncursesw over ncurses library.
830
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000831- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
832
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000833- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
834 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
835
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000836- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
837
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000838- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
839 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
840
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000841- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
842 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
843
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000844- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
845 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
846 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000847 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000848
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000849- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
850 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
851 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
852
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000853- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
854
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000855- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
856 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
857
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000858- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
859 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
860 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
861 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
862 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
863 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
864 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
865 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
866
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000867- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
868 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
869 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
870 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
871
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000872C API
873-----
874
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000875- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
876
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000877- Removed PyRange_New().
878
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000879- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
880 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
881 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
882 mappings.
883
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000884
885Tests
886-----
887
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000888- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000889
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000890- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
891 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
892
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000893
894Documentation
895-------------
896
Georg Brandl8cb30772006-01-20 09:34:29 +0000897- Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.
898
Georg Brandla3a93ae2006-01-20 09:14:36 +0000899- Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
900 values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
901
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000902- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
903
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000904- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
905
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000906- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
907
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000908- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
909
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000910- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
911
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000912- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
913
914- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
915
916- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
917
918- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
919
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000920- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
921 Closes bug #1166582.
922
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000923- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
924 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
925 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
926
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000927Mac
928---
929
930
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000931New platforms
932-------------
933
934- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
935
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000936
937Tools/Demos
938-----------
939
Brett Cannonacde7342006-03-01 04:28:00 +0000940- Created Misc/Vim/vim_syntax.py to auto-generate a python.vim file in that
941 directory for syntax highlighting in Vim. Vim directory was added and placed
942 vimrc to it (was previous up a level).
943
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000944- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
945 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
946 source files that need an encoding declaration.
947 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
948
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000949- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
950
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000951- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000952
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000953- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
954 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000955
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000956What's New in Python 2.4 final?
957===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000958
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000959*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000960
961Core and builtins
962-----------------
963
964- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
965 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
966 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
967
968
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000969What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
970==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000971
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000972*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000973
974Core and builtins
975-----------------
976
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000977- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
978 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
979 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
980
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000981
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000982Library
983-------
984
985- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
986 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
987 raised is re-raised.
988
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000989- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
990 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
991
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000992- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
993 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
994 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
995 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
996 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
997 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
998 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
999 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
1000 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
1001 by the slice are recomputed now.
1002
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +00001003- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +00001004
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00001005Build
1006-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +00001007
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +00001008- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
1009 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
1010 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00001011
1012C API
1013-----
1014
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +00001015- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
1016
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00001017
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001018What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
1019================================
1020
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +00001021*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001022
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001023License
1024-------
1025
1026The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
1027is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
1028changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
1029Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
1030intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
1031durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
1032the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
1033License::
1034
1035 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
1036
1037says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
1038to Python 2.1.1.
1039
1040The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
1041License Version 2.
1042
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001043Core and builtins
1044-----------------
1045
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +00001046- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
1047 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
1048 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
1049 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
1050 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
1051 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
1052 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +00001053 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +00001054 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
1055 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
1056
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +00001057- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001058
1059Extension Modules
1060-----------------
1061
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +00001062- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
1063 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
1064 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
1065 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001066
1067Library
1068-------
1069
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +00001070- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
1071 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
1072 returned.
1073
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +00001074- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
1075
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +00001076- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
1077 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
1078
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +00001079- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
1080
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +00001081- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
1082 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001083
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +00001084- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
1085
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +00001086- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
1087
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +00001088- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +00001089 the source code is updated and reloaded.
1090
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001091Build
1092-----
1093
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +00001094- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001095
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001096What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
1097================================
1098
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +00001099*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001100
1101Core and builtins
1102-----------------
1103
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001104- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +00001105 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
1106
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +00001107- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
1108 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
1109 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
1110 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
1111
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001112- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
1113 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
1114
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +00001115- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
1116 constant.
1117
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001118- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
1119 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
1120 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
1121 large), and to anomalies such as
1122 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
1123 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
1124 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
1125 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001126
1127Extension modules
1128-----------------
1129
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +00001130- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
1131 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001132 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
1133 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
1134 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001135
1136Library
1137-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001138
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001139- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001140 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001141 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
1142 --swig-cpp.
1143
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +00001144- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
1145 it is set.
1146
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +00001147- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +00001148
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +00001149- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
1150 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
1151 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
1152 Closes bug #1039270.
1153
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001154- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +00001155
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +00001156 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001157 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
1158 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
1159 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
1160 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
1161 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
1162 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
1163 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
1164 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
1165 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
1166 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
1167 + Updates to documentation.
1168
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +00001169- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
1170 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
1171 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
1172 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
1173
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001174- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001175
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +00001176- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
1177 applications should use the getmember function.
1178
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +00001179- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
1180
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +00001181- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
1182 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
1183 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
1184 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
1185 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
1186 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
1187 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
1188 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
1189 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
1190
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001191- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
1192 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +00001193 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001194
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001195- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
1196 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
1197 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
1198 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
1199 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
1200 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
1201 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
1202 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001203
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001204- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1205 the new public features (of which there are many).
1206
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001207- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001208 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1209 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1210 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1211 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001212 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001213
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001214- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1215
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001216- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1217 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1218 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1219 options.
1220
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001221- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1222 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1223 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1224 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1225 conditions under which non-string values work.
1226
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001227Build
1228-----
1229
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001230- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1231 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1232 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1233
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001234- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1235 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1236 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1237 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1238 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001239
1240C API
1241-----
1242
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001243- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1244 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1245
1246- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1247
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001248- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1249 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1250 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1251 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1252 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1253 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1254 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1255 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1256 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1257
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001258- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1259
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001260- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1261 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1262 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001263
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001264Tests
1265-----
1266
1267- test__locale ported to unittest
1268
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001269Mac
1270---
1271
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001272- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1273 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1274 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001275
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001276Tools/Demos
1277-----------
1278
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001279- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1280 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1281 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1282 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1283 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001284
1285
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001286What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1287=================================
1288
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001289*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001290
1291Core and builtins
1292-----------------
1293
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001294- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001295 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1296
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001297- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1298 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1299 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1300 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1301 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1302 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1303 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1304 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001305 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1306 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1307 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1308 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1309 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001310
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001311- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1312 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1313 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1314 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1315 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1316
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001317- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1318
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001319- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1320 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1321
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001322- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1323 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1324 modified the list.
1325
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001326- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1327 functions is now writable.
1328
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001329- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1330 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1331 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1332 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1333
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001334- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1335 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1336 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1337 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1338 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001339
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001340- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1341 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1342
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001343Extension modules
1344-----------------
1345
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001346- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1347
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001348- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1349 data.
1350
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001351- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1352 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1353 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1354 supposed to have been truncated away.
1355
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001356- Added socket.socketpair().
1357
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001358- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1359 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1360
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001361- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001362 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1363
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001364Library
1365-------
1366
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001367- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001368 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001369
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001370- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1371 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1372
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001373- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1374 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1375
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001376- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1377
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001378- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1379 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001380
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001381- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1382 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1383
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001384- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1385
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001386- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1387
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001388- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1389
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001390- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1391 Percivall.
1392
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001393- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1394 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1395
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001396- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1397 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1398 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001399 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001400
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001401- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1402 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1403 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1404 and exponent.
1405
1406- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1407
1408- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001409 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001410 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1411
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001412- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1413 to the readline module.
1414
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001415- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001416 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1417 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001418
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001419- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1420 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1421 contains symlinks.
1422
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001423- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1424 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1425
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001426- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1427 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1428 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1429
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001430- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1431 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1432 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1433 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1434 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1435 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1436 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1437 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1438 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1439 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1440 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1441 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1442 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1443
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001444- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1445
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001446Tools/Demos
1447-----------
1448
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001449- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1450 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1451
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001452- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1453
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001454Build
1455-----
1456
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001457- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1458 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1459 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1460 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1461 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1462 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1463 plans to do so.
1464
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001465- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1466 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1467
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001468- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1469 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1470
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001471- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1472 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1473
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001474- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1475 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1476
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001477- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1478 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1479
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001480C API
1481-----
1482
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001483..
1484
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001485Documentation
1486-------------
1487
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001488- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1489 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1490
1491- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1492 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1493 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001494
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001495New platforms
1496-------------
1497
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001498- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1499
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001500Tests
1501-----
1502
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001503..
1504
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001505Windows
1506-------
1507
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001508- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1509 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1510 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1511 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1512 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1513 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1514 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1515 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1516 the problem.
1517
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001518Mac
1519---
1520
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001521..
1522
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001523
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001524What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1525=================================
1526
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001527*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001528
1529Core and builtins
1530-----------------
1531
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001532- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1533 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1534 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1535 sensitive code.
1536
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001537- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001538 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001539
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001540 @staticmethod
1541 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001542
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001543 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001544
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001545- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1546 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1547 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1548 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1549 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1550 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1551 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1552 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1553 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1554 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1555 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1556
1557 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1558 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1559 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1560 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1561 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1562 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1563 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1564
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001565- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1566 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1567
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001568- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001569 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001570
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001571- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001572 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001573 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1574
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001575- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001576 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1577 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1578
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001579- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1580 types that support garbage collection.
1581
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001582- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1583
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001584- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1585 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1586 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1587 Jython.
1588
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001589- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1590
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001591- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1592 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1593
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001594- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1595 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1596 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001597
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001598- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1599 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1600 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1601
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001602Extension modules
1603-----------------
1604
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001605- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1606
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001607Library
1608-------
1609
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001610- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1611 TIS-620
1612
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001613- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1614 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1615 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1616 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1617 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1618 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1619 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1620 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1621 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1622 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1623
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001624- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1625
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001626- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1627 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1628 same as when the argument is omitted).
1629 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1630
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001631- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1632
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001633- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1634 schemes are offered.
1635
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001636- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1637
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001638- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1639 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1640 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1641
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001642- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1643
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001644- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1645 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1646
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001647- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1648 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1649 when dummy_threading is being used.
1650
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001651- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1652 from a tarfile.
1653
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001654- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001655 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001656
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001657- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1658 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1659 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1660 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1661
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001662- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1663 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1664
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001665- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1666 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1667 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1668 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1669 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1670 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1671 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1672 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1673 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1674 by some other method in progress).
1675
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001676- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1677 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1678 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001679
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001680- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1681
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001682- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1683 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1684 AM Kuchling.
1685
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001686- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1687 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1688 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1689
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001690- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1691 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1692 instead of unsigned.
1693
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001694- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001695 no longer part of the public API.
1696
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001697- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1698 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1699 string methods of the same name).
1700
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001701- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001702 SF patch 945642.
1703
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001704- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1705
1706 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1707
1708 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1709 DocTestSuites.
1710
1711- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1712 that provide thread-local data.
1713
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001714- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1715 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1716
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001717- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1718
1719- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1720 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1721 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1722
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001723- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1724
1725 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1726 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1727 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001728
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001729 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1730 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1731 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1732 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1733
1734 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1735 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1736
1737 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1738 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1739 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1740 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1741
1742 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1743 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1744 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1745 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1746 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1747
1748 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1749 wrapping help output.
1750
1751 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1752 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1753 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001754
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001755C API
1756-----
1757
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001758- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1759 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1760 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1761 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1762 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1763 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1764 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1765 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1766 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1767 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1768 its visible semantics have not changed.
1769
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001770- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1771 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1772
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001773Documentation
1774-------------
1775
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001776- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001777
1778 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001779 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001780
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001781 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001782
1783 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1784
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001785- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001786
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001787Tests
1788-----
1789
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001790- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001791 platforms that use the Makefile.
1792
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001793- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1794 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1795 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1796
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001797
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001798What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1799=================================
1800
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001801*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001802
1803Core and builtins
1804-----------------
1805
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001806- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1807 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1808 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1809 objects now (one object instead of three).
1810
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001811- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1812 Windows DLLs.
1813
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001814- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1815 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001816
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001817- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1818 a new .pyc magic.
1819
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001820- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1821 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1822 be there.
1823
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001824- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1825 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1826 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1827
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001828- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1829 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1830 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1831
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001832- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1833
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001834- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1835 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1836 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001837
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001838- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1839 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1840
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001841- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1842
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001843- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001844 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001845
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001846- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1847
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001848- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1849
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001850- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1851 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1852
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001853- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1854 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1855 Fixes bug #858016 .
1856
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001857- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1858 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1859 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1860
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001861- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1862 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1863 improves their performance (about 35%).
1864
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001865- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1866 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1867 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1868
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001869- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1870 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1871 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1872 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1873
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001874- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1875 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001876 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001877 length is not known).
1878
1879- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1880 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001881 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1882 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001883 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1884
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001885- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1886 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1887
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001888- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1889 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1890 keyword arguments.
1891
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001892- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1893 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1894 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1895
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001896- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1897 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1898 cases.
1899
1900- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1901 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1902 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1903 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1904 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1905 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1906 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1907 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1908 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1909 a release build.
1910
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001911- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1912 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1913
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001914- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001915 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001916
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001917- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1918 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1919 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1920 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1921 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1922 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1923 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1924 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1925 destroyed.
1926
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001927- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1928 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1929 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1930 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1931 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1932 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1933 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1934 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1935
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001936- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1937 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1938 character other than a space.
1939
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001940- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1941 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1942 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1943 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1944 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1945 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1946 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1947 attributes with the same name.
1948
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001949- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1950 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1951 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1952 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1953 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1954 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1955 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1956 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1957 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1958 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1959 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1960 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1961 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1962 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001963
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001964- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1965 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1966 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1967 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1968 This has been repaired.
1969
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001970- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1971
1972- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1973
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001974- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1975 over a sequence.
1976
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001977- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001978 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001979
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001980- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1981
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001982- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1983 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1984 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1985 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1986 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1987 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1988 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1989 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1990
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001991- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1992 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1993 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1994
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001995- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1996 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1997 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1998 freelist.
1999
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00002000- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
2001 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
2002
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00002003- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
2004 number.
2005
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00002006- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
2007 a TypeError exception.
2008
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00002009- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
2010 820195.
2011
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00002012- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
2013 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
2014 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
2015
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002016- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00002017 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
2018 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00002019
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00002020- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
2021 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
2022 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
2023
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00002024- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
2025 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002026 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00002027
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002028- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00002029 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
2030 the first call.
2031
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00002032
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002033Extension modules
2034-----------------
2035
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00002036- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
2037 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
2038
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002039- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
2040 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
2041 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
2042 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
2043 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
2044 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
2045 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00002046
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00002047- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
2048
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00002049- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
2050
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00002051- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
2052 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
2053
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00002054- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
2055 fewer false positives.
2056
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00002057- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
2058 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
2059
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002060- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00002061 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
2062
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00002063- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002064 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00002065 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00002066 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
2067 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00002068
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00002069- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
2070 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
2071 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
2072 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
2073
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00002074- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
2075 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
2076 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
2077 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
2078 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
2079 #897625.
2080
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00002081- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
2082 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
2083
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00002084- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
2085 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
2086 and pops on either side of the deque.
2087
2088- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
2089 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
2090
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00002091- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
2092 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
2093 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
2094 other functions that expect a function argument.
2095
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00002096- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
2097
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002098- os.getsid was added.
2099
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00002100- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
2101 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
2102 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
2103
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00002104- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
2105
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00002106- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
2107
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00002108- readline.clear_history was added.
2109
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00002110- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
2111
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00002112- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
2113
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00002114- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
2115
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00002116- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
2117
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00002118- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
2119
2120- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
2121
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00002122- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
2123
2124- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
2125
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002126- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
2127 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
2128 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
2129
2130- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
2131 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
2132 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
2133 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
2134 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
2135 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
2136 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
2137
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00002138- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
2139 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
2140 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
2141 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002142
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002143- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002144 iterators from a single iterable.
2145
2146- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
2147 of raising a TypeError exception.
2148
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00002149- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
2150 as parameter.
2151
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002152Library
2153-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00002154
Armin Rigoa871ef22006-02-08 12:53:56 +00002155- Added a new module: cProfile, a C profiler with the same interface as the
2156 profile module. cProfile avoids some of the drawbacks of the hotshot
2157 profiler and provides a bit more information than the other two profilers.
2158 Based on "lsprof" (patch #1212837).
2159
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00002160- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
2161
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00002162- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
2163 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
2164 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002165
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00002166- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
2167 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
2168 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00002169
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00002170- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00002171
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00002172- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
2173 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00002174
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00002175- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
2176 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
2177
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002178- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
2179
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002180- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002181 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002182
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002183- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00002184 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002185
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00002186- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
2187
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00002188- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
2189 on cygwin and mingw32.
2190
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00002191- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
2192
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00002193- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
2194 module.
2195
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00002196- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
2197 installation scheme for all platforms.
2198
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002199- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00002200 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002201
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002202- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
2203 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
2204 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
2205
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00002206- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
2207 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2208 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2209
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002210- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2211
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002212- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2213
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002214- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2215 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2216
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002217- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2218 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2219 type pattern with the same value exists.
2220
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002221- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2222 when run from the command prompt).
2223
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002224- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2225 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2226
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002227- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2228 default sort).
2229
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002230- Added global runctx function to profile module
2231
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002232- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2233
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002234- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2235
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002236- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2237
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002238- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002239 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2240 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2241 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2242 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2243 accordingly.
2244
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002245- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2246 decoding standards.
2247
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002248- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2249 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2250 called for all requests.
2251
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002252- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2253 they are passed to the compiler.
2254
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002255- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2256 indent, width and depth.
2257
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002258- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2259 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2260
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002261- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2262 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2263
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002264- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2265
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002266- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2267
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002268- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2269
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002270- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2271 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2272
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002273- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002274 for better performance.
2275
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002276- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002277
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002278- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2279 a string).
2280
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002281- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2282
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002283- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2284
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002285- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2286
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002287- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2288
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002289- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2290 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2291 list of fieldnames.
2292
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002293- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2294 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2295
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002296- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2297
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002298- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2299 empty lists.
2300
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002301- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2302 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2303 and shelves.
2304
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002305- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2306 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2307
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002308- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002309 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2310 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002311
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002312- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2313 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002314 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002315
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002316- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002317 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2318 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2319
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002320- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2321 and removed in Py2.4.
2322
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002323- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2324
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002325- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2326
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002327Tools/Demos
2328-----------
2329
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002330- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2331 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2332
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002333- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2334
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002335- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2336 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2337 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2338 destination in situations where both files are given.
2339
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002340- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2341 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2342 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2343 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2344
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002345- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2346
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002347- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2348 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2349 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2350 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2351 now.
2352
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002353- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2354 in effect
2355
2356- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2357 C-c C-h
2358
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002359- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2360 -d option was given.
2361
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002362Build
2363-----
2364
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002365- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2366 build under OS X.
2367
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002368- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2369 --enable-profiling.
2370
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002371- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2372 is configured --with-tsc.
2373
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002374- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2375 on AMD64.
2376
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002377- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2378 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2379
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002380- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2381 removed.
2382
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002383- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2384 supported (see PEP 11).
2385
2386- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2387
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002388- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2389
2390- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2391 (see PEP 11).
2392
2393- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2394 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2395
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002396C API
2397-----
2398
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002399- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2400 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2401 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2402
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002403- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2404 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2405 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2406 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2407
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002408- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2409 generator objects.
2410
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002411- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2412 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002413 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2414 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002415
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002416- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2417 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2418
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002419- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2420 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2421 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2422 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2423 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2424
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002425- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2426 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2427 about 10% faster.
2428
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002429- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2430 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2431
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002432- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2433 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2434 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2435 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2436
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002437Windows
2438-------
2439
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002440- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2441 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2442 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2443 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2444
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002445- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2446 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2447 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2448
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002449
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002450What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2451===============================
2452
2453*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2454
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002455IDLE
2456----
2457
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002458- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2459 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2460 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2461 context-menu actions.
2462
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002463- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2464 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2465 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2466 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2467 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2468 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2469 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2470 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2471 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2472
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002473
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002474What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2475=============================================
2476
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002477*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002478
2479Core and builtins
2480-----------------
2481
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002482- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002483 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002484 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2485
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002486Extension modules
2487-----------------
2488
2489- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2490 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2491 than once. This has been fixed.
2492
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002493- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2494 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2495 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2496 call.
2497
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002498- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2499
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002500Library
2501-------
2502
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002503- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2504 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2505
2506- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2507 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2508 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2509 restored.
2510
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002511IDLE
2512----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002513
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002514- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002515
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002516Build
2517-----
2518
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002519- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2520 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2521
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002522C API
2523-----
2524
2525Windows
2526-------
2527
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002528- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2529 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2530
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002531- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2532
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002533Mac
2534---
2535
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002536- Various fixes to pimp.
2537
2538- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2539
2540- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2541 more problems than it solves.
2542
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002543
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002544What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2545=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002546
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002547*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2548
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002549Core and builtins
2550-----------------
2551
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002552- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2553 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2554
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002555- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2556 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002557 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002558
2559- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2560 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2561 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002562 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002563
2564- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2565 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002566
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002567- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2568 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2569 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2570
2571- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002572 770247.
2573
2574- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002575
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002576Extension modules
2577-----------------
2578
2579- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2580 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2581
2582- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2583
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002584- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2585
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002586- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2587 contained within the _strptime module.
2588
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002589- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2590 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2591
2592- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002593 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2594
2595- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2596 the find_class attribute, if present.
2597
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002598- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002599
2600 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2601 (SF bug 763298).
2602
2603 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002604 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2605 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2606 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002607
2608 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2609
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002610Library
2611-------
2612
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002613- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2614
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002615- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2616 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2617 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2618 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2619 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2620 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2621 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2622 or Tester().
2623
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002624- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2625 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2626 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2627 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2628 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2629 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2630 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2631 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2632 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002633
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002634 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002635
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002636- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2637 weren't before was an oversight.
2638
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002639- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2640 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2641
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002642- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2643 when there are no lines.
2644
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002645- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2646 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2647
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002648- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2649 to child processes.
2650
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002651- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2652
2653- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2654
2655- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2656 xmlrpclib.
2657
2658- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2659 responses.
2660
2661- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2662 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2663
2664- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2665 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2666 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2667
2668- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2669 used as patterns.
2670
2671- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2672 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2673 than Tk 8.3.
2674
2675- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2676
2677- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002678
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002679Tools/Demos
2680-----------
2681
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002682- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2683
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002684- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2685
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002686- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002687
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002688Build
2689-----
2690
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002691- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2692
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002693- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2694
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002695- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2696 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002697
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002698- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2699 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2700 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002701
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002702C API
2703-----
2704
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002705- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2706 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2707
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002708Windows
2709-------
2710
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002711- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2712 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2713 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2714 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2715 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2716 Python exception ::
2717
2718 thread.error: can't start new thread
2719
2720 is raised now.
2721
2722- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2723 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2724 instead of from DLL teardown.
2725
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002726Mac
2727---
2728
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002729- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002730 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002731 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2732 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2733 the executable in the bundle.
2734
2735- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002736
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002737- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2738
2739- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2740 on Panther.
2741
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002742What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2743================================
2744
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002745*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002746
2747Core and builtins
2748-----------------
2749
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002750- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2751 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2752 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2753 with the -i option.
2754
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002755- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2756 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2757
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002758- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2759 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2760
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002761- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2762 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2763 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2764 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2765 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2766 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2767 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2768 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2769 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2770 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2771 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2772 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2773 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002774
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002775- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2776 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2777 embedded in a lambda expression.
2778
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002779- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2780 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2781 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2782 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2783 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2784
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002785- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2786 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2787 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2788
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002789- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2790 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2791
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002792- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2793 It's writable again.
2794
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002795- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2796 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2797 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002798 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002799
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002800- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2801 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2802 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2803
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002804Extension modules
2805-----------------
2806
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002807- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2808 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2809
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002810- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2811 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2812 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2813 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2814
2815- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2816 collection.
2817
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002818- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2819 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2820 unique within a single program run.
2821
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002822- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2823 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2824
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002825- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2826 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2827
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002828- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2829 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002830
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002831- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2832
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002833- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2834 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2835
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002836- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2837 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2838 for many BSD-derived systems.
2839
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002840
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002841Library
2842-------
2843
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002844- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2845 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2846 primary ones:
2847
2848 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2849 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2850 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2851
2852 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2853 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2854 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2855 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2856 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2857 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2858
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002859- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2860 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2861 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2862 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2863 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2864 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2865 argument.
2866
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002867- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2868 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2869 in the archive.
2870
2871- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2872 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2873
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002874- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2875 569574).
2876
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002877- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2878 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2879 no more.
2880
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002881- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2882 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2883 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2884 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2885 code coverage.
2886
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002887- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2888 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2889 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002890 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2891 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002892
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002893- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2894 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2895 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002896 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002897
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002898- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2899
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002900- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2901 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2902 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2903 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2904
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002905- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2906 handling.
2907
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002908- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2909 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2910
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002911- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2912 in socket.py.
2913
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002914- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2915
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002916- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2917 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2918 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2919 opener with proxy support.
2920
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002921- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2922
2923- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2924
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002925Tools/Demos
2926-----------
2927
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002928- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2929
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002930- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2931
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002932- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2933 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002934
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002935- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2936 files.
2937
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002938Build
2939-----
2940
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002941- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002942 different root directory.
2943
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002944C API
2945-----
2946
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002947- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2948 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2949 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2950 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2951 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2952 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2953 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2954 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2955 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2956 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2957
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002958- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2959 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2960 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2961 from Python.
2962
2963
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002964New platforms
2965-------------
2966
2967None this time.
2968
2969Tests
2970-----
2971
2972- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2973 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2974
2975Windows
2976-------
2977
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002978- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2979
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002980- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2981 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2982 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2983 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2984 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2985 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2986 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2987 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2988 that's what it's for.
2989
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002990Mac
2991---
2992
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002993- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2994 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2995 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2996 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002997- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2998 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2999- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00003000
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00003001SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
3002------------------------------------
3003
3004430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
3005598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
3006622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
3007661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
3008683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
3009697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
3010713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
3011724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
3012727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
3013729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
3014730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
3015731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
3016732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
3017733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
3018735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
3019740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
3020744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
3021745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
3022747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
3023749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
3024751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
3025753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
3026755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
3027757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
3028760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
3029
3030
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003031What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
3032================================
3033
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00003034*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003035
3036Core and builtins
3037-----------------
3038
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00003039- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
3040 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
3041
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00003042- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
3043 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
3044 and cannot be strings).
3045
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00003046- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
3047 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
3048 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
3049 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
3050
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00003051- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
3052 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
3053 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
3054 Python itself.
3055
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00003056- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
3057 the referenced object, if it has one.
3058
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00003059- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
3060 the thread started at
3061 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
3062
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00003063- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
3064 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
3065 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
3066 placed on a list index.
3067
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00003068- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
3069 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
3070 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
3071 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
3072
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003073- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
3074 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
3075 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
3076 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
3077 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
3078 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
3079 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
3080
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00003081- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
3082 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
3083 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
3084 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
3085 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
3086
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00003087- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
3088 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00003089
3090- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
3091 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
3092 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
3093 #693195.)
3094
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00003095- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
3096 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003097
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00003098- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00003099 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00003100 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
3101 interpreter executions, would fail.
3102
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003103- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00003104 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00003105 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003106
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003107Extension modules
3108-----------------
3109
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00003110- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
3111 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
3112 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
3113 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
3114
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00003115- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
3116 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
3117
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00003118- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
3119 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
3120 and Greg Chapman.)
3121
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003122- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
3123 recursively.
3124
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00003125- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00003126 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
3127 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
3128 leaks.
3129
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00003130- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
3131
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00003132- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
3133 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
3134 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
3135 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
3136 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
3137 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
3138 #705836.
3139
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00003140- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00003141 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
3142
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00003143- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
3144 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
3145 See SF bug #692416.
3146
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00003147- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
3148 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
3149
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00003150- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
3151 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
3152 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003153
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003154- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00003155 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
3156 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
3157
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00003158- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
3159 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
3160 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
3161 timeouts to work properly.
3162
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003163Library
3164-------
3165
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003166- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
3167 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
3168 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
3169 future release.
3170
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00003171- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
3172 for querying platform dependent features.
3173
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00003174- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00003175
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00003176- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
3177 pickle protocol versions.
3178
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00003179- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
3180 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
3181 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
3182
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00003183- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
3184
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00003185- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
3186 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
3187 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
3188 modules.
3189
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00003190- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
3191 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
3192 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
3193
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003194- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
3195 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
3196
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00003197- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
3198 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
3199 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
3200
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003201- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00003202 MS Office extensions.
3203
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00003204- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
3205 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
3206
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00003207- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3208 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3209
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003210- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3211 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3212 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3213 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3214 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3215 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3216
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003217- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3218 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3219 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003220
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003221- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3222 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3223 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3224
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003225- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3226
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003227- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3228 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3229 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3230
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003231Tools/Demos
3232-----------
3233
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003234- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3235 See the module docstring for details.
3236
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003237Build
3238-----
3239
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003240- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3241 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003242
3243C API
3244-----
3245
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003246- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3247
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003248- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3249 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3250 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3251
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003252- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3253 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003254
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003255 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3256 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3257 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003258
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003259- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003260 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3261
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003262- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3263 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3264 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003265
3266New platforms
3267-------------
3268
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003269None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003270
3271Tests
3272-----
3273
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003274- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3275 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003276
3277Windows
3278-------
3279
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003280- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3281 function.
3282
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003283- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3284 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003285
3286Mac
3287---
3288
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003289- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3290 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003291
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003292- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3293 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003294
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003295- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3296 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3297 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003298
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003299- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003300 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3301 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003302
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003303- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3304 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003305
3306
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003307What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3308=================================
3309
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003310*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003311
3312Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003313-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003314
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003315- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3316 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3317 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3318
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003319- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3320 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3321 (SF patch #664376.)
3322
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003323- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3324 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3325 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3326 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3327 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3328 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003329 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003330
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003331- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3332 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3333 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3334 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003335 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003336
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003337- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3338 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3339 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3340 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3341 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3342 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3343 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3344 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3345 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3346 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3347 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3348
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003349- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3350 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3351 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3352 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3353 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3354 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3355
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003356- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3357 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3358
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003359- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3360 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3361 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3362 case.)
3363
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003364- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3365 passed as unicode strings.
3366
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003367- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3368 See SF bug #683467.
3369
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003370- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3371 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3372
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003373- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3374
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003375- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3376
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003377- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3378 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3379 arguments.
3380
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003381- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3382 See SF bug #667147.
3383
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003384- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003385 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003386 See SF bug #676155.
3387
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003388- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003389 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003390 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3391 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3392 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3393 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3394 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3395 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003396
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003397Extension modules
3398-----------------
3399
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003400- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3401 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3402 tp_as_number pointer.
3403
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003404- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3405 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3406 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3407 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3408 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3409
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003410- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3411
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003412- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3413
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003414- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003415 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003416 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3417 patch #678531.)
3418
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003419- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3420 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3421
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003422- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3423 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3424
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003425- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3426
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003427- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3428 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3429 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3430
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003431- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3432
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003433- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3434 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3435
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003436- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003437
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003438- datetime changes:
3439
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003440 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3441
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003442 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3443 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3444 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3445 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3446 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3447 now.
3448
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003449 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003450 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3451 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003452
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003453 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003454 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003455 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3456 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3457 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3458 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003459
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003460 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3461 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3462 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003463 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3464
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003465 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3466 by a later example coded by Guido.
3467
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003468 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003469 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3470 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3471 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003472 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3473 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3474
3475 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3476 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3477 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3478 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3479 tzinfo subclass instance.
3480
3481 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3482 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3483 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3484 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3485 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3486 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3487 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3488 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003489
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003490 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3491 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3492 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3493 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3494 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003495 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3496
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003497 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003498
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003499 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3500 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3501 as a naive datetime object.
3502
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003503 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3504 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3505 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3506
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003507 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3508 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3509 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3510 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3511 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3512 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3513 comparison.
3514
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003515 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3516 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3517 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3518 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003519 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003520
3521 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003522
3523 and ::
3524
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003525 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3526
3527 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3528 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3529 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3530 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3531
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003532 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3533 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3534 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3535 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3536 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3537
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003538 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3539 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003540 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3541 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003542
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003543Library
3544-------
3545
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003546- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3547 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3548
3549- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3550 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3551 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3552 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3553 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3554 See PEP 307 for details.
3555
3556- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3557 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3558
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003559- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3560 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003561 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003562 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3563 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003564 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003565
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003566- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3567 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3568
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003569- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3570 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3571 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3572
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003573- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3574
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003575- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3576 exception.
3577
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003578- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3579 class.
3580
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003581- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3582 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3583 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3584
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003585- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3586 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3587
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003588- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003589 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3590 See SF bug #659228.
3591
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003592- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3593 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3594 See SF patch #651082.
3595
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003596- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003597
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003598- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3599 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3600
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003601- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003602 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003603
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003604- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3605 DOS paths from other platforms.
3606
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003607Tools/Demos
3608-----------
3609
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003610- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3611 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3612 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3613 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3614 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3615 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3616 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3617 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3618 example:
3619
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003620 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3621 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003622
3623 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3624
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003625
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003626Build
3627-----
3628
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003629- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3630 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3631 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003632 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3633
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003634 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3635
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003636- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3637 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3638 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3639 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3640 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3641 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3642 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3643 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3644 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3645
3646- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3647 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3648 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3649 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3650
3651- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3652 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3653
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003654C API
3655-----
3656
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003657- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3658 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003659
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003660- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3661 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3662 tp_as_number pointer.
3663
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003664- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3665 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3666 (SF #681367)
3667
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003668- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3669 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3670 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3671 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003672
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003673Tests
3674-----
3675
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003676- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003677 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3678 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3679 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3680 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3681 pydoc.)
3682
3683- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3684
3685- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003686
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003687Windows
3688-------
3689
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003690- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3691 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3692 time).
3693
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003694- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3695 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3696
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003697- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3698 release without strong cryptography.
3699
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003700- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003701 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003702
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003703- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3704 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3705
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003706Mac
3707---
3708
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003709- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3710 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003711
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003712- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3713 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3714 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003715
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003716- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3717 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003718
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003719- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3720 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3721 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3722 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003723
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003724- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003725 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3726 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3727 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003728
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003729
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003730What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003731=================================
3732
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003733*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003734
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003735Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003736--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003737
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003738- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3739
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003740- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3741 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003742 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003743 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003744 a different meaning than before.
3745
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003746- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003747 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003748 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003749
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003750- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003751 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003752 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003753
3754- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3755 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3756 and deallocation.
3757
3758- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3759 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3760
3761- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3762 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3763 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3764 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3765 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3766
3767- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3768 now detected by the garbage collector.
3769
3770- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3771 [SF bug 519621]
3772
3773- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3774 identifier.
3775
3776- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3777 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3778 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3779 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3780 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3781 [SF bug 563060]
3782
3783- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3784 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3785 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3786 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3787 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3788
3789- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3790 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3791 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3792
3793- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3794
3795- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3796 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3797 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3798 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3799 state of the slots would be lost.)
3800
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003801Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003802-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003803
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003804- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003805 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3806 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3807 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3808 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003809 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3810 Jython 2.1.
3811
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003812- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003813 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003814 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3815 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3816 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3817 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3818 these, see PEP 302.
3819
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003820- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3821 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3822 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3823
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003824- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3825 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3826 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3827
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003828- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3829 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3830 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3831
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003832- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3833 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3834 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3835 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3836 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3837 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3838 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3839 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3840 releases or implementations.
3841
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003842- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003843 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3844 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003845
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003846- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3847 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3848
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003849- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3850 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3851 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3852
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003853- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3854 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3855
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003856- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3857 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003858 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3859 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003860
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003861- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3862 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3863 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3864 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3865 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3866
3867 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3868 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3869 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3870 pattern.
3871
3872 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3873 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3874 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3875 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3876
3877 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3878 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3879 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3880 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3881 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3882 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3883
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003884- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3885 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3886 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3887 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3888 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3889 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3890 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3891 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003892
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003893- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3894 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3895 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3896 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3897 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003898 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3899 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3900 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3901 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3902 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3903 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3904 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003905
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003906- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3907 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3908
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003909- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3910 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3911 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3912 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3913 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3914 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3915 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3916 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3917 to Zack Weinberg!
3918
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003919- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3920 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3921 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3922 type. This has been fixed now.
3923
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003924- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3925 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3926 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3927
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003928- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3929 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3930 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3931 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3932 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3933 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3934 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3935 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003936 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003937
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003938- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3939 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3940 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003941
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003942- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3943 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3944 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3945 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3946 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3947 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3948 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3949 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003950 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003951 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3952 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3953
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003954- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3955 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3956 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3957 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3958 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3959 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3960 this.)
3961
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003962- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3963 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003964 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003965 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003966 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3967 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003968 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3969 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003970
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003971- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3972 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3973 currently running.
3974
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003975- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3976 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3977 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3978 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3979
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003980- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3981 as directory names.
3982
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003983- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3984 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3985
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003986- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3987 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3988
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003989- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003990 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3991 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003992
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003993- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3994 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3995 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3996 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3997 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3998
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003999- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
4000 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
4001 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
4002 removed.
4003
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00004004- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
4005 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
4006 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
4007
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00004008- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
4009 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
4010 to __debug__.
4011
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00004012- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
4013 string to the left with zeros. For example,
4014 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
4015
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00004016- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
4017 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
4018 deprecated now.
4019
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00004020- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
4021 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
4022 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00004023
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00004024- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
4025 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
4026 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
4027 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
4028 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00004029
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00004030- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
4031 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
4032
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00004033- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
4034 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
4035 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004036 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00004037 is backward compatible.
4038
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00004039- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
4040 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
4041 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
4042 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
4043 could access a pointer to freed memory.
4044
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00004045- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
4046 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
4047 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
4048 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
4049 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
4050 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004051
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00004052- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
4053 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
4054
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004055- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
4056 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
4057
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004058- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
4059 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
4060 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
4061 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
4062 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
4063
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00004064- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
4065 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
4066 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
4067
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004068- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00004069 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
4070
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00004071- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
4072 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
4073 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00004074
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00004075- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
4076 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
4077
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00004078- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
4079 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
4080 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
4081
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00004082- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
4083
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004084Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004085-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004086
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00004087- Added three operators to the operator module:
4088 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
4089 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
4090 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
4091
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00004092- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
4093
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00004094- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
4095 archives.
4096
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004097- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
4098 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
4099 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
4100
4101 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
4102
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004103- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
4104 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
4105 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00004106 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004107
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00004108- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
4109 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
4110 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
4111 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00004112 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
4113 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
4114 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
4115 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00004116
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00004117- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
4118 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00004119
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00004120- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
4121
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00004122- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
4123 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
4124
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00004125- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
4126 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
4127 supported.
4128
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00004129- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
4130
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00004131- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
4132 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00004133
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00004134- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
4135 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
4136
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00004137- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
4138
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004139- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
4140 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
4141
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00004142- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
4143 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
4144 functions but callable type objects.
4145
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004146- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004147 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004148 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004149
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00004150- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
4151 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00004152
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00004153- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
4154 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00004155
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00004156- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
4157 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
4158 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
4159 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
4160
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00004161- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
4162 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00004163
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00004164- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
4165 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
4166 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
4167 and __imul__.
4168
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00004169- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00004170 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
4171 is called.
4172
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00004173- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
4174 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
4175 interpreter was compiled.
4176
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004177- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
4178 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
4179 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004180 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004181 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
4182 1, not 2.
4183
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00004184- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
4185 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
4186 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
4187 limit.
4188
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00004189- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
4190 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
4191 bug #623464.
4192
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00004193- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
4194 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
4195 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
4196 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
4197
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004198Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004199-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004200
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00004201- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
4202
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00004203- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
4204 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
4205 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
4206 with Python 2.3a2.
4207
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004208- os.path exposes getctime.
4209
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004210- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004211 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004212 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004213 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004214 unit tests of floating point results.
4215
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004216- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4217 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4218 has been increased.
4219
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004220- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4221 executed.
4222
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004223- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4224 postinstallation script.
4225
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004226- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4227 test the current module.
4228
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004229- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004230 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4231 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4232 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4233 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4234
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004235- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004236 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004237 Ward's Optik package.
4238
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004239- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4240 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4241 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4242 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4243
4244- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4245 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004246 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004247
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004248- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4249 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4250 shelf are binary pickles.
4251
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004252- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4253 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4254
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004255- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4256 modules are iterators now.
4257
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004258- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4259 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4260 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4261 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4262 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4263 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004264
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004265- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4266 with their entity value.
4267
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004268- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4269
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004270- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4271 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004272
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004273- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4274 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004275 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004276
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004277- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4278 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4279 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4280 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4281 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4282 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4283 main():
4284
4285 import locale
4286 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4287
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004288- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4289 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4290
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004291- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4292 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4293 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4294 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4295 to the new standard.
4296
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004297- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4298 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4299 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4300 an extension to the database.
4301
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004302- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4303 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4304 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4305 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004306 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004307
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004308- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004309 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004310
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004311- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4312 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4313 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4314 bounded integers.
4315
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004316- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4317 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4318 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4319 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4320 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4321 in existence.
4322
4323 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4324 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4325 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4326 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4327 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4328 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4329
4330 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4331 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4332 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4333 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4334
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004335- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4336 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4337 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4338
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004339- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4340
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004341- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4342 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4343 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4344 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4345
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004346- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4347 argument.
4348
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004349- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4350 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4351 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4352 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4353 [SF patch 560794].
4354
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004355- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4356 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4357 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004358 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4359 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4360 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004361
4362- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4363 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004364
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004365- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4366 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4367 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4368 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004369
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004370- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4371 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4372 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4373 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4374 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4375
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004376- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004377
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004378- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4379
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004380- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4381 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4382 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4383 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4384 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4385 identical to None.
4386
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004387- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4388 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4389 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4390 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4391 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4392 results now.
4393
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004394- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4395 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4396
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004397- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4398 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4399 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4400 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4401 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4402 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4403 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4404 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4405
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004406- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4407
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004408- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4409 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4410
4411- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4412 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4413 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4414 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4415 and other systems.
4416
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004417- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4418 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4419 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4420 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 +00004421 work well with these.
4422
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004423- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4424
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004425- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004426 connections.
4427
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004428- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4429 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4430 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4431
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004432- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4433 sets
4434
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004435- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4436 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4437 name.
4438
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004439- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4440 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4441 passed in.
4442
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004443- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004444 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004445 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4446 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004447
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004448- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4449
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004450- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4451
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004452- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4453 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4454 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4455
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004456- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4457 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4458 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4459 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004460 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004461
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004462- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004463 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004464 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004465
4466- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4467 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4468 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4469
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004470- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004471 the value of its expression argument.
4472
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004473- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4474 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4475 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4476
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004477- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4478 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4479 skipstone browser was included.
4480
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004481- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4482 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4483
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004484Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004485-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004486
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004487- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4488 names in addition to accepting file names.
4489
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004490- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4491 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4492 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4493 still used and useful.)
4494
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004495- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4496 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4497 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4498 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004499
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004500- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4501 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4502 the generated binary.
4503
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004504Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004505-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004506
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004507- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4508
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004509- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4510 except in the hands of experts.
4511
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004512- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004513 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4514 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4515 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004516
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004517- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4518 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4519 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4520 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4521 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4522 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4523 builds.
4524
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004525- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4526 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4527 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4528 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4529 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4530 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4531 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4532 new type.
4533
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004534- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004535
4536 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4537 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4538 positive infinities.
4539
4540 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4541 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4542 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4543 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4544 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4545 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4546 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4547
4548 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4549
4550 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4551
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004552- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4553 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4554 size of the executable.
4555
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004556- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4557 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4558 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4559 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004560
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004561- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4562
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004563- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4564 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4565 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004566
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004567- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4568 well as Unix.
4569
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004570- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4571 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4572 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4573 modules in the README file for details.
4574
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004575C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004576-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004577
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004578- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4579 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004580 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004581 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004582 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004583
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004584- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4585 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4586 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4587 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4588 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4589 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004590 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004591 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4592 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4593 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4594 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4595 aligned.)
4596
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004597- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4598 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4599 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4600
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004601- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4602 level.
4603
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004604- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4605 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4606 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4607 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4608 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4609
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004610- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4611 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4612 code.
4613
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004614- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4615 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4616 adjusting for negative indices.
4617
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004618- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4619 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4620 object.
4621
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004622- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4623 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4624 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4625
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004626- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4627 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004628
4629- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4630
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004631- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4632 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4633 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4634 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4635
4636- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4637
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004638- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004639
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004640- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004641 without going through the buffer API.
4642
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004643- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004644
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004645- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4646 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4647 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4648 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4649
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004650- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4651 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4652
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004653- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004654 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4655
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004656New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004657-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004658
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004659- OpenVMS is now supported.
4660
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004661- AtheOS is now supported.
4662
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004663- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4664
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004665- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4666
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004667Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004668-----
4669
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004670- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4671 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4672 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004673
4674Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004675-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004676
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004677- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4678 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4679 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4680 bugs.
4681 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004682 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004683 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4684 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004685 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004686
4687- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004688 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004689
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004690- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4691 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4692
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004693- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4694 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004695 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004696 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4697
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004698- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4699 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4700 use files" uninstall option).
4701
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004702- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4703
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004704- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4705 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4706
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004707- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4708 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4709 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4710
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004711- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4712 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4713 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4714 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4715 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004716 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4717 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4718 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004719
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004720- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004721 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004722 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4723 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4724 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4725 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4726 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4727 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4728 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4729 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4730 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4731 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4732 work around.
4733
4734- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4735 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4736 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4737 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4738 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4739 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4740 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4741 specified with O_CREAT too).
4742
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004743Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004744----
4745
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004746- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004747
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004748- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4749 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4750 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4751
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004752- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4753 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4754 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4755
4756- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4757 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4758 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4759 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4760 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4761 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4762 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4763 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004764
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004765- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4766 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4767 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004768
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004769- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4770 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4771 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4772 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4773 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004774
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004775- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4776 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4777 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004778
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004779- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4780 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004781
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004782- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4783 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4784 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4785 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4786 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004787
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004788- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4789 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4790 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4791
4792- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4793 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4794 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004795
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004796- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4797 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4798 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4799 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004800 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004801
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004802- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4803 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004804
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004805- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4806 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004807
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004808- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004809 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004810 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4811 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004812
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004813
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004814What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004815===============================
4816
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004817*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4818
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004819Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004820--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004821
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004822- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4823 with a custom metaclass.
4824
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004825Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004826-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004827
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004828- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4829 are proxies.
4830
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004831Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004832-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004833
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004834- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4835 very short strings.
4836
4837- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4838 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4839 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4840 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4841 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4842
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004843Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004844-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004845
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004846- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4847 close or delete time).
4848
4849- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4850 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4851
4852- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4853
4854- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004855 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004856
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004857Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004858-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004859
4860Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004861-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004862
4863C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004864-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004865
4866New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004867-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004868
4869Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004870-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004871
4872Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004873-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004874
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004875- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4876
4877- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4878 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4879
4880- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4881 deleted at process exit time.
4882
4883- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4884 in backslash.
4885
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004886Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004887----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004888
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004889- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4890 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4891 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4892
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004893
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004894What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004895===========================
4896
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004897*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4898
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004899Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004900--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004901
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004902- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4903 been extensively updated. See
4904
4905 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4906
4907 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4908
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004909- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4910 deleted!
4911
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004912- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4913 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4914 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4915 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4916 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4917
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004918- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4919
4920 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4921 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4922
4923 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4924 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4925 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4926 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4927 supported anyway.
4928
4929 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4930 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4931
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004932- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4933 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4934 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4935 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4936 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004937
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004938- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4939 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4940 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4941
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004942Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004943-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004944
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004945- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4946 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4947 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4948 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4949 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4950 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004951 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4952 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4953 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4954 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004955
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004956- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4957 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4958 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4959
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004960Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004961-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004962
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004963- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4964
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004965Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004966-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004967
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004968- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4969 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4970 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4971 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4972 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4973 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4974
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004975- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4976
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004977- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4978
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004979- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4980
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004981- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4982 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4983 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4984
4985- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4986
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004987Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004988-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004989
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004990- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4991 off a search on Google.
4992
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004993Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004994-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004995
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004996- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4997 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4998 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4999 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
5000 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
5001 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
5002 other platforms should do likewise.
5003
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00005004- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
5005 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
5006 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
5007
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005008C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005009-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005010
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00005011- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
5012 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
5013 producing key-value pairs.
5014
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00005015- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00005016 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00005017 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
5018 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
5019 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
5020 previously went unchallenged.
5021
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005022New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005023-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005024
5025Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005026-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005027
5028Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005029-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005030
5031Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005032----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005033
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00005034- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
5035 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005036
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00005037- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
5038 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
5039 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
5040 home.
5041
5042
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005043What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005044===========================
5045
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005046*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
5047
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005048Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005049--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005050
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00005051- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
5052 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00005053
5054 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00005055 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00005056
5057 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
5058 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005059 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00005060 This needs to be documented.
5061
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00005062- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
5063 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
5064
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00005065- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
5066 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
5067 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
5068
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00005069- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
5070 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
5071
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005072- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
5073 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
5074 class forbids it).
5075
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00005076- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
5077 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
5078 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
5079
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005080- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
5081
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005082Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005083-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005084
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00005085- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
5086 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005087 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00005088
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005089- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
5090 (like 1 + '').
5091
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005092Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005093-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005094
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005095- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
5096 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
5097 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
5098 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005099 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005100 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
5101
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00005102- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
5103 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
5104 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
5105 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
5106
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005107- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
5108 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005109 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
5110 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
5111 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005112
5113- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
5114 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005115
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00005116- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
5117 bytes on its input.
5118
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005119Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005120-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005121
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005122- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00005123 convenience function.
5124
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005125- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
5126 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
5127 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005128 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
5129 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
5130 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
5131 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
5132 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
5133 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005134
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00005135- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
5136 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
5137 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
5138 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
5139
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00005140- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
5141 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
5142 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
5143
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005144- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
5145 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
5146 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
5147 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
5148
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005149- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
5150 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005151 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005152 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
5153 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
5154 new -l and -e options.
5155
5156- statcache is now deprecated.
5157
5158- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
5159 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005160 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005161 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
5162 time properly taken into account.
5163
5164- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
5165 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
5166 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
5167 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
5168
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005169Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005170-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005171
5172Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005173-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005174
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005175- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
5176 is built with libdb3 if available.
5177
5178- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
5179
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005180C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005181-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005182
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00005183- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
5184 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
5185 PySequence_Size().
5186
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005187- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
5188
5189- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
5190 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
5191 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
5192
5193- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
5194 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
5195
5196- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
5197 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
5198
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005199New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005200-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005201
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005202- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
5203 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
5204
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00005205- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
5206 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
5207
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005208- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5209
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005210Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005211-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005212
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005213- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5214 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5215
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005216Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005217-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005218
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005219Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005220----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005221
5222- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5223 removed completely in the next release.
5224
5225- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5226 OSX.
5227
5228- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5229 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5230
5231- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5232
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005233
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005234What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005235===========================
5236
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005237*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5238
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005239Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005240--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005241
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005242- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005243 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005244 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005245 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5246 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005247 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5248 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005249 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5250 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005251
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005252- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5253 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5254
5255- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5256 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5257
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005258Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005259-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005260
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005261- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5262 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5263 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5264 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5265 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5266 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5267 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5268 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5269
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005270- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5271 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5272 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5273 example).
5274
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005275- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005276 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005277 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005278 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005279
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005280- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5281 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5282 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005283 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005284
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005285- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5286 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5287 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5288 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5289 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5290 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5291
5292 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5293
5294 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5295
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005296Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005297-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005298
5299- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5300
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005301- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5302
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005303- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5304 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005305
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005306- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5307 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5308 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5309 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5310 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5311 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005312 attributes.
5313
5314- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5315 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5316 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005317
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005318- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5319 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5320 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005321
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005322- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5323 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5324 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005325 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5326 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5327
5328- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5329 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005330
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005331Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005332-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005333
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005334- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5335 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5336
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005337- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5338 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5339 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5340 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5341
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005342- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5343 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5344 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5345 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5346
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005347 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5348 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5349 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5350 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5351 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5352 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5353 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5354 without losing information).
5355
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005356- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005357 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5358 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5359 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5360 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5361 module).
5362
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005363 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005364 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5365 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5366 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5367 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005368
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005369- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005370 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5371 encoding.
5372
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005373- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5374 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5375
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005376- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005377 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5378
5379- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5380 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5381 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5382 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5383
5384- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5385
5386- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5387 ON, and OFF.
5388
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005389- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5390 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5391
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005392Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005393-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005394
5395- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5396 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5397 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005398
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005399- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5400 been added: -X and -E.
5401
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005402Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005403-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005404
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005405- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5406 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5407
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005408C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005409-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005410
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005411- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5412 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5413 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5414 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5415 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5416
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005417- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5418 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5419 as long) arguments.
5420
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005421- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5422 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5423 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5424 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5425 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5426 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5427
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005428- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5429 input.
5430
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005431New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005432-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005433
5434Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005435-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005436
5437Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005438-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005439
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005440- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5441 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5442 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5443
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005444- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5445 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5446 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005447 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005448
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005449 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5450 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5451 import signal
5452 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005453
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005454 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005455 while 1:
5456 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005457 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005458 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5459 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5460 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5461 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005462
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005463
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005464What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5465===========================
5466
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005467*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5468
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005469Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005470--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005471
5472- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5473 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5474 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5475
5476- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5477 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5478 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5479 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5480 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5481 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5482 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005483
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005484- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005485 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005486 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5487 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5488 associate a docstring with a property.
5489
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005490- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5491 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5492 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5493 other built-in object types.
5494
5495- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5496 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5497 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5498 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5499 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5500
5501- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5502 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5503
5504- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5505 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005506 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005507 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5508 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5509 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5510 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5511 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5512
5513- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5514 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5515 class.
5516
5517- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5518 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5519 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5520 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5521
5522- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5523 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5524 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5525 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5526
5527- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5528 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5529
5530- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5531 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5532 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5533 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5534 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005535 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005536 with the same value as s.
5537
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005538- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5539
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005540Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005541----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005542
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005543- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5544
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005545- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5546 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5547 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5548 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5549 objects.
5550
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005551- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5552 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005553 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5554 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5555
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005556- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5557 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5558 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5559
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005560Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005561-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005562
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005563- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5564 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5565 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5566 by the instances.
5567
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005568- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5569 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5570 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5571
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005572- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5573 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5574 before the entire comparison is complete.
5575
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005576- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5577 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5578 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5579
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005580- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5581 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5582 getwriter().
5583
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005584- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5585 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5586
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005587- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005588 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5589 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5590
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005591- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5592 iterable object.
5593
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005594- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5595 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005596
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005597- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5598 authentication.
5599
5600- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5601 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005602
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005603- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005604 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5605 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5606 a sample driver.)
5607
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005608Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005609-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005610
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005611- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5612 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5613 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5614 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5615 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5616 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5617 kernel has large file support.
5618
5619- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5620 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5621 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5622 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5623 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5624
5625- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5626 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5627 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5628
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005629C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005630-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005631
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005632- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5633 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5634
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005635New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005636-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005637
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005638- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5639 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5640
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005641Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005642-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005643
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005644- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5645 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5646 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5647 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5648 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5649
5650- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5651 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5652 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5653 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5654
5655- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5656 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5657
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005658Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005659-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005660
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005661- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005662 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5663 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005664
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005665
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005666What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5667===========================
5668
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005669*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5670
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005671Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005672----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005673
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005674- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5675 big to represent as a C double.
5676
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005677- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5678 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5679 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5680 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5681 restriction).
5682
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005683- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5684 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5685 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5686 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5687 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5688
5689 >>> dir([])
5690 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5691 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5692 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5693 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5694 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5695 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5696 'reverse', 'sort']
5697
5698 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5699
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005700- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005701 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5702 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5703 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5704 OverflowError exception.
5705
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005706- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005707 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005708 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5709 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5710 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5711 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5712 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005713 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005714 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5715 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5716
5717 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5718 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5719 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5720 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005721
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005722- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005723 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5724 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5725 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5726 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5727 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5728 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5729 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5730 once it is created.
5731
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005732- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5733 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5734 (key, value) pairs.
5735
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005736- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005737 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5738 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5739
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005740- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5741 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5742 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5743 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5744 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005745
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005746- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005747 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5748 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5749
5750 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5751
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005752- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005753 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5754
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005755Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005756-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005757
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005758- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005759 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5760 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005761
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005762- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5763 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5764 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5765 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5766 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5767 in this area anymore).
5768
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005769- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5770 threading.Timer.
5771
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005772- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5773 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5774
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005775- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005776 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5777
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005778- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005779 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5780 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5781 converted to Python longs.
5782
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005783- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005784 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5785
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005786- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5787 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5788 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5789
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005790Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005791-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005792
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005793- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5794 division operators as per PEP 238.
5795
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005796Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005797-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005798
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005799- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5800 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5801 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5802 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5803
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005804C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005805-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005806
5807- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005808
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005809- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5810 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005811 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005812
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005813 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5814 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005815 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005816 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005817
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005818- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005819 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5820 module:
5821
5822 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005823
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005824 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5825 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005826
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005827 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5828 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005829
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005830 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5831
5832 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5833
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005834- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005835 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5836 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5837 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005838
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005839New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005840-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005841
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005842- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5843 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5844 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5845 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5846 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005847
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005848Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005849-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005850
5851Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005852-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005853
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005854- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5855 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5856 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5857 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005858 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5859 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5860 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5861 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5862 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005863
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005864- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005865 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5866
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005867
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005868What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5869===========================
5870
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005871*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5872
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005873Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005874-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005875
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005876- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5877 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5878
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005879- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5880 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5881 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005882
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005883- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5884 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5885 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5886 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005887
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005888- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5889
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005890- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005891
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005892Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005893-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005894
5895- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005896 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005897 the module docstring for details.
5898
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005899Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005900-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005901
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005902- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005903 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5904 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5905 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005906
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005907- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5908 Nick Mathewson.
5909
5910Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005911----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005912
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005913- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5914 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5915 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5916 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5917 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5918 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5919 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5920 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5921
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005922- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5923 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5924 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5925 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5926
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005927- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5928 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5929 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5930 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5931 come a long way).
5932
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005933- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5934 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5935 write filters for these warnings).
5936
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005937- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5938 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5939 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5940 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5941 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5942
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005943- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5944 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5945 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5946 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5947 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5948 older distribution.
5949
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005950Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005951-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005952
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005953- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5954 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005955 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005956
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005957- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5958 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5959 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5960
5961- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5962
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005963- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5964
5965- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5966
5967- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5968
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005969- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005970
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005971- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5972
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005973New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005974-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005975
5976C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005977-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005978
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005979- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5980 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5981 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5982 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5983 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5984 against buffer overruns.
5985
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005986- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005987 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5988 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005989 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5990 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5991 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5992
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005993- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5994 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5995 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5996 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5997 deprecated.
5998
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005999Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006000-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00006001
6002- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
6003 relevant is found.
6004
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00006005
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00006006What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006007===========================
6008
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006009*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
6010
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006011Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006012----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006013
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00006014- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
6015 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
6016 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
6017 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
6018 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
6019 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
6020 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
6021 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006022 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00006023 repaired.
6024
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00006025- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00006026 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00006027 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
6028 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
6029 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
6030 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
6031 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
6032 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
6033 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
6034 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
6035
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00006036- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
6037 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
6038 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
6039 leading BMO character).
6040
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00006041- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
6042 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
6043 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
6044
6045 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
6046 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
6047 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006048
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00006049 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
6050 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
6051 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
6052 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
6053 for various simple to use conversions.
6054
6055 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
6056 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
6057
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006058 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6059 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
6060 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
6061 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
6062 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6063 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
6064 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6065 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
6066 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6067 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
6068 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6069 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
6070 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6071 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
6072 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00006073
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006074- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
6075 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
6076 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006077 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006078 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006079
6080 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006081 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
6082 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
6083 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
6084 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
6085 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006086 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
6087 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006088
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006089 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
6090 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
6091 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006092 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006093
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00006094- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
6095 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
6096 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
6097 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
6098 floating arithmetic,
6099
6100 x = 9007199254740992.0
6101 print long(x)
6102
6103 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
6104 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
6105 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
6106 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
6107 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
6108 functions are of good quality).
6109
6110 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
6111 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
6112 algorithms to break.
6113
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00006114- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
6115 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
6116 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
6117 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
6118 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
6119 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
6120 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
6121 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
6122 order.
6123
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006124- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
6125 operation along the most common code paths.
6126
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006127- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
6128 the same as dict.has_key(x).
6129
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00006130- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
6131 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
6132 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
6133 {}.update(UserDict())
6134
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006135- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
6136 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
6137 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
6138 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
6139 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
6140 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
6141 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
6142 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
6143
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006144- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00006145 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006146
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006147 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00006148 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
6149 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00006150 join() method of strings
6151 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006152 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
6153 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006154 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00006155 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006156
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00006157- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
6158 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
6159
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006160- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
6161 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
6162
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00006163- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
6164 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
6165 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
6166 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
6167
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006168- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
6169 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006170 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006171 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
6172 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00006173
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00006174- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
6175
6176
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006177Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006178-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006179
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006180- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006181 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006182 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
6183 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
6184
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00006185- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
6186 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
6187
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00006188- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
6189 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
6190 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
6191 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
6192
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00006193- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
6194 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
6195 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
6196
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00006197- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
6198
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00006199- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
6200
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00006201- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
6202 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
6203 that are still imported into string.py).
6204
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006205- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
6206
6207- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6208 Now it does.
6209
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006210- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6211
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006212- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6213 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6214 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6215 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6216 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006217 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6218 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006219
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006220- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6221 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6222 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6223 'help(object)'.
6224
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006225Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006226-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006227
6228- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006229 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006230 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6231 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6232
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006233- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006234 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6235 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006236
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006237C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006238-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006239
6240- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6241 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006242
6243----
6244
6245**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**