blob: 1e828d6a44ca2ac31fdb6e53dda42a8f80f9e59b [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
Neal Norwitzfc76d632006-01-10 06:03:13 +000015- Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
16 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
17 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
18
Neal Norwitz671b9e32006-01-09 07:07:12 +000019- Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
20 configure would break checking curses.h.
21
Georg Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000022- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
23 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
24
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000025- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
26
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000027- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
28
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000029- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
30
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000031- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
32 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
33
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000034- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
35 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number
36 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
37
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000038- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
39 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000040 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000041
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000042- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
43 now encodes backslash correctly.
44
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000045- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
46
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000047- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
48 and long longs.
49
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000050- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
51 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
52 message in this case.
53
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000054- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
55 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
56 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
57 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
58 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
59
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000060- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000061
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000062- Speed up some Unicode operations.
63
64- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
65
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000066- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000067 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
68
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000069- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
70
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000071- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
72 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
73
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000074- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
75
76- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
77
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000078- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
79 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
80 was empty.
81
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000082- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
83 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
84
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000085- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000086 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000087
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000088- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
89 codes.
90
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000091- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
92 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
93 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
94
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000095- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
96 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
97
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000098- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000099 (fixes bug #1119418).
100
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +0000101- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
102
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +0000103- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
104 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
105
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +0000106- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
107 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
108 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
109
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000110- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
111
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000112- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
113 reference counts in some error exit cases.
114
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000115- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
116 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
117 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
118 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
119 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
120 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
121 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
122 realloc.
123
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000124- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
125 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
126
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000127- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
128 like their int counterparts.
129
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000130- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
131 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
132 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
133 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
134 for a longer write-up of the problem).
135
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000136- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
137 serializing floats.
138
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000139- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
140 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
141 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
142
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000143- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
144 278.
145
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000146- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
147 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
148 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
149 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000150 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000151 PyNumber_*().
152 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
153
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000154- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
155 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
156 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
157 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
158
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000159- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
160 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
161 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
162 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
163 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
164
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000165- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
166 disabled caused a crash.
167
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000168- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
169 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
170
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000171- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000172 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
173
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000174- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
175
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000176- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000177 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
178 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
179 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000180
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000181- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
182
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000183- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
184 returning None.
185
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000186- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000187 ('\') with a specific error message.
188
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000189- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
190
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000191- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
192 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
193
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000194- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000195 an ferror() call.
196
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000197- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
198 list.sort().
199
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000200- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
201 (2+3) --> (5).
202
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000203- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
204
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000205- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
206 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000207
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000208- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
209 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
210 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
211
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000212- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
213 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
214 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
215
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000216Extension Modules
217-----------------
218
Neal Norwitz0e6bc8c2006-02-05 05:45:43 +0000219- Patch #1407135, bug #1424041: harmonize mmap behavior of anonymous memory.
220 mmap.mmap(-1, size) now returns anonymous memory in both Unix and Windows.
221 mmap.mmap(0, size) should not be used on Windows for anonymous memory.
222
Martin v. Löwis57a34e82006-02-04 19:12:37 +0000223- Patch #1422385: The nis module now supports access to domains other
224 than the system default domain.
225
Martin v. Löwis14694662006-02-03 12:54:16 +0000226- Use Win32 API to implement os.stat/fstat. As a result, subsecond timestamps
227 are reported, the limit on path name lengths is removed, and stat reports
228 WindowsError now (instead of OSError).
229
Gregory P. Smithcfc4a8d2006-01-29 19:46:23 +0000230- Add bsddb.db.DBEnv.set_tx_timestamp allowing time based database recovery.
231
Neal Norwitz62a21122006-01-25 05:21:55 +0000232- Bug #1413192, fix seg fault in bsddb if a transaction was deleted
233 before the env.
234
Martin v. Löwis11017b12006-01-14 18:12:57 +0000235- Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
236
Neal Norwitz3b4fff82006-01-11 08:54:45 +0000237- Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
238
Neal Norwitz88bbd732006-01-10 07:05:44 +0000239- Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
240 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
241 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
242
Neal Norwitz5e3d8622006-01-09 06:24:35 +0000243- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
244 without prior setting of the userptr.
245
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000246- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
247
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000248- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
249
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000250- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
251 problem on AIX.
252
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000253- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
254
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000255- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
256
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000257- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
258
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000259- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
260 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
261
Gregory P. Smithe101df92006-01-24 20:09:45 +0000262- Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using
263 BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1.
264
265- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4
266
267- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000268
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000269- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
270 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
271
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000272- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
273
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000274- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
275 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
276
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000277- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
278 returns in cStringIO.c.
279
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000280- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
281 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
282
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000283- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
284
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000285- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
286
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000287- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
288 the file system encoding.
289
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000290- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
291 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000292
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000293- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
294
295- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000296 line without newlines.
297
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000298- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
299 on Windows.
300
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000301- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000302 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
303
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000304- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
305 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
306 for large or negative values.
307
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000308- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000309 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000310
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000311- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
312
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000313- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
314 if available on the platform.
315
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000316- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
317 available on the platform.
318
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000319- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
320 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
321
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000322- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
323
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000324- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
325 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
326 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
327
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000328- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
329
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000330- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
331 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
332
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000333- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000334 file size.
335
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000336- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
337
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000338- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
339 {remove_history,replace_history}
340
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000341- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
342 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000343
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000344- stat_float_times is now True.
345
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000346- array.array objects are now picklable.
347
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000348- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
349 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
350
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000351- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
352 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
353 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
354
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000355- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
356 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000357
358Library
359-------
360
Martin v. Löwisc81e3a62006-01-30 15:04:31 +0000361- Patch #1349118: urllib now supports user:pass@ style proxy
Martin v. Löwis3e865952006-01-24 15:51:21 +0000362 specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols
363 are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections.
364
Georg Brandl531ceba2006-01-21 07:20:56 +0000365- Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications.
366
367- Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.
Georg Brandl89f35ac2006-01-20 17:24:23 +0000368
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000369- Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
370
Neal Norwitzf60cd472006-01-14 07:05:13 +0000371- Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
Georg Brandl45ab2332006-01-13 17:05:56 +0000372 any more.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000373
Georg Brandl4edd9892006-01-13 16:59:46 +0000374- Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
375 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000376
Martin v. Löwis412ed3b2006-01-08 10:45:39 +0000377- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
378
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000379- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
380
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000381- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
382 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
383 LoadError subclasses IOError.
384
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000385- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000386 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
387 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
388 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
389 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
390
391 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
392 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
393 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
394 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
395 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000396
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000397- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
398 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
399 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
400
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000401- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
402
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000403- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
404
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000405- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
406 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
407 illegal argument)
408
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000409- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
410 is an error in the format string.
411
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000412- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
413
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000414- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000415 "parent" argument.
416
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000417- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
418 for padding.
419
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000420- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
421 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
422
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000423- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
424 to get the correct encoding.
425
426- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
427 languages.
428
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000429- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
430
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000431- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
432
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000433- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
434
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000435- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
436 functionality.
437
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000438- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
439
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000440- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
441 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
442
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000443- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
444 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
445 match the Content-Length header.
446
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000447- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
448
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000449- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
450 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000451 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000452
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000453- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
454
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000455- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
456
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000457- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
458 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
459
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000460- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
461 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
462 Tkdnd.
463
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000464- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
465 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
466
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000467- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
468 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
469
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000470- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000471 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
472
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000473- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
474 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
475
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000476- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
477 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
478
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000479- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000480 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000481
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000482- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
483
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000484- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
485 error messages.
486
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000487- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
488
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000489- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
490 Bug #1224621.
491
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000492- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
493 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
494 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
495 terminates by raising StopIteration.
496
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000497- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
498
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000499- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
500 component of the path.
501
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000502- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
503 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
504 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
505 class at all.
506
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000507- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
508 files to PyPI.
509
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000510- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
511 them to PyPI.
512
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000513- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
514 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
515 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
516 work as expected.
517
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000518- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
519 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
520
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000521- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000522 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
523
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000524- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
525
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000526- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
527 to build.
528
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000529- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
530 symbolic links on Windows.
531
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000532- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000533 profile.py if available.
534
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000535- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
536
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000537- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
538 in LWPCookieJar.
539
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000540- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
541
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000542- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
543
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000544- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
545
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000546- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
547
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000548- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
549
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000550- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
551
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000552- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
553
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000554- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
555
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000556- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
557 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
558 be exploited in various ways.
559
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000560- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000561 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
562
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000563- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
564 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
565
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000566- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000567 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
568
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000569- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
570
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000571- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
572
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000573- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
574
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000575- Enhancements to the csv module:
576
577 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000578 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000579 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000580 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
581 reporting.
582 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
583 dictates.
584 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000585 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000586 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000587 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
588 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000589 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
590 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000591 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000592 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
593 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
594 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
595 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
596 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
597 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
598 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
599 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
600 without first creating a dialect class.
601 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
602 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
603 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000604 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000605 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
606 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000607 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
608 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
609 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
610 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000611 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
612 This has been fixed.
613
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000614- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
615 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
616 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
617 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
618
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000619- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
620
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000621- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
622 (Bug #951915).
623
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000624- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
625 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
626 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000627 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000628
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000629- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
630
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000631- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
632 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
633
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000634- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
635
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000636- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
637
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000638- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
639
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000640- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
641
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000642- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
643
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000644- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
645 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
646 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
647
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000648- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000649 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000650
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000651- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
652 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
653 tokenizer with very long source lines.
654
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000655- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
656 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
657 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000658
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000659- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
660 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000661
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000662- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
663 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
664
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000665- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
666 correctly.
667
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000668- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
669 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
670 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
671 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
672 between two lines.
673
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000674- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
675 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
676 handlers.
677
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000678- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000679 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
680 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000681
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000682- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
683 considering it exactly like a '*'.
684
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000685- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
686 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000687
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000688- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
689
Gustavo Niemeyer548148812006-01-31 18:34:13 +0000690- Patch #1413711: Certain patterns of differences were making difflib
691 touch the recursion limit.
692
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000693Build
694-----
695
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000696- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
697
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000698- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
699 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
700
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000701- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
702
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000703- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
704 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
705
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000706- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
707 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
708
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000709- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
710 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
711 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000712 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000713
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000714- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
715 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
716 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
717
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000718- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
719
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000720- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
721 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
722
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000723- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
724 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
725 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
726 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
727 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
728 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
729 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
730 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
731
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000732- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
733 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
734 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
735 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
736
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000737C API
738-----
739
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000740- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
741
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000742- Removed PyRange_New().
743
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000744- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
745 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
746 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
747 mappings.
748
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000749
750Tests
751-----
752
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000753- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000754
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000755- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
756 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
757
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000758
759Documentation
760-------------
761
Georg Brandl8cb30772006-01-20 09:34:29 +0000762- Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.
763
Georg Brandla3a93ae2006-01-20 09:14:36 +0000764- Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
765 values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
766
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000767- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
768
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000769- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
770
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000771- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
772
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000773- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
774
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000775- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
776
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000777- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
778
779- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
780
781- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
782
783- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
784
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000785- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
786 Closes bug #1166582.
787
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000788- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
789 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
790 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
791
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000792Mac
793---
794
795
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000796New platforms
797-------------
798
799- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
800
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000801
802Tools/Demos
803-----------
804
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000805- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
806 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
807 source files that need an encoding declaration.
808 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
809
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000810- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
811
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000812- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000813
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000814- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
815 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000816
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000817What's New in Python 2.4 final?
818===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000819
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000820*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000821
822Core and builtins
823-----------------
824
825- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
826 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
827 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
828
829
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000830What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
831==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000832
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000833*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000834
835Core and builtins
836-----------------
837
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000838- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
839 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
840 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
841
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000842
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000843Library
844-------
845
846- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
847 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
848 raised is re-raised.
849
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000850- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
851 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
852
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000853- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
854 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
855 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
856 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
857 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
858 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
859 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
860 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
861 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
862 by the slice are recomputed now.
863
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000864- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000865
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000866Build
867-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000868
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000869- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
870 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
871 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000872
873C API
874-----
875
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000876- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
877
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000878
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000879What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
880================================
881
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000882*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000883
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000884License
885-------
886
887The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
888is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
889changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
890Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
891intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
892durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
893the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
894License::
895
896 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
897
898says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
899to Python 2.1.1.
900
901The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
902License Version 2.
903
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000904Core and builtins
905-----------------
906
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000907- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
908 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
909 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
910 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
911 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
912 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
913 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000914 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000915 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
916 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
917
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000918- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000919
920Extension Modules
921-----------------
922
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000923- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
924 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
925 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
926 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000927
928Library
929-------
930
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000931- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
932 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
933 returned.
934
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000935- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
936
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000937- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
938 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
939
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000940- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
941
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000942- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
943 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000944
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000945- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
946
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000947- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
948
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000949- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000950 the source code is updated and reloaded.
951
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000952Build
953-----
954
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000955- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000956
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000957What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
958================================
959
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000960*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000961
962Core and builtins
963-----------------
964
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000965- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000966 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
967
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000968- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
969 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
970 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
971 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
972
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000973- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
974 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
975
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000976- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
977 constant.
978
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000979- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
980 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
981 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
982 large), and to anomalies such as
983 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
984 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
985 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
986 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000987
988Extension modules
989-----------------
990
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000991- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
992 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000993 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
994 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
995 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000996
997Library
998-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000999
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001000- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001001 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001002 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
1003 --swig-cpp.
1004
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +00001005- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
1006 it is set.
1007
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +00001008- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +00001009
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +00001010- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
1011 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
1012 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
1013 Closes bug #1039270.
1014
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001015- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +00001016
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +00001017 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001018 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
1019 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
1020 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
1021 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
1022 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
1023 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
1024 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
1025 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
1026 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
1027 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
1028 + Updates to documentation.
1029
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +00001030- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
1031 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
1032 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
1033 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
1034
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001035- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001036
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +00001037- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
1038 applications should use the getmember function.
1039
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +00001040- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
1041
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +00001042- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
1043 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
1044 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
1045 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
1046 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
1047 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
1048 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
1049 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
1050 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
1051
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001052- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
1053 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +00001054 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001055
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001056- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
1057 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
1058 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
1059 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
1060 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
1061 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
1062 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
1063 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001064
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001065- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1066 the new public features (of which there are many).
1067
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001068- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001069 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1070 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1071 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1072 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001073 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001074
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001075- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1076
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001077- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1078 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1079 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1080 options.
1081
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001082- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1083 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1084 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1085 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1086 conditions under which non-string values work.
1087
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001088Build
1089-----
1090
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001091- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1092 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1093 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1094
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001095- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1096 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1097 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1098 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1099 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001100
1101C API
1102-----
1103
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001104- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1105 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1106
1107- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1108
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001109- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1110 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1111 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1112 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1113 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1114 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1115 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1116 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1117 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1118
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001119- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1120
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001121- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1122 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1123 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001124
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001125Tests
1126-----
1127
1128- test__locale ported to unittest
1129
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001130Mac
1131---
1132
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001133- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1134 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1135 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001136
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001137Tools/Demos
1138-----------
1139
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001140- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1141 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1142 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1143 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1144 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001145
1146
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001147What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1148=================================
1149
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001150*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001151
1152Core and builtins
1153-----------------
1154
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001155- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001156 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1157
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001158- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1159 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1160 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1161 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1162 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1163 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1164 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1165 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001166 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1167 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1168 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1169 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1170 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001171
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001172- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1173 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1174 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1175 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1176 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1177
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001178- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1179
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001180- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1181 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1182
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001183- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1184 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1185 modified the list.
1186
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001187- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1188 functions is now writable.
1189
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001190- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1191 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1192 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1193 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1194
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001195- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1196 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1197 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1198 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1199 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001200
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001201- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1202 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1203
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001204Extension modules
1205-----------------
1206
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001207- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1208
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001209- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1210 data.
1211
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001212- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1213 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1214 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1215 supposed to have been truncated away.
1216
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001217- Added socket.socketpair().
1218
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001219- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1220 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1221
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001222- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001223 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1224
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001225Library
1226-------
1227
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001228- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001229 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001230
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001231- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1232 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1233
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001234- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1235 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1236
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001237- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1238
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001239- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1240 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001241
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001242- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1243 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1244
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001245- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1246
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001247- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1248
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001249- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1250
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001251- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1252 Percivall.
1253
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001254- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1255 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1256
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001257- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1258 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1259 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001260 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001261
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001262- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1263 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1264 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1265 and exponent.
1266
1267- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1268
1269- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001270 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001271 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1272
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001273- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1274 to the readline module.
1275
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001276- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001277 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1278 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001279
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001280- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1281 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1282 contains symlinks.
1283
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001284- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1285 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1286
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001287- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1288 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1289 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1290
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001291- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1292 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1293 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1294 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1295 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1296 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1297 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1298 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1299 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1300 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1301 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1302 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1303 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1304
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001305- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1306
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001307Tools/Demos
1308-----------
1309
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001310- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1311 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1312
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001313- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1314
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001315Build
1316-----
1317
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001318- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1319 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1320 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1321 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1322 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1323 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1324 plans to do so.
1325
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001326- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1327 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1328
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001329- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1330 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1331
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001332- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1333 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1334
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001335- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1336 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1337
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001338- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1339 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1340
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001341C API
1342-----
1343
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001344..
1345
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001346Documentation
1347-------------
1348
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001349- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1350 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1351
1352- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1353 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1354 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001355
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001356New platforms
1357-------------
1358
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001359- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1360
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001361Tests
1362-----
1363
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001364..
1365
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001366Windows
1367-------
1368
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001369- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1370 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1371 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1372 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1373 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1374 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1375 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1376 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1377 the problem.
1378
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001379Mac
1380---
1381
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001382..
1383
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001384
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001385What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1386=================================
1387
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001388*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001389
1390Core and builtins
1391-----------------
1392
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001393- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1394 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1395 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1396 sensitive code.
1397
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001398- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001399 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001400
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001401 @staticmethod
1402 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001403
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001404 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001405
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001406- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1407 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1408 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1409 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1410 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1411 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1412 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1413 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1414 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1415 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1416 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1417
1418 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1419 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1420 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1421 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1422 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1423 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1424 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1425
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001426- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1427 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1428
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001429- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001430 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001431
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001432- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001433 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001434 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1435
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001436- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001437 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1438 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1439
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001440- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1441 types that support garbage collection.
1442
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001443- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1444
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001445- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1446 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1447 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1448 Jython.
1449
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001450- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1451
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001452- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1453 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1454
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001455- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1456 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1457 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001458
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001459- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1460 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1461 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1462
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001463Extension modules
1464-----------------
1465
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001466- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1467
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001468Library
1469-------
1470
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001471- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1472 TIS-620
1473
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001474- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1475 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1476 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1477 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1478 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1479 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1480 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1481 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1482 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1483 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1484
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001485- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1486
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001487- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1488 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1489 same as when the argument is omitted).
1490 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1491
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001492- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1493
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001494- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1495 schemes are offered.
1496
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001497- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1498
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001499- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1500 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1501 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1502
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001503- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1504
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001505- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1506 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1507
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001508- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1509 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1510 when dummy_threading is being used.
1511
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001512- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1513 from a tarfile.
1514
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001515- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001516 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001517
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001518- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1519 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1520 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1521 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1522
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001523- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1524 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1525
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001526- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1527 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1528 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1529 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1530 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1531 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1532 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1533 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1534 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1535 by some other method in progress).
1536
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001537- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1538 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1539 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001540
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001541- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1542
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001543- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1544 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1545 AM Kuchling.
1546
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001547- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1548 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1549 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1550
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001551- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1552 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1553 instead of unsigned.
1554
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001555- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001556 no longer part of the public API.
1557
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001558- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1559 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1560 string methods of the same name).
1561
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001562- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001563 SF patch 945642.
1564
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001565- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1566
1567 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1568
1569 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1570 DocTestSuites.
1571
1572- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1573 that provide thread-local data.
1574
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001575- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1576 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1577
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001578- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1579
1580- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1581 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1582 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1583
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001584- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1585
1586 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1587 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1588 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001589
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001590 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1591 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1592 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1593 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1594
1595 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1596 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1597
1598 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1599 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1600 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1601 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1602
1603 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1604 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1605 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1606 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1607 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1608
1609 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1610 wrapping help output.
1611
1612 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1613 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1614 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001615
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001616C API
1617-----
1618
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001619- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1620 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1621 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1622 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1623 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1624 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1625 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1626 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1627 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1628 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1629 its visible semantics have not changed.
1630
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001631- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1632 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1633
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001634Documentation
1635-------------
1636
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001637- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001638
1639 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001640 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001641
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001642 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001643
1644 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1645
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001646- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001647
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001648Tests
1649-----
1650
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001651- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001652 platforms that use the Makefile.
1653
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001654- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1655 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1656 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1657
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001658
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001659What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1660=================================
1661
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001662*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001663
1664Core and builtins
1665-----------------
1666
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001667- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1668 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1669 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1670 objects now (one object instead of three).
1671
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001672- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1673 Windows DLLs.
1674
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001675- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1676 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001677
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001678- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1679 a new .pyc magic.
1680
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001681- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1682 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1683 be there.
1684
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001685- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1686 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1687 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1688
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001689- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1690 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1691 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1692
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001693- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1694
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001695- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1696 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1697 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001698
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001699- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1700 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1701
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001702- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1703
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001704- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001705 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001706
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001707- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1708
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001709- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1710
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001711- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1712 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1713
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001714- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1715 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1716 Fixes bug #858016 .
1717
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001718- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1719 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1720 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1721
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001722- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1723 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1724 improves their performance (about 35%).
1725
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001726- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1727 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1728 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1729
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001730- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1731 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1732 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1733 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1734
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001735- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1736 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001737 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001738 length is not known).
1739
1740- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1741 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001742 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1743 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001744 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1745
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001746- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1747 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1748
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001749- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1750 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1751 keyword arguments.
1752
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001753- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1754 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1755 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1756
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001757- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1758 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1759 cases.
1760
1761- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1762 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1763 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1764 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1765 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1766 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1767 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1768 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1769 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1770 a release build.
1771
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001772- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1773 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1774
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001775- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001776 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001777
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001778- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1779 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1780 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1781 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1782 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1783 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1784 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1785 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1786 destroyed.
1787
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001788- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1789 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1790 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1791 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1792 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1793 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1794 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1795 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1796
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001797- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1798 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1799 character other than a space.
1800
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001801- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1802 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1803 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1804 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1805 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1806 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1807 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1808 attributes with the same name.
1809
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001810- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1811 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1812 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1813 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1814 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1815 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1816 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1817 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1818 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1819 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1820 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1821 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1822 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1823 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001824
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001825- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1826 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1827 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1828 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1829 This has been repaired.
1830
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001831- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1832
1833- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1834
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001835- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1836 over a sequence.
1837
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001838- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001839 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001840
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001841- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1842
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001843- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1844 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1845 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1846 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1847 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1848 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1849 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1850 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1851
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001852- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1853 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1854 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1855
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001856- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1857 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1858 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1859 freelist.
1860
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001861- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1862 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1863
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001864- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1865 number.
1866
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001867- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1868 a TypeError exception.
1869
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001870- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1871 820195.
1872
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001873- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1874 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1875 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1876
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001877- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001878 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1879 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001880
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001881- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1882 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1883 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1884
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001885- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1886 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001887 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001888
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001889- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001890 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1891 the first call.
1892
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001893
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001894Extension modules
1895-----------------
1896
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001897- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1898 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1899
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001900- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1901 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1902 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1903 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1904 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1905 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1906 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001907
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001908- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1909
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001910- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1911
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001912- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1913 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1914
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001915- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1916 fewer false positives.
1917
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001918- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1919 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1920
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001921- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001922 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1923
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001924- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001925 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001926 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001927 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1928 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001929
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001930- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1931 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1932 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1933 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1934
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001935- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1936 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1937 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1938 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1939 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1940 #897625.
1941
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001942- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1943 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1944
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001945- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1946 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1947 and pops on either side of the deque.
1948
1949- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1950 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1951
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001952- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1953 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1954 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1955 other functions that expect a function argument.
1956
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001957- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1958
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001959- os.getsid was added.
1960
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001961- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1962 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1963 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1964
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001965- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1966
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001967- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1968
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001969- readline.clear_history was added.
1970
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001971- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1972
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001973- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1974
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001975- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1976
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001977- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1978
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001979- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1980
1981- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1982
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001983- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1984
1985- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1986
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001987- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1988 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1989 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1990
1991- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1992 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1993 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1994 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1995 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1996 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1997 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1998
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001999- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
2000 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
2001 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
2002 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002003
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002004- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002005 iterators from a single iterable.
2006
2007- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
2008 of raising a TypeError exception.
2009
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00002010- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
2011 as parameter.
2012
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002013Library
2014-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00002015
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00002016- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
2017
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00002018- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
2019 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
2020 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002021
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00002022- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
2023 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
2024 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00002025
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00002026- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00002027
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00002028- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
2029 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00002030
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00002031- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
2032 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
2033
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002034- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
2035
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002036- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002037 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002038
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002039- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00002040 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002041
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00002042- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
2043
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00002044- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
2045 on cygwin and mingw32.
2046
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00002047- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
2048
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00002049- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
2050 module.
2051
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00002052- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
2053 installation scheme for all platforms.
2054
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002055- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00002056 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002057
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002058- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
2059 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
2060 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
2061
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00002062- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
2063 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2064 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2065
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002066- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2067
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002068- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2069
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002070- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2071 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2072
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002073- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2074 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2075 type pattern with the same value exists.
2076
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002077- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2078 when run from the command prompt).
2079
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002080- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2081 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2082
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002083- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2084 default sort).
2085
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002086- Added global runctx function to profile module
2087
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002088- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2089
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002090- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2091
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002092- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2093
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002094- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002095 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2096 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2097 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2098 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2099 accordingly.
2100
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002101- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2102 decoding standards.
2103
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002104- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2105 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2106 called for all requests.
2107
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002108- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2109 they are passed to the compiler.
2110
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002111- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2112 indent, width and depth.
2113
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002114- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2115 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2116
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002117- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2118 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2119
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002120- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2121
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002122- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2123
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002124- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2125
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002126- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2127 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2128
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002129- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002130 for better performance.
2131
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002132- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002133
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002134- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2135 a string).
2136
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002137- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2138
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002139- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2140
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002141- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2142
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002143- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2144
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002145- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2146 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2147 list of fieldnames.
2148
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002149- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2150 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2151
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002152- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2153
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002154- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2155 empty lists.
2156
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002157- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2158 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2159 and shelves.
2160
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002161- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2162 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2163
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002164- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002165 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2166 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002167
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002168- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2169 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002170 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002171
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002172- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002173 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2174 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2175
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002176- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2177 and removed in Py2.4.
2178
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002179- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2180
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002181- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2182
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002183Tools/Demos
2184-----------
2185
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002186- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2187 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2188
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002189- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2190
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002191- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2192 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2193 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2194 destination in situations where both files are given.
2195
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002196- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2197 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2198 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2199 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2200
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002201- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2202
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002203- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2204 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2205 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2206 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2207 now.
2208
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002209- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2210 in effect
2211
2212- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2213 C-c C-h
2214
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002215- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2216 -d option was given.
2217
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002218Build
2219-----
2220
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002221- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2222 build under OS X.
2223
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002224- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2225 --enable-profiling.
2226
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002227- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2228 is configured --with-tsc.
2229
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002230- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2231 on AMD64.
2232
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002233- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2234 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2235
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002236- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2237 removed.
2238
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002239- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2240 supported (see PEP 11).
2241
2242- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2243
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002244- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2245
2246- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2247 (see PEP 11).
2248
2249- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2250 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2251
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002252C API
2253-----
2254
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002255- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2256 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2257 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2258
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002259- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2260 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2261 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2262 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2263
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002264- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2265 generator objects.
2266
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002267- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2268 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002269 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2270 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002271
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002272- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2273 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2274
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002275- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2276 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2277 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2278 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2279 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2280
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002281- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2282 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2283 about 10% faster.
2284
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002285- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2286 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2287
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002288- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2289 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2290 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2291 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2292
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002293Windows
2294-------
2295
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002296- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2297 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2298 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2299 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2300
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002301- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2302 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2303 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2304
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002305
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002306What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2307===============================
2308
2309*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2310
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002311IDLE
2312----
2313
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002314- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2315 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2316 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2317 context-menu actions.
2318
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002319- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2320 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2321 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2322 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2323 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2324 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2325 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2326 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2327 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2328
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002329
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002330What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2331=============================================
2332
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002333*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002334
2335Core and builtins
2336-----------------
2337
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002338- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002339 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002340 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2341
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002342Extension modules
2343-----------------
2344
2345- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2346 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2347 than once. This has been fixed.
2348
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002349- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2350 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2351 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2352 call.
2353
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002354- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2355
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002356Library
2357-------
2358
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002359- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2360 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2361
2362- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2363 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2364 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2365 restored.
2366
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002367IDLE
2368----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002369
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002370- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002371
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002372Build
2373-----
2374
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002375- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2376 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2377
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002378C API
2379-----
2380
2381Windows
2382-------
2383
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002384- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2385 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2386
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002387- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2388
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002389Mac
2390---
2391
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002392- Various fixes to pimp.
2393
2394- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2395
2396- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2397 more problems than it solves.
2398
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002399
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002400What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2401=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002402
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002403*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2404
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002405Core and builtins
2406-----------------
2407
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002408- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2409 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2410
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002411- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2412 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002413 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002414
2415- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2416 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2417 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002418 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002419
2420- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2421 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002422
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002423- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2424 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2425 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2426
2427- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002428 770247.
2429
2430- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002431
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002432Extension modules
2433-----------------
2434
2435- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2436 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2437
2438- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2439
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002440- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2441
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002442- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2443 contained within the _strptime module.
2444
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002445- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2446 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2447
2448- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002449 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2450
2451- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2452 the find_class attribute, if present.
2453
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002454- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002455
2456 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2457 (SF bug 763298).
2458
2459 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002460 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2461 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2462 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002463
2464 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2465
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002466Library
2467-------
2468
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002469- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2470
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002471- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2472 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2473 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2474 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2475 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2476 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2477 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2478 or Tester().
2479
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002480- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2481 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2482 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2483 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2484 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2485 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2486 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2487 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2488 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002489
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002490 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002491
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002492- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2493 weren't before was an oversight.
2494
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002495- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2496 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2497
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002498- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2499 when there are no lines.
2500
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002501- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2502 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2503
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002504- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2505 to child processes.
2506
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002507- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2508
2509- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2510
2511- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2512 xmlrpclib.
2513
2514- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2515 responses.
2516
2517- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2518 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2519
2520- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2521 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2522 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2523
2524- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2525 used as patterns.
2526
2527- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2528 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2529 than Tk 8.3.
2530
2531- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2532
2533- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002534
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002535Tools/Demos
2536-----------
2537
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002538- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2539
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002540- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2541
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002542- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002543
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002544Build
2545-----
2546
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002547- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2548
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002549- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2550
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002551- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2552 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002553
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002554- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2555 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2556 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002557
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002558C API
2559-----
2560
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002561- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2562 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2563
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002564Windows
2565-------
2566
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002567- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2568 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2569 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2570 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2571 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2572 Python exception ::
2573
2574 thread.error: can't start new thread
2575
2576 is raised now.
2577
2578- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2579 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2580 instead of from DLL teardown.
2581
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002582Mac
2583---
2584
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002585- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002586 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002587 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2588 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2589 the executable in the bundle.
2590
2591- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002592
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002593- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2594
2595- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2596 on Panther.
2597
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002598What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2599================================
2600
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002601*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002602
2603Core and builtins
2604-----------------
2605
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002606- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2607 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2608 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2609 with the -i option.
2610
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002611- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2612 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2613
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002614- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2615 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2616
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002617- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2618 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2619 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2620 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2621 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2622 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2623 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2624 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2625 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2626 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2627 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2628 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2629 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002630
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002631- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2632 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2633 embedded in a lambda expression.
2634
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002635- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2636 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2637 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2638 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2639 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2640
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002641- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2642 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2643 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2644
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002645- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2646 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2647
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002648- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2649 It's writable again.
2650
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002651- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2652 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2653 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002654 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002655
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002656- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2657 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2658 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2659
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002660Extension modules
2661-----------------
2662
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002663- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2664 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2665
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002666- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2667 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2668 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2669 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2670
2671- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2672 collection.
2673
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002674- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2675 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2676 unique within a single program run.
2677
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002678- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2679 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2680
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002681- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2682 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2683
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002684- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2685 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002686
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002687- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2688
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002689- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2690 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2691
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002692- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2693 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2694 for many BSD-derived systems.
2695
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002696
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002697Library
2698-------
2699
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002700- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2701 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2702 primary ones:
2703
2704 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2705 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2706 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2707
2708 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2709 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2710 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2711 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2712 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2713 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2714
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002715- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2716 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2717 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2718 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2719 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2720 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2721 argument.
2722
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002723- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2724 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2725 in the archive.
2726
2727- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2728 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2729
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002730- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2731 569574).
2732
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002733- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2734 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2735 no more.
2736
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002737- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2738 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2739 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2740 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2741 code coverage.
2742
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002743- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2744 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2745 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002746 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2747 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002748
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002749- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2750 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2751 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002752 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002753
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002754- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2755
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002756- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2757 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2758 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2759 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2760
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002761- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2762 handling.
2763
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002764- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2765 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2766
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002767- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2768 in socket.py.
2769
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002770- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2771
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002772- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2773 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2774 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2775 opener with proxy support.
2776
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002777- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2778
2779- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2780
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002781Tools/Demos
2782-----------
2783
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002784- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2785
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002786- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2787
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002788- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2789 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002790
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002791- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2792 files.
2793
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002794Build
2795-----
2796
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002797- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002798 different root directory.
2799
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002800C API
2801-----
2802
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002803- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2804 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2805 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2806 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2807 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2808 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2809 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2810 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2811 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2812 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2813
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002814- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2815 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2816 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2817 from Python.
2818
2819
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002820New platforms
2821-------------
2822
2823None this time.
2824
2825Tests
2826-----
2827
2828- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2829 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2830
2831Windows
2832-------
2833
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002834- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2835
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002836- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2837 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2838 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2839 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2840 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2841 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2842 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2843 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2844 that's what it's for.
2845
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002846Mac
2847---
2848
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002849- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2850 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2851 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2852 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002853- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2854 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2855- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002856
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002857SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2858------------------------------------
2859
2860430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2861598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2862622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2863661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2864683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2865697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2866713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2867724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2868727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2869729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2870730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2871731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2872732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2873733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2874735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2875740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2876744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2877745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2878747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2879749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2880751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2881753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2882755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2883757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2884760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2885
2886
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002887What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2888================================
2889
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002890*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002891
2892Core and builtins
2893-----------------
2894
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002895- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2896 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2897
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002898- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2899 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2900 and cannot be strings).
2901
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002902- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2903 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2904 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2905 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2906
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002907- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2908 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2909 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2910 Python itself.
2911
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002912- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2913 the referenced object, if it has one.
2914
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002915- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2916 the thread started at
2917 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2918
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002919- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2920 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2921 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2922 placed on a list index.
2923
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002924- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2925 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2926 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2927 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2928
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002929- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2930 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2931 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2932 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2933 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2934 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2935 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2936
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002937- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2938 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2939 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2940 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2941 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2942
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002943- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2944 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002945
2946- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2947 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2948 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2949 #693195.)
2950
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002951- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2952 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002953
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002954- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002955 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002956 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2957 interpreter executions, would fail.
2958
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002959- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002960 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002961 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002962
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002963Extension modules
2964-----------------
2965
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002966- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2967 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2968 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2969 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2970
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002971- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2972 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2973
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002974- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2975 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2976 and Greg Chapman.)
2977
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002978- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2979 recursively.
2980
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002981- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002982 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2983 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2984 leaks.
2985
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002986- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2987
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002988- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2989 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2990 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2991 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2992 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2993 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2994 #705836.
2995
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002996- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002997 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2998
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002999- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
3000 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
3001 See SF bug #692416.
3002
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00003003- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
3004 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
3005
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00003006- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
3007 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
3008 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003009
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003010- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00003011 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
3012 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
3013
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00003014- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
3015 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
3016 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
3017 timeouts to work properly.
3018
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003019Library
3020-------
3021
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003022- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
3023 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
3024 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
3025 future release.
3026
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00003027- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
3028 for querying platform dependent features.
3029
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00003030- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00003031
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00003032- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
3033 pickle protocol versions.
3034
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00003035- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
3036 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
3037 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
3038
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00003039- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
3040
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00003041- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
3042 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
3043 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
3044 modules.
3045
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00003046- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
3047 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
3048 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
3049
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003050- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
3051 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
3052
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00003053- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
3054 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
3055 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
3056
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003057- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00003058 MS Office extensions.
3059
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00003060- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
3061 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
3062
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00003063- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3064 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3065
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003066- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3067 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3068 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3069 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3070 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3071 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3072
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003073- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3074 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3075 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003076
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003077- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3078 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3079 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3080
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003081- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3082
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003083- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3084 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3085 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3086
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003087Tools/Demos
3088-----------
3089
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003090- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3091 See the module docstring for details.
3092
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003093Build
3094-----
3095
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003096- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3097 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003098
3099C API
3100-----
3101
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003102- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3103
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003104- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3105 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3106 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3107
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003108- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3109 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003110
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003111 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3112 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3113 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003114
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003115- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003116 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3117
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003118- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3119 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3120 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003121
3122New platforms
3123-------------
3124
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003125None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003126
3127Tests
3128-----
3129
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003130- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3131 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003132
3133Windows
3134-------
3135
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003136- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3137 function.
3138
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003139- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3140 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003141
3142Mac
3143---
3144
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003145- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3146 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003147
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003148- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3149 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003150
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003151- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3152 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3153 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003154
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003155- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003156 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3157 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003158
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003159- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3160 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003161
3162
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003163What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3164=================================
3165
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003166*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003167
3168Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003169-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003170
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003171- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3172 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3173 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3174
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003175- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3176 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3177 (SF patch #664376.)
3178
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003179- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3180 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3181 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3182 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3183 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3184 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003185 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003186
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003187- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3188 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3189 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3190 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003191 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003192
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003193- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3194 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3195 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3196 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3197 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3198 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3199 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3200 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3201 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3202 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3203 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3204
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003205- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3206 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3207 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3208 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3209 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3210 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3211
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003212- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3213 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3214
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003215- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3216 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3217 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3218 case.)
3219
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003220- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3221 passed as unicode strings.
3222
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003223- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3224 See SF bug #683467.
3225
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003226- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3227 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3228
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003229- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3230
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003231- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3232
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003233- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3234 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3235 arguments.
3236
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003237- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3238 See SF bug #667147.
3239
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003240- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003241 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003242 See SF bug #676155.
3243
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003244- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003245 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003246 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3247 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3248 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3249 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3250 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3251 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003252
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003253Extension modules
3254-----------------
3255
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003256- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3257 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3258 tp_as_number pointer.
3259
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003260- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3261 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3262 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3263 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3264 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3265
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003266- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3267
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003268- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3269
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003270- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003271 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003272 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3273 patch #678531.)
3274
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003275- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3276 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3277
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003278- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3279 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3280
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003281- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3282
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003283- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3284 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3285 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3286
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003287- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3288
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003289- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3290 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3291
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003292- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003293
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003294- datetime changes:
3295
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003296 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3297
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003298 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3299 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3300 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3301 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3302 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3303 now.
3304
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003305 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003306 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3307 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003308
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003309 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003310 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003311 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3312 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3313 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3314 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003315
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003316 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3317 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3318 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003319 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3320
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003321 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3322 by a later example coded by Guido.
3323
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003324 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003325 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3326 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3327 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003328 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3329 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3330
3331 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3332 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3333 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3334 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3335 tzinfo subclass instance.
3336
3337 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3338 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3339 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3340 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3341 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3342 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3343 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3344 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003345
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003346 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3347 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3348 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3349 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3350 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003351 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3352
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003353 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003354
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003355 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3356 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3357 as a naive datetime object.
3358
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003359 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3360 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3361 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3362
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003363 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3364 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3365 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3366 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3367 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3368 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3369 comparison.
3370
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003371 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3372 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3373 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3374 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003375 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003376
3377 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003378
3379 and ::
3380
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003381 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3382
3383 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3384 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3385 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3386 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3387
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003388 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3389 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3390 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3391 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3392 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3393
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003394 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3395 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003396 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3397 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003398
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003399Library
3400-------
3401
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003402- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3403 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3404
3405- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3406 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3407 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3408 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3409 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3410 See PEP 307 for details.
3411
3412- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3413 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3414
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003415- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3416 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003417 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003418 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3419 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003420 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003421
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003422- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3423 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3424
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003425- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3426 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3427 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3428
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003429- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3430
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003431- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3432 exception.
3433
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003434- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3435 class.
3436
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003437- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3438 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3439 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3440
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003441- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3442 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3443
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003444- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003445 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3446 See SF bug #659228.
3447
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003448- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3449 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3450 See SF patch #651082.
3451
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003452- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003453
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003454- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3455 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3456
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003457- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003458 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003459
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003460- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3461 DOS paths from other platforms.
3462
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003463Tools/Demos
3464-----------
3465
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003466- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3467 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3468 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3469 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3470 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3471 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3472 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3473 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3474 example:
3475
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003476 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3477 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003478
3479 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3480
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003481
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003482Build
3483-----
3484
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003485- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3486 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3487 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003488 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3489
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003490 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3491
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003492- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3493 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3494 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3495 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3496 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3497 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3498 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3499 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3500 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3501
3502- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3503 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3504 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3505 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3506
3507- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3508 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3509
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003510C API
3511-----
3512
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003513- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3514 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003515
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003516- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3517 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3518 tp_as_number pointer.
3519
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003520- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3521 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3522 (SF #681367)
3523
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003524- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3525 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3526 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3527 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003528
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003529Tests
3530-----
3531
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003532- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003533 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3534 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3535 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3536 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3537 pydoc.)
3538
3539- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3540
3541- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003542
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003543Windows
3544-------
3545
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003546- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3547 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3548 time).
3549
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003550- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3551 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3552
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003553- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3554 release without strong cryptography.
3555
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003556- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003557 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003558
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003559- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3560 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3561
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003562Mac
3563---
3564
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003565- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3566 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003567
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003568- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3569 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3570 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003571
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003572- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3573 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003574
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003575- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3576 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3577 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3578 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003579
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003580- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003581 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3582 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3583 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003584
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003585
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003586What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003587=================================
3588
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003589*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003590
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003591Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003592--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003593
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003594- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3595
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003596- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3597 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003598 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003599 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003600 a different meaning than before.
3601
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003602- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003603 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003604 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003605
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003606- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003607 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003608 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003609
3610- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3611 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3612 and deallocation.
3613
3614- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3615 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3616
3617- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3618 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3619 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3620 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3621 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3622
3623- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3624 now detected by the garbage collector.
3625
3626- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3627 [SF bug 519621]
3628
3629- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3630 identifier.
3631
3632- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3633 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3634 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3635 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3636 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3637 [SF bug 563060]
3638
3639- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3640 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3641 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3642 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3643 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3644
3645- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3646 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3647 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3648
3649- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3650
3651- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3652 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3653 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3654 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3655 state of the slots would be lost.)
3656
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003657Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003658-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003659
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003660- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003661 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3662 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3663 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3664 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003665 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3666 Jython 2.1.
3667
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003668- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003669 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003670 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3671 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3672 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3673 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3674 these, see PEP 302.
3675
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003676- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3677 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3678 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3679
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003680- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3681 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3682 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3683
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003684- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3685 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3686 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3687
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003688- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3689 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3690 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3691 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3692 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3693 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3694 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3695 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3696 releases or implementations.
3697
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003698- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003699 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3700 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003701
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003702- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3703 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3704
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003705- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3706 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3707 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3708
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003709- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3710 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3711
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003712- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3713 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003714 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3715 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003716
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003717- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3718 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3719 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3720 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3721 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3722
3723 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3724 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3725 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3726 pattern.
3727
3728 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3729 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3730 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3731 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3732
3733 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3734 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3735 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3736 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3737 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3738 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3739
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003740- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3741 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3742 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3743 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3744 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3745 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3746 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3747 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003748
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003749- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3750 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3751 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3752 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3753 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003754 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3755 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3756 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3757 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3758 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3759 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3760 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003761
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003762- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3763 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3764
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003765- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3766 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3767 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3768 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3769 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3770 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3771 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3772 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3773 to Zack Weinberg!
3774
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003775- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3776 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3777 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3778 type. This has been fixed now.
3779
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003780- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3781 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3782 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3783
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003784- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3785 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3786 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3787 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3788 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3789 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3790 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3791 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003792 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003793
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003794- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3795 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3796 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003797
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003798- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3799 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3800 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3801 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3802 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3803 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3804 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3805 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003806 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003807 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3808 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3809
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003810- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3811 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3812 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3813 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3814 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3815 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3816 this.)
3817
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003818- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3819 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003820 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003821 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003822 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3823 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003824 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3825 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003826
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003827- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3828 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3829 currently running.
3830
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003831- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3832 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3833 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3834 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3835
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003836- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3837 as directory names.
3838
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003839- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3840 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3841
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003842- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3843 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3844
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003845- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003846 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3847 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003848
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003849- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3850 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3851 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3852 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3853 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3854
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003855- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3856 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3857 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3858 removed.
3859
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003860- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3861 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3862 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3863
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003864- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3865 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3866 to __debug__.
3867
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003868- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3869 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3870 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3871
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003872- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3873 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3874 deprecated now.
3875
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003876- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3877 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3878 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003879
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003880- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3881 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3882 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3883 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3884 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003885
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003886- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3887 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3888
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003889- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3890 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3891 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003892 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003893 is backward compatible.
3894
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003895- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3896 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3897 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3898 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3899 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3900
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003901- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3902 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3903 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3904 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3905 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3906 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003907
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003908- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3909 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3910
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003911- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3912 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3913
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003914- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3915 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3916 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3917 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3918 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3919
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003920- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3921 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3922 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3923
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003924- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003925 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3926
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003927- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3928 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3929 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003930
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003931- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3932 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3933
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003934- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3935 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3936 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3937
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003938- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3939
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003940Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003941-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003942
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003943- Added three operators to the operator module:
3944 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3945 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3946 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3947
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003948- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3949
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003950- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3951 archives.
3952
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003953- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3954 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3955 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3956
3957 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3958
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003959- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3960 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3961 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003962 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003963
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003964- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3965 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3966 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3967 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003968 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3969 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3970 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3971 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003972
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003973- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3974 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003975
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003976- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3977
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003978- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3979 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3980
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003981- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3982 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3983 supported.
3984
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003985- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3986
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003987- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3988 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003989
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003990- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3991 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3992
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003993- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3994
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003995- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3996 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3997
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003998- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3999 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
4000 functions but callable type objects.
4001
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004002- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004003 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004004 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004005
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00004006- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
4007 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00004008
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00004009- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
4010 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00004011
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00004012- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
4013 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
4014 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
4015 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
4016
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00004017- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
4018 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00004019
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00004020- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
4021 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
4022 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
4023 and __imul__.
4024
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00004025- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00004026 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
4027 is called.
4028
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00004029- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
4030 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
4031 interpreter was compiled.
4032
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004033- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
4034 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
4035 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004036 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004037 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
4038 1, not 2.
4039
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00004040- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
4041 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
4042 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
4043 limit.
4044
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00004045- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
4046 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
4047 bug #623464.
4048
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00004049- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
4050 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
4051 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
4052 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
4053
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004054Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004055-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004056
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00004057- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
4058
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00004059- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
4060 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
4061 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
4062 with Python 2.3a2.
4063
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004064- os.path exposes getctime.
4065
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004066- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004067 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004068 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004069 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004070 unit tests of floating point results.
4071
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004072- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4073 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4074 has been increased.
4075
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004076- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4077 executed.
4078
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004079- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4080 postinstallation script.
4081
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004082- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4083 test the current module.
4084
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004085- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004086 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4087 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4088 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4089 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4090
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004091- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004092 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004093 Ward's Optik package.
4094
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004095- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4096 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4097 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4098 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4099
4100- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4101 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004102 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004103
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004104- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4105 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4106 shelf are binary pickles.
4107
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004108- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4109 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4110
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004111- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4112 modules are iterators now.
4113
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004114- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4115 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4116 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4117 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4118 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4119 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004120
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004121- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4122 with their entity value.
4123
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004124- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4125
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004126- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4127 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004128
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004129- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4130 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004131 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004132
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004133- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4134 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4135 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4136 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4137 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4138 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4139 main():
4140
4141 import locale
4142 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4143
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004144- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4145 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4146
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004147- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4148 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4149 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4150 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4151 to the new standard.
4152
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004153- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4154 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4155 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4156 an extension to the database.
4157
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004158- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4159 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4160 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4161 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004162 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004163
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004164- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004165 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004166
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004167- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4168 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4169 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4170 bounded integers.
4171
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004172- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4173 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4174 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4175 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4176 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4177 in existence.
4178
4179 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4180 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4181 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4182 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4183 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4184 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4185
4186 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4187 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4188 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4189 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4190
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004191- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4192 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4193 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4194
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004195- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4196
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004197- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4198 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4199 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4200 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4201
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004202- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4203 argument.
4204
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004205- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4206 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4207 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4208 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4209 [SF patch 560794].
4210
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004211- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4212 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4213 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004214 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4215 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4216 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004217
4218- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4219 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004220
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004221- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4222 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4223 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4224 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004225
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004226- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4227 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4228 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4229 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4230 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4231
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004232- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004233
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004234- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4235
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004236- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4237 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4238 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4239 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4240 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4241 identical to None.
4242
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004243- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4244 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4245 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4246 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4247 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4248 results now.
4249
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004250- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4251 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4252
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004253- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4254 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4255 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4256 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4257 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4258 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4259 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4260 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4261
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004262- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4263
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004264- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4265 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4266
4267- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4268 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4269 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4270 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4271 and other systems.
4272
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004273- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4274 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4275 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4276 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 +00004277 work well with these.
4278
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004279- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4280
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004281- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004282 connections.
4283
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004284- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4285 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4286 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4287
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004288- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4289 sets
4290
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004291- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4292 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4293 name.
4294
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004295- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4296 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4297 passed in.
4298
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004299- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004300 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004301 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4302 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004303
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004304- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4305
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004306- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4307
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004308- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4309 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4310 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4311
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004312- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4313 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4314 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4315 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004316 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004317
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004318- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004319 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004320 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004321
4322- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4323 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4324 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4325
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004326- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004327 the value of its expression argument.
4328
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004329- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4330 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4331 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4332
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004333- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4334 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4335 skipstone browser was included.
4336
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004337- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4338 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4339
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004340Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004341-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004342
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004343- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4344 names in addition to accepting file names.
4345
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004346- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4347 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4348 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4349 still used and useful.)
4350
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004351- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4352 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4353 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4354 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004355
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004356- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4357 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4358 the generated binary.
4359
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004360Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004361-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004362
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004363- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4364
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004365- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4366 except in the hands of experts.
4367
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004368- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004369 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4370 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4371 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004372
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004373- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4374 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4375 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4376 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4377 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4378 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4379 builds.
4380
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004381- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4382 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4383 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4384 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4385 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4386 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4387 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4388 new type.
4389
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004390- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004391
4392 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4393 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4394 positive infinities.
4395
4396 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4397 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4398 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4399 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4400 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4401 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4402 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4403
4404 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4405
4406 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4407
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004408- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4409 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4410 size of the executable.
4411
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004412- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4413 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4414 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4415 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004416
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004417- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4418
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004419- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4420 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4421 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004422
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004423- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4424 well as Unix.
4425
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004426- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4427 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4428 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4429 modules in the README file for details.
4430
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004431C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004432-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004433
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004434- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4435 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004436 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004437 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004438 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004439
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004440- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4441 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4442 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4443 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4444 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4445 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004446 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004447 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4448 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4449 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4450 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4451 aligned.)
4452
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004453- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4454 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4455 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4456
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004457- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4458 level.
4459
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004460- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4461 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4462 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4463 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4464 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4465
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004466- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4467 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4468 code.
4469
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004470- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4471 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4472 adjusting for negative indices.
4473
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004474- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4475 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4476 object.
4477
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004478- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4479 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4480 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4481
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004482- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4483 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004484
4485- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4486
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004487- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4488 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4489 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4490 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4491
4492- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4493
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004494- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004495
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004496- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004497 without going through the buffer API.
4498
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004499- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004500
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004501- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4502 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4503 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4504 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4505
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004506- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4507 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4508
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004509- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004510 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4511
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004512New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004513-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004514
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004515- OpenVMS is now supported.
4516
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004517- AtheOS is now supported.
4518
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004519- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4520
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004521- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4522
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004523Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004524-----
4525
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004526- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4527 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4528 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004529
4530Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004531-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004532
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004533- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4534 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4535 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4536 bugs.
4537 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004538 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004539 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4540 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004541 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004542
4543- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004544 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004545
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004546- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4547 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4548
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004549- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4550 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004551 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004552 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4553
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004554- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4555 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4556 use files" uninstall option).
4557
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004558- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4559
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004560- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4561 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4562
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004563- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4564 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4565 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4566
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004567- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4568 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4569 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4570 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4571 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004572 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4573 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4574 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004575
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004576- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004577 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004578 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4579 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4580 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4581 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4582 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4583 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4584 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4585 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4586 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4587 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4588 work around.
4589
4590- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4591 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4592 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4593 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4594 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4595 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4596 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4597 specified with O_CREAT too).
4598
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004599Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004600----
4601
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004602- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004603
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004604- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4605 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4606 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4607
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004608- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4609 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4610 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4611
4612- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4613 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4614 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4615 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4616 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4617 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4618 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4619 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004620
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004621- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4622 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4623 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004624
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004625- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4626 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4627 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4628 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4629 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004630
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004631- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4632 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4633 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004634
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004635- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4636 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004637
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004638- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4639 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4640 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4641 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4642 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004643
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004644- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4645 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4646 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4647
4648- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4649 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4650 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004651
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004652- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4653 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4654 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4655 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004656 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004657
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004658- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4659 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004660
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004661- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4662 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004663
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004664- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004665 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004666 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4667 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004668
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004669
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004670What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004671===============================
4672
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004673*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4674
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004675Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004676--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004677
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004678- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4679 with a custom metaclass.
4680
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004681Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004682-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004683
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004684- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4685 are proxies.
4686
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004687Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004688-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004689
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004690- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4691 very short strings.
4692
4693- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4694 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4695 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4696 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4697 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4698
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004699Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004700-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004701
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004702- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4703 close or delete time).
4704
4705- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4706 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4707
4708- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4709
4710- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004711 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004712
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004713Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004714-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004715
4716Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004717-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004718
4719C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004720-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004721
4722New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004723-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004724
4725Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004726-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004727
4728Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004729-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004730
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004731- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4732
4733- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4734 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4735
4736- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4737 deleted at process exit time.
4738
4739- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4740 in backslash.
4741
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004742Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004743----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004744
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004745- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4746 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4747 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4748
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004749
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004750What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004751===========================
4752
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004753*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4754
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004755Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004756--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004757
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004758- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4759 been extensively updated. See
4760
4761 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4762
4763 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4764
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004765- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4766 deleted!
4767
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004768- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4769 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4770 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4771 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4772 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4773
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004774- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4775
4776 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4777 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4778
4779 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4780 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4781 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4782 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4783 supported anyway.
4784
4785 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4786 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4787
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004788- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4789 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4790 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4791 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4792 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004793
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004794- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4795 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4796 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4797
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004798Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004799-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004800
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004801- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4802 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4803 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4804 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4805 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4806 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004807 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4808 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4809 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4810 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004811
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004812- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4813 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4814 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4815
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004816Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004817-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004818
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004819- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4820
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004821Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004822-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004823
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004824- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4825 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4826 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4827 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4828 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4829 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4830
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004831- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4832
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004833- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4834
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004835- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4836
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004837- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4838 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4839 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4840
4841- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4842
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004843Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004844-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004845
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004846- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4847 off a search on Google.
4848
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004849Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004850-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004851
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004852- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4853 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4854 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4855 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4856 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4857 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4858 other platforms should do likewise.
4859
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004860- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4861 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4862 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4863
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004864C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004865-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004866
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004867- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4868 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4869 producing key-value pairs.
4870
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004871- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004872 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004873 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4874 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4875 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4876 previously went unchallenged.
4877
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004878New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004879-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004880
4881Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004882-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004883
4884Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004885-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004886
4887Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004888----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004889
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004890- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4891 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004892
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004893- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4894 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4895 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4896 home.
4897
4898
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004899What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004900===========================
4901
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004902*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4903
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004904Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004905--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004906
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004907- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4908 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004909
4910 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004911 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004912
4913 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4914 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004915 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004916 This needs to be documented.
4917
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004918- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4919 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4920
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004921- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4922 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4923 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4924
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004925- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4926 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4927
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004928- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4929 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4930 class forbids it).
4931
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004932- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4933 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4934 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4935
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004936- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4937
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004938Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004939-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004940
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004941- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4942 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004943 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004944
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004945- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4946 (like 1 + '').
4947
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004948Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004949-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004950
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004951- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4952 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4953 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4954 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004955 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004956 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4957
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004958- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4959 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4960 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4961 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4962
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004963- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4964 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004965 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4966 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4967 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004968
4969- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4970 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004971
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004972- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4973 bytes on its input.
4974
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004975Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004976-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004977
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004978- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004979 convenience function.
4980
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004981- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4982 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4983 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004984 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4985 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4986 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4987 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4988 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4989 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004990
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004991- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4992 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4993 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4994 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4995
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004996- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4997 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4998 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4999
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005000- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
5001 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
5002 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
5003 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
5004
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005005- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
5006 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005007 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005008 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
5009 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
5010 new -l and -e options.
5011
5012- statcache is now deprecated.
5013
5014- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
5015 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005016 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005017 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
5018 time properly taken into account.
5019
5020- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
5021 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
5022 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
5023 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
5024
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005025Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005026-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005027
5028Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005029-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005030
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005031- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
5032 is built with libdb3 if available.
5033
5034- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
5035
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005036C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005037-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005038
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00005039- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
5040 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
5041 PySequence_Size().
5042
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005043- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
5044
5045- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
5046 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
5047 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
5048
5049- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
5050 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
5051
5052- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
5053 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
5054
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005055New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005056-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005057
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005058- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
5059 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
5060
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00005061- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
5062 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
5063
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005064- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5065
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005066Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005067-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005068
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005069- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5070 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5071
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005072Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005073-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005074
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005075Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005076----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005077
5078- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5079 removed completely in the next release.
5080
5081- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5082 OSX.
5083
5084- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5085 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5086
5087- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5088
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005089
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005090What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005091===========================
5092
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005093*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5094
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005095Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005096--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005097
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005098- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005099 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005100 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005101 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5102 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005103 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5104 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005105 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5106 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005107
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005108- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5109 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5110
5111- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5112 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5113
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005114Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005115-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005116
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005117- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5118 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5119 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5120 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5121 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5122 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5123 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5124 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5125
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005126- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5127 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5128 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5129 example).
5130
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005131- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005132 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005133 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005134 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005135
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005136- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5137 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5138 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005139 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005140
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005141- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5142 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5143 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5144 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5145 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5146 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5147
5148 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5149
5150 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5151
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005152Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005153-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005154
5155- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5156
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005157- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5158
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005159- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5160 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005161
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005162- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5163 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5164 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5165 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5166 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5167 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005168 attributes.
5169
5170- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5171 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5172 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005173
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005174- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5175 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5176 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005177
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005178- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5179 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5180 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005181 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5182 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5183
5184- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5185 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005186
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005187Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005188-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005189
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005190- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5191 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5192
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005193- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5194 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5195 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5196 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5197
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005198- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5199 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5200 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5201 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5202
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005203 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5204 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5205 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5206 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5207 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5208 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5209 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5210 without losing information).
5211
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005212- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005213 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5214 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5215 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5216 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5217 module).
5218
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005219 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005220 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5221 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5222 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5223 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005224
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005225- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005226 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5227 encoding.
5228
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005229- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5230 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5231
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005232- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005233 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5234
5235- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5236 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5237 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5238 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5239
5240- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5241
5242- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5243 ON, and OFF.
5244
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005245- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5246 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5247
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005248Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005249-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005250
5251- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5252 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5253 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005254
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005255- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5256 been added: -X and -E.
5257
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005258Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005259-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005260
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005261- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5262 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5263
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005264C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005265-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005266
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005267- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5268 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5269 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5270 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5271 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5272
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005273- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5274 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5275 as long) arguments.
5276
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005277- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5278 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5279 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5280 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5281 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5282 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5283
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005284- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5285 input.
5286
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005287New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005288-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005289
5290Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005291-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005292
5293Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005294-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005295
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005296- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5297 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5298 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5299
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005300- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5301 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5302 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005303 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005304
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005305 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5306 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5307 import signal
5308 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005309
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005310 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005311 while 1:
5312 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005313 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005314 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5315 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5316 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5317 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005318
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005319
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005320What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5321===========================
5322
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005323*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5324
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005325Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005326--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005327
5328- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5329 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5330 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5331
5332- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5333 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5334 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5335 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5336 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5337 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5338 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005339
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005340- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005341 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005342 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5343 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5344 associate a docstring with a property.
5345
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005346- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5347 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5348 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5349 other built-in object types.
5350
5351- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5352 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5353 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5354 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5355 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5356
5357- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5358 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5359
5360- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5361 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005362 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005363 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5364 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5365 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5366 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5367 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5368
5369- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5370 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5371 class.
5372
5373- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5374 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5375 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5376 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5377
5378- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5379 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5380 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5381 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5382
5383- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5384 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5385
5386- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5387 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5388 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5389 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5390 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005391 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005392 with the same value as s.
5393
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005394- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5395
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005396Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005397----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005398
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005399- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5400
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005401- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5402 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5403 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5404 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5405 objects.
5406
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005407- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5408 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005409 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5410 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5411
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005412- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5413 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5414 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5415
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005416Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005417-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005418
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005419- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5420 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5421 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5422 by the instances.
5423
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005424- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5425 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5426 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5427
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005428- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5429 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5430 before the entire comparison is complete.
5431
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005432- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5433 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5434 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5435
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005436- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5437 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5438 getwriter().
5439
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005440- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5441 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5442
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005443- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005444 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5445 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5446
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005447- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5448 iterable object.
5449
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005450- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5451 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005452
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005453- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5454 authentication.
5455
5456- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5457 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005458
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005459- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005460 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5461 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5462 a sample driver.)
5463
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005464Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005465-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005466
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005467- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5468 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5469 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5470 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5471 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5472 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5473 kernel has large file support.
5474
5475- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5476 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5477 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5478 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5479 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5480
5481- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5482 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5483 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5484
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005485C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005486-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005487
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005488- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5489 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5490
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005491New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005492-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005493
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005494- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5495 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5496
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005497Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005498-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005499
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005500- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5501 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5502 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5503 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5504 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5505
5506- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5507 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5508 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5509 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5510
5511- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5512 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5513
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005514Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005515-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005516
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005517- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005518 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5519 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005520
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005521
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005522What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5523===========================
5524
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005525*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5526
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005527Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005528----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005529
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005530- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5531 big to represent as a C double.
5532
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005533- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5534 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5535 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5536 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5537 restriction).
5538
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005539- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5540 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5541 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5542 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5543 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5544
5545 >>> dir([])
5546 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5547 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5548 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5549 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5550 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5551 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5552 'reverse', 'sort']
5553
5554 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5555
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005556- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005557 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5558 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5559 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5560 OverflowError exception.
5561
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005562- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005563 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005564 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5565 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5566 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5567 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5568 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005569 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005570 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5571 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5572
5573 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5574 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5575 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5576 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005577
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005578- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005579 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5580 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5581 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5582 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5583 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5584 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5585 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5586 once it is created.
5587
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005588- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5589 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5590 (key, value) pairs.
5591
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005592- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005593 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5594 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5595
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005596- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5597 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5598 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5599 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5600 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005601
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005602- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005603 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5604 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5605
5606 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5607
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005608- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005609 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5610
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005611Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005612-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005613
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005614- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005615 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5616 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005617
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005618- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5619 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5620 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5621 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5622 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5623 in this area anymore).
5624
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005625- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5626 threading.Timer.
5627
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005628- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5629 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5630
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005631- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005632 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5633
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005634- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005635 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5636 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5637 converted to Python longs.
5638
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005639- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005640 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5641
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005642- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5643 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5644 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5645
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005646Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005647-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005648
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005649- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5650 division operators as per PEP 238.
5651
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005652Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005653-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005654
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005655- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5656 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5657 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5658 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5659
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005660C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005661-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005662
5663- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005664
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005665- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5666 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005667 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005668
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005669 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5670 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005671 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005672 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005673
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005674- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005675 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5676 module:
5677
5678 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005679
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005680 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5681 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005682
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005683 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5684 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005685
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005686 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5687
5688 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5689
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005690- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005691 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5692 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5693 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005694
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005695New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005696-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005697
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005698- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5699 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5700 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5701 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5702 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005703
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005704Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005705-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005706
5707Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005708-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005709
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005710- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5711 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5712 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5713 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005714 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5715 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5716 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5717 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5718 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005719
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005720- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005721 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5722
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005723
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005724What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5725===========================
5726
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005727*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5728
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005729Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005730-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005731
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005732- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5733 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5734
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005735- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5736 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5737 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005738
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005739- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5740 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5741 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5742 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005743
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005744- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5745
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005746- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005747
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005748Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005749-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005750
5751- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005752 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005753 the module docstring for details.
5754
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005755Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005756-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005757
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005758- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005759 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5760 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5761 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005762
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005763- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5764 Nick Mathewson.
5765
5766Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005767----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005768
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005769- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5770 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5771 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5772 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5773 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5774 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5775 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5776 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5777
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005778- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5779 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5780 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5781 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5782
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005783- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5784 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5785 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5786 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5787 come a long way).
5788
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005789- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5790 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5791 write filters for these warnings).
5792
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005793- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5794 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5795 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5796 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5797 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5798
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005799- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5800 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5801 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5802 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5803 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5804 older distribution.
5805
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005806Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005807-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005808
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005809- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5810 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005811 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005812
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005813- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5814 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5815 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5816
5817- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5818
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005819- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5820
5821- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5822
5823- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5824
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005825- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005826
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005827- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5828
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005829New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005830-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005831
5832C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005833-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005834
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005835- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5836 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5837 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5838 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5839 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5840 against buffer overruns.
5841
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005842- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005843 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5844 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005845 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5846 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5847 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5848
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005849- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5850 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5851 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5852 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5853 deprecated.
5854
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005855Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005856-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005857
5858- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5859 relevant is found.
5860
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005861
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005862What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005863===========================
5864
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005865*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5866
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005867Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005868----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005869
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005870- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5871 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5872 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5873 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5874 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5875 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5876 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5877 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005878 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005879 repaired.
5880
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005881- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005882 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005883 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5884 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5885 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5886 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5887 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5888 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5889 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5890 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5891
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005892- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5893 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5894 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5895 leading BMO character).
5896
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005897- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5898 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5899 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5900
5901 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5902 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5903 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005904
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005905 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5906 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5907 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5908 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5909 for various simple to use conversions.
5910
5911 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5912 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5913
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005914 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5915 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5916 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5917 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5918 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5919 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5920 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5921 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5922 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5923 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5924 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5925 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5926 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5927 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5928 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005929
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005930- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5931 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5932 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005933 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005934 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005935
5936 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005937 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5938 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5939 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5940 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5941 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005942 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5943 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005944
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005945 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5946 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5947 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005948 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005949
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005950- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5951 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5952 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5953 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5954 floating arithmetic,
5955
5956 x = 9007199254740992.0
5957 print long(x)
5958
5959 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5960 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5961 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5962 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5963 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5964 functions are of good quality).
5965
5966 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5967 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5968 algorithms to break.
5969
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005970- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5971 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5972 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5973 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5974 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5975 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5976 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5977 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5978 order.
5979
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005980- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5981 operation along the most common code paths.
5982
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005983- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5984 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5985
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005986- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5987 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5988 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5989 {}.update(UserDict())
5990
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005991- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5992 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5993 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5994 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5995 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5996 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5997 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5998 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5999
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006000- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00006001 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006002
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006003 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00006004 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
6005 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00006006 join() method of strings
6007 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006008 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
6009 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006010 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00006011 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006012
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00006013- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
6014 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
6015
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006016- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
6017 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
6018
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00006019- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
6020 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
6021 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
6022 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
6023
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006024- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
6025 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006026 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006027 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
6028 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00006029
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00006030- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
6031
6032
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006033Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006034-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006035
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006036- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006037 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006038 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
6039 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
6040
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00006041- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
6042 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
6043
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00006044- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
6045 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
6046 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
6047 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
6048
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00006049- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
6050 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
6051 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
6052
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00006053- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
6054
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00006055- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
6056
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00006057- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
6058 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
6059 that are still imported into string.py).
6060
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006061- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
6062
6063- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6064 Now it does.
6065
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006066- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6067
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006068- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6069 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6070 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6071 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6072 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006073 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6074 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006075
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006076- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6077 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6078 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6079 'help(object)'.
6080
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006081Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006082-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006083
6084- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006085 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006086 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6087 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6088
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006089- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006090 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6091 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006092
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006093C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006094-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006095
6096- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6097 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006098
6099----
6100
6101**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**