blob: 828063a87909b6412234436ecc052850bdf45697 [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
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000013- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
14 list.sort().
15
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000016- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
17 (2+3) --> (5).
18
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000019- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
20
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000021
22Extension Modules
23-----------------
24
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000025- array.array objects are now picklable.
26
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000027- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
28 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
29
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000030- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
31 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
32 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
33
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000034
35Library
36-------
37
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000038- Enhancements to the csv module:
39
40 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
41 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
42 PEP 305.
43 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
44 reporting.
45 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
46 dictates.
47 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000048 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
49 objects, rather than attempting to cast to float, and using the
50 success of that as the determinator.
51 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
52 to floats.
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +000053 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000054 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
55 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
56 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
57 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
58 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
59 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
60 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
61 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
62 without first creating a dialect class.
63 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
64 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
65 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +000066 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000067 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
68 limit is 128kB.
69 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
70 This has been fixed.
71
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +000072- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
73 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
74 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
75 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
76
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +000077- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
78
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +000079- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
80 (Bug #951915).
81
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +000082- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
83 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
84 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
85 encoding alias table
86
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +000087- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
88
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000089- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
90 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
91
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +000092- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
93
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +000094- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
95
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +000096- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
97
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +000098- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
99
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000100- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
101
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000102- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
103 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
104 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
105
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000106- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000107 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000108
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000109- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
110 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
111 tokenizer with very long source lines.
112
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000113- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
114 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
115
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000116
117Build
118-----
119
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000120- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
121 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
122 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
123 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
124 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
125 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
126 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
127 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
128
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000129
130C API
131-----
132
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000133- Removed PyRange_New().
134
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000135
136Tests
137-----
138
139
140Mac
141---
142
143
144
145Tools/Demos
146-----------
147
148
149
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000150What's New in Python 2.4 final?
151===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000152
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000153*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000154
155Core and builtins
156-----------------
157
158- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
159 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
160 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
161
162
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000163What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
164==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000165
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000166*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000167
168Core and builtins
169-----------------
170
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000171- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
172 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
173 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
174
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000175
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000176Library
177-------
178
179- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
180 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
181 raised is re-raised.
182
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000183- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
184 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
185
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000186- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
187 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
188 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
189 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
190 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
191 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
192 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
193 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
194 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
195 by the slice are recomputed now.
196
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000197- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000198
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000199Build
200-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000201
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000202- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
203 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
204 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000205
206C API
207-----
208
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000209- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
210
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000211
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000212What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
213================================
214
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000215*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000216
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000217License
218-------
219
220The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
221is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
222changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
223Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
224intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
225durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
226the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
227License::
228
229 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
230
231says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
232to Python 2.1.1.
233
234The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
235License Version 2.
236
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000237Core and builtins
238-----------------
239
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000240- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
241 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
242 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
243 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
244 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
245 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
246 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
247 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
248 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
249 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
250
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000251- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000252
253Extension Modules
254-----------------
255
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000256- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
257 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
258 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
259 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000260
261Library
262-------
263
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000264- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
265 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
266 returned.
267
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000268- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
269
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000270- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
271 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
272
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000273- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
274
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000275- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
276 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000277
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000278- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
279
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000280- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
281
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000282- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000283 the source code is updated and reloaded.
284
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000285Build
286-----
287
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000288- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000289
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000290What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
291================================
292
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000293*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000294
295Core and builtins
296-----------------
297
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000298- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000299 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
300
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000301- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
302 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
303 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
304 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
305
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000306- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
307 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
308
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000309- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
310 constant.
311
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000312- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
313 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
314 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
315 large), and to anomalies such as
316 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
317 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
318 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
319 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000320
321Extension modules
322-----------------
323
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000324- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
325 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000326 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
327 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
328 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000329
330Library
331-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000332
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000333- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000334 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000335 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
336 --swig-cpp.
337
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000338- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
339 it is set.
340
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000341- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000342
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000343- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
344 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
345 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
346 Closes bug #1039270.
347
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000348- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000349
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000350 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000351 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
352 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
353 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
354 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
355 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
356 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
357 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
358 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
359 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
360 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
361 + Updates to documentation.
362
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000363- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
364 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
365 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
366 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
367
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000368- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000369
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000370- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
371 applications should use the getmember function.
372
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000373- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
374
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000375- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
376 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
377 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
378 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
379 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
380 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
381 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
382 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
383 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
384
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000385- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
386 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000387 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000388
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000389- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
390 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
391 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
392 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
393 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
394 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
395 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
396 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000397
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000398- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
399 the new public features (of which there are many).
400
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000401- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000402 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
403 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
404 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
405 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000406 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000407
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000408- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
409
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000410- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
411 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
412 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
413 options.
414
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000415- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
416 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
417 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
418 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
419 conditions under which non-string values work.
420
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000421Build
422-----
423
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000424- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
425 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
426 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
427
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000428- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
429 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
430 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
431 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
432 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000433
434C API
435-----
436
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000437- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
438 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
439
440- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
441
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000442- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
443 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
444 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
445 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
446 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
447 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
448 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
449 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
450 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
451
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000452- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
453
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000454- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
455 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
456 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000457
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000458Tests
459-----
460
461- test__locale ported to unittest
462
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000463Mac
464---
465
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000466- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
467 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
468 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000469
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000470Tools/Demos
471-----------
472
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000473- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
474 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
475 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
476 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
477 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000478
479
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000480What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
481=================================
482
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000483*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000484
485Core and builtins
486-----------------
487
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000488- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000489 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
490
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000491- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
492 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
493 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
494 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
495 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
496 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
497 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
498 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000499 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
500 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
501 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
502 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
503 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000504
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000505- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
506 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
507 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
508 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
509 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
510
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000511- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
512
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000513- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
514 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
515
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000516- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
517 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
518 modified the list.
519
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000520- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
521 functions is now writable.
522
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000523- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
524 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
525 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
526 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
527
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000528- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
529 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
530 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
531 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
532 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000533
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000534- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
535 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
536
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000537Extension modules
538-----------------
539
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000540- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
541
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000542- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
543 data.
544
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000545- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
546 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
547 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
548 supposed to have been truncated away.
549
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000550- Added socket.socketpair().
551
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000552- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
553 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
554
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000555- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000556 versions of Python, have now been removed.
557
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000558Library
559-------
560
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000561- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000562 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000563
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000564- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
565 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
566
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000567- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
568 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
569
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000570- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
571
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000572- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
573 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000574
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000575- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
576 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
577
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000578- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
579
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000580- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
581
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000582- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
583
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000584- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
585 Percivall.
586
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000587- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
588 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
589
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000590- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
591 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
592 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000593 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000594
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000595- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
596 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
597 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
598 and exponent.
599
600- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
601
602- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
603 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
604 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
605
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000606- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
607 to the readline module.
608
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000609- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000610 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
611 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000612
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000613- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
614 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
615 contains symlinks.
616
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000617- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
618 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
619
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000620- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
621 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
622 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
623
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000624- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
625 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
626 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
627 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
628 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
629 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
630 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
631 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
632 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
633 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
634 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
635 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
636 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
637
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000638- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
639
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000640Tools/Demos
641-----------
642
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000643- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
644 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
645
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000646- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
647
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000648Build
649-----
650
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000651- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
652 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
653 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
654 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
655 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
656 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
657 plans to do so.
658
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000659- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
660 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
661
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000662- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
663 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
664
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000665- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
666 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
667
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000668- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
669 GNU/k*BSD systems.
670
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000671- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
672 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
673
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000674C API
675-----
676
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000677..
678
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000679Documentation
680-------------
681
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000682- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
683 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
684
685- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
686 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
687 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000688
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000689New platforms
690-------------
691
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000692- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
693
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000694Tests
695-----
696
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000697..
698
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000699Windows
700-------
701
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000702- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
703 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
704 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
705 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
706 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
707 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
708 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
709 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
710 the problem.
711
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000712Mac
713---
714
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000715..
716
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000717
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000718What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
719=================================
720
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000721*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000722
723Core and builtins
724-----------------
725
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000726- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
727 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
728 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
729 sensitive code.
730
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000731- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000732 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000733
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000734 @staticmethod
735 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000736
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000737 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000738
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000739- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
740 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
741 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
742 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
743 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
744 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
745 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
746 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
747 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
748 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
749 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
750
751 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
752 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
753 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
754 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
755 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
756 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
757 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
758
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000759- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
760 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
761
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000762- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000763 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000764
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000765- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000766 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000767 which was missing for no apparent reason.
768
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000769- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000770 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
771 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
772
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000773- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
774 types that support garbage collection.
775
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000776- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
777
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000778- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
779 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
780 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
781 Jython.
782
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000783- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
784
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000785- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
786 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
787
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000788- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
789 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
790 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000791
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000792- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
793 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
794 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
795
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000796Extension modules
797-----------------
798
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000799- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
800
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000801Library
802-------
803
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000804- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
805 TIS-620
806
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000807- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
808 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
809 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
810 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
811 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
812 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
813 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
814 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
815 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
816 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
817
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000818- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
819
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000820- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
821 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
822 same as when the argument is omitted).
823 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
824
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000825- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
826
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000827- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
828 schemes are offered.
829
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000830- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
831
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000832- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
833 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
834 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
835
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000836- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
837
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000838- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
839 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
840
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000841- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
842 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
843 when dummy_threading is being used.
844
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000845- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
846 from a tarfile.
847
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000848- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000849 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000850
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000851- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
852 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
853 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
854 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
855
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000856- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
857 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
858
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000859- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
860 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
861 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
862 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
863 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
864 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
865 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
866 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
867 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
868 by some other method in progress).
869
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000870- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
871 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
872 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000873
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000874- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
875
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000876- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
877 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
878 AM Kuchling.
879
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000880- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
881 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
882 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
883
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000884- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
885 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
886 instead of unsigned.
887
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000888- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000889 no longer part of the public API.
890
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000891- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
892 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
893 string methods of the same name).
894
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000895- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000896 SF patch 945642.
897
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000898- doctest unittest integration improvements:
899
900 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
901
902 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
903 DocTestSuites.
904
905- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
906 that provide thread-local data.
907
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000908- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
909 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
910
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000911- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
912
913- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
914 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
915 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
916
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000917- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
918
919 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
920 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
921 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000922
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000923 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
924 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
925 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
926 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
927
928 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
929 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
930
931 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
932 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
933 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
934 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
935
936 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
937 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
938 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
939 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
940 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
941
942 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
943 wrapping help output.
944
945 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
946 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
947 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000948
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000949C API
950-----
951
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000952- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
953 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
954 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
955 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
956 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
957 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
958 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
959 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
960 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
961 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
962 its visible semantics have not changed.
963
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000964- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
965 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
966
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000967Documentation
968-------------
969
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000970- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000971
972 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000973 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000974
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000975 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000976
977 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
978
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000979- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000980
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000981Tests
982-----
983
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000984- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000985 platforms that use the Makefile.
986
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000987- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
988 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
989 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
990
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000991
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000992What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
993=================================
994
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000995*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000996
997Core and builtins
998-----------------
999
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001000- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1001 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1002 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1003 objects now (one object instead of three).
1004
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001005- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1006 Windows DLLs.
1007
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001008- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1009 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001010
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001011- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1012 a new .pyc magic.
1013
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001014- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1015 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1016 be there.
1017
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001018- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1019 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1020 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1021
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001022- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1023 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1024 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1025
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001026- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1027
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001028- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1029 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1030 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001031
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001032- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1033 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1034
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001035- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1036
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001037- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001038 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001039
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001040- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1041
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001042- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1043
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001044- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1045 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1046
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001047- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1048 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1049 Fixes bug #858016 .
1050
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001051- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1052 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1053 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1054
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001055- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1056 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1057 improves their performance (about 35%).
1058
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001059- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1060 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1061 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1062
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001063- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1064 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1065 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1066 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1067
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001068- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1069 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1070 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1071 length is not known).
1072
1073- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1074 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001075 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1076 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001077 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1078
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001079- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1080 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1081
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001082- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1083 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1084 keyword arguments.
1085
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001086- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1087 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1088 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1089
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001090- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1091 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1092 cases.
1093
1094- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1095 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1096 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1097 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1098 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1099 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1100 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1101 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1102 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1103 a release build.
1104
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001105- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1106 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1107
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001108- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001109 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001110
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001111- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1112 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1113 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1114 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1115 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1116 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1117 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1118 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1119 destroyed.
1120
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001121- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1122 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1123 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1124 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1125 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1126 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1127 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1128 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1129
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001130- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1131 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1132 character other than a space.
1133
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001134- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1135 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1136 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1137 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1138 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1139 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1140 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1141 attributes with the same name.
1142
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001143- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1144 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1145 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1146 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1147 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1148 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1149 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1150 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1151 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1152 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1153 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1154 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1155 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1156 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001157
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001158- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1159 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1160 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1161 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1162 This has been repaired.
1163
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001164- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1165
1166- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1167
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001168- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1169 over a sequence.
1170
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001171- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001172 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001173
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001174- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1175
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001176- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1177 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1178 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1179 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1180 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1181 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1182 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1183 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1184
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001185- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1186 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1187 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1188
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001189- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1190 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1191 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1192 freelist.
1193
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001194- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1195 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1196
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001197- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1198 number.
1199
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001200- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1201 a TypeError exception.
1202
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001203- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1204 820195.
1205
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001206- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1207 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1208 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1209
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001210- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001211 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1212 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001213
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001214- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1215 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1216 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1217
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001218- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1219 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001220 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001221
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001222- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001223 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1224 the first call.
1225
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001226
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001227Extension modules
1228-----------------
1229
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001230- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1231 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1232
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001233- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1234 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1235 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1236 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1237 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1238 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1239 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001240
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001241- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1242
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001243- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1244
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001245- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1246 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1247
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001248- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1249 fewer false positives.
1250
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001251- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1252 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1253
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001254- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001255 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1256
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001257- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001258 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001259 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001260 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1261 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001262
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001263- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1264 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1265 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1266 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1267
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001268- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1269 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1270 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1271 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1272 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1273 #897625.
1274
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001275- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1276 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1277
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001278- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1279 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1280 and pops on either side of the deque.
1281
1282- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1283 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1284
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001285- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1286 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1287 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1288 other functions that expect a function argument.
1289
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001290- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1291
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001292- os.getsid was added.
1293
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001294- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1295 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1296 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1297
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001298- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1299
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001300- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1301
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001302- readline.clear_history was added.
1303
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001304- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1305
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001306- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1307
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001308- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1309
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001310- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1311
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001312- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1313
1314- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1315
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001316- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1317
1318- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1319
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001320- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1321 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1322 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1323
1324- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1325 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1326 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1327 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1328 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1329 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1330 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1331
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001332- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1333 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1334 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1335 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001336
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001337- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001338 iterators from a single iterable.
1339
1340- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1341 of raising a TypeError exception.
1342
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001343- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1344 as parameter.
1345
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001346Library
1347-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001348
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001349- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1350 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1351 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001352
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001353- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1354 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1355 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001356
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001357- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001358
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001359- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1360 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001361
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001362- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1363 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1364
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001365- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1366
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001367- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001368 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001369
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001370- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001371 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001372
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001373- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1374
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001375- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1376 on cygwin and mingw32.
1377
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001378- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1379
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001380- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1381 module.
1382
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001383- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1384 installation scheme for all platforms.
1385
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001386- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001387 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001388
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001389- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1390 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1391 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1392
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001393- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1394 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1395 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1396
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001397- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1398
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001399- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1400
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001401- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1402 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1403
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001404- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1405 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1406 type pattern with the same value exists.
1407
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001408- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1409 when run from the command prompt).
1410
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001411- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1412 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1413
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001414- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1415 default sort).
1416
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001417- Added global runctx function to profile module
1418
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001419- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1420
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001421- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1422
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001423- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1424
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001425- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001426 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1427 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1428 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1429 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1430 accordingly.
1431
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001432- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1433 decoding standards.
1434
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001435- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1436 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1437 called for all requests.
1438
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001439- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1440 they are passed to the compiler.
1441
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001442- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1443 indent, width and depth.
1444
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001445- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1446 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1447
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001448- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1449 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1450
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001451- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1452
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001453- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1454
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001455- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1456
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001457- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1458 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1459
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001460- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001461 for better performance.
1462
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001463- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001464
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001465- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1466 a string).
1467
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001468- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1469
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001470- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1471
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001472- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1473
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001474- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1475
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001476- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1477 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1478 list of fieldnames.
1479
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001480- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1481 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1482
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001483- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1484
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001485- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1486 empty lists.
1487
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001488- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1489 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1490 and shelves.
1491
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001492- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1493 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1494
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001495- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001496 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1497 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001498
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001499- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1500 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001501 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001502
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001503- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001504 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1505 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1506
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001507- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1508 and removed in Py2.4.
1509
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001510- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1511
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001512- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1513
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001514Tools/Demos
1515-----------
1516
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001517- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1518 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1519
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001520- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1521
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001522- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1523 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1524 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1525 destination in situations where both files are given.
1526
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001527- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1528 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1529 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1530 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1531
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001532- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1533
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001534- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1535 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1536 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1537 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1538 now.
1539
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001540- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1541 in effect
1542
1543- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1544 C-c C-h
1545
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001546- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1547 -d option was given.
1548
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001549Build
1550-----
1551
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001552- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1553 build under OS X.
1554
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001555- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1556 --enable-profiling.
1557
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001558- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1559 is configured --with-tsc.
1560
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001561- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1562 on AMD64.
1563
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001564- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1565 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1566
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001567- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1568 removed.
1569
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001570- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1571 supported (see PEP 11).
1572
1573- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1574
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001575- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1576
1577- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1578 (see PEP 11).
1579
1580- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1581 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1582
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001583C API
1584-----
1585
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001586- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1587 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1588 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1589
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001590- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1591 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1592 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1593 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1594
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001595- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1596 generator objects.
1597
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001598- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1599 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001600 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1601 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001602
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001603- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1604 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1605
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001606- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1607 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1608 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1609 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1610 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1611
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001612- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1613 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1614 about 10% faster.
1615
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001616- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1617 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1618
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001619- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1620 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1621 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1622 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1623
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001624Windows
1625-------
1626
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001627- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1628 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1629 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1630 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1631
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001632- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1633 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1634 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1635
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001636
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001637What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1638===============================
1639
1640*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1641
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001642IDLE
1643----
1644
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001645- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1646 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1647 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1648 context-menu actions.
1649
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001650- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1651 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1652 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1653 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1654 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1655 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1656 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1657 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1658 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1659
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001660
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001661What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1662=============================================
1663
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001664*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001665
1666Core and builtins
1667-----------------
1668
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001669- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001670 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001671 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1672
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001673Extension modules
1674-----------------
1675
1676- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1677 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1678 than once. This has been fixed.
1679
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001680- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1681 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1682 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1683 call.
1684
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001685- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1686
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001687Library
1688-------
1689
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001690- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1691 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1692
1693- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1694 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1695 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1696 restored.
1697
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001698IDLE
1699----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001700
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001701- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001702
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001703Build
1704-----
1705
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001706- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1707 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1708
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001709C API
1710-----
1711
1712Windows
1713-------
1714
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001715- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1716 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1717
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001718- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1719
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001720Mac
1721---
1722
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001723- Various fixes to pimp.
1724
1725- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1726
1727- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1728 more problems than it solves.
1729
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001730
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001731What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1732=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001733
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001734*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1735
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001736Core and builtins
1737-----------------
1738
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001739- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1740 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1741
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001742- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1743 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001744 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001745
1746- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1747 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1748 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001749 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001750
1751- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1752 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001753
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001754- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1755 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1756 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1757
1758- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001759 770247.
1760
1761- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001762
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001763Extension modules
1764-----------------
1765
1766- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1767 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1768
1769- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1770
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001771- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1772
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001773- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1774 contained within the _strptime module.
1775
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001776- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1777 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1778
1779- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001780 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1781
1782- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1783 the find_class attribute, if present.
1784
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001785- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001786
1787 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1788 (SF bug 763298).
1789
1790 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001791 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1792 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1793 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001794
1795 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1796
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001797Library
1798-------
1799
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001800- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1801
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001802- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1803 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1804 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1805 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1806 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1807 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1808 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1809 or Tester().
1810
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001811- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1812 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1813 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1814 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1815 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1816 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1817 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1818 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1819 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001820
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001821 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001822
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001823- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1824 weren't before was an oversight.
1825
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001826- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1827 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1828
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001829- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1830 when there are no lines.
1831
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001832- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1833 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1834
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001835- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1836 to child processes.
1837
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001838- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1839
1840- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1841
1842- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1843 xmlrpclib.
1844
1845- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1846 responses.
1847
1848- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1849 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1850
1851- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1852 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1853 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1854
1855- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1856 used as patterns.
1857
1858- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1859 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1860 than Tk 8.3.
1861
1862- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1863
1864- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001865
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001866Tools/Demos
1867-----------
1868
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001869- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1870
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001871- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1872
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001873- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001874
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001875Build
1876-----
1877
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001878- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1879
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001880- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1881
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001882- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1883 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001884
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001885- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1886 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1887 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001888
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001889C API
1890-----
1891
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001892- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1893 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1894
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001895Windows
1896-------
1897
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001898- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1899 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1900 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1901 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1902 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1903 Python exception ::
1904
1905 thread.error: can't start new thread
1906
1907 is raised now.
1908
1909- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1910 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1911 instead of from DLL teardown.
1912
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001913Mac
1914---
1915
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001916- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001917 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001918 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1919 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1920 the executable in the bundle.
1921
1922- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001923
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001924- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1925
1926- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1927 on Panther.
1928
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001929What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1930================================
1931
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001932*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001933
1934Core and builtins
1935-----------------
1936
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001937- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1938 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1939 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1940 with the -i option.
1941
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001942- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1943 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1944
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001945- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1946 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1947
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001948- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1949 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1950 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1951 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1952 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1953 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1954 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1955 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1956 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1957 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1958 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1959 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1960 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001961
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001962- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1963 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1964 embedded in a lambda expression.
1965
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001966- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1967 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1968 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1969 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1970 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1971
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001972- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1973 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1974 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1975
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001976- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1977 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1978
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001979- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1980 It's writable again.
1981
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001982- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1983 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1984 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001985 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001986
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001987- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1988 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1989 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1990
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001991Extension modules
1992-----------------
1993
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001994- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1995 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1996
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001997- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1998 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1999 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2000 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2001
2002- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2003 collection.
2004
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002005- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2006 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2007 unique within a single program run.
2008
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002009- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2010 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2011
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002012- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2013 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2014
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002015- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2016 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002017
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002018- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2019
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002020- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2021 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2022
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002023- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2024 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2025 for many BSD-derived systems.
2026
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002027
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002028Library
2029-------
2030
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002031- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2032 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2033 primary ones:
2034
2035 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2036 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2037 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2038
2039 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2040 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2041 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2042 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2043 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2044 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2045
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002046- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2047 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2048 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2049 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2050 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2051 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2052 argument.
2053
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002054- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2055 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2056 in the archive.
2057
2058- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2059 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2060
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002061- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2062 569574).
2063
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002064- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2065 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2066 no more.
2067
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002068- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2069 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2070 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2071 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2072 code coverage.
2073
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002074- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2075 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2076 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002077 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2078 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002079
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002080- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2081 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2082 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002083 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002084
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002085- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2086
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002087- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2088 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2089 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2090 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2091
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002092- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2093 handling.
2094
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002095- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2096 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2097
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002098- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2099 in socket.py.
2100
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002101- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2102
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002103- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2104 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2105 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2106 opener with proxy support.
2107
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002108- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2109
2110- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2111
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002112Tools/Demos
2113-----------
2114
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002115- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2116
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002117- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2118
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002119- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2120 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002121
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002122- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2123 files.
2124
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002125Build
2126-----
2127
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002128- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002129 different root directory.
2130
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002131C API
2132-----
2133
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002134- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2135 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2136 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2137 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2138 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2139 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2140 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2141 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2142 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2143 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2144
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002145- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2146 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2147 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2148 from Python.
2149
2150
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002151New platforms
2152-------------
2153
2154None this time.
2155
2156Tests
2157-----
2158
2159- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2160 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2161
2162Windows
2163-------
2164
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002165- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2166
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002167- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2168 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2169 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2170 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2171 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2172 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2173 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2174 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2175 that's what it's for.
2176
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002177Mac
2178---
2179
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002180- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2181 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2182 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2183 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002184- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2185 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2186- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002187
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002188SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2189------------------------------------
2190
2191430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2192598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2193622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2194661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2195683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2196697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2197713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2198724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2199727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2200729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2201730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2202731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2203732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2204733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2205735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2206740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2207744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2208745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2209747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2210749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2211751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2212753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2213755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2214757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2215760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2216
2217
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002218What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2219================================
2220
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002221*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002222
2223Core and builtins
2224-----------------
2225
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002226- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2227 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2228
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002229- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2230 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2231 and cannot be strings).
2232
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002233- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2234 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2235 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2236 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2237
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002238- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2239 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2240 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2241 Python itself.
2242
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002243- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2244 the referenced object, if it has one.
2245
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002246- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2247 the thread started at
2248 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2249
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002250- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2251 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2252 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2253 placed on a list index.
2254
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002255- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2256 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2257 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2258 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2259
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002260- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2261 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2262 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2263 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2264 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2265 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2266 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2267
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002268- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2269 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2270 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2271 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2272 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2273
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002274- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2275 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002276
2277- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2278 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2279 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2280 #693195.)
2281
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002282- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2283 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002284
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002285- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002286 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002287 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2288 interpreter executions, would fail.
2289
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002290- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002291 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002292 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002293
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002294Extension modules
2295-----------------
2296
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002297- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2298 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2299 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2300 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2301
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002302- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2303 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2304
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002305- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2306 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2307 and Greg Chapman.)
2308
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002309- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2310 recursively.
2311
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002312- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002313 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2314 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2315 leaks.
2316
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002317- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2318
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002319- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2320 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2321 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2322 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2323 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2324 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2325 #705836.
2326
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002327- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002328 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2329
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002330- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2331 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2332 See SF bug #692416.
2333
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002334- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2335 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2336
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002337- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2338 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2339 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002340
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002341- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002342 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2343 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2344
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002345- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2346 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2347 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2348 timeouts to work properly.
2349
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002350Library
2351-------
2352
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002353- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2354 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2355 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2356 future release.
2357
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002358- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2359 for querying platform dependent features.
2360
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002361- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002362
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002363- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2364 pickle protocol versions.
2365
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002366- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2367 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2368 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2369
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002370- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2371
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002372- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2373 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2374 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2375 modules.
2376
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002377- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2378 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2379 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2380
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002381- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2382 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2383
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002384- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2385 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2386 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2387
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002388- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002389 MS Office extensions.
2390
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002391- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2392 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2393
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002394- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2395 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2396
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002397- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2398 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2399 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2400 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2401 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2402 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2403
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002404- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2405 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2406 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002407
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002408- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2409 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2410 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2411
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002412- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2413
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002414- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2415 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2416 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2417
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002418Tools/Demos
2419-----------
2420
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002421- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2422 See the module docstring for details.
2423
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002424Build
2425-----
2426
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002427- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2428 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002429
2430C API
2431-----
2432
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002433- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2434
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002435- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2436 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2437 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2438
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002439- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2440 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002441
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002442 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2443 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2444 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002445
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002446- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002447 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2448
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002449- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2450 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2451 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002452
2453New platforms
2454-------------
2455
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002456None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002457
2458Tests
2459-----
2460
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002461- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2462 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002463
2464Windows
2465-------
2466
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002467- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2468 function.
2469
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002470- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2471 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002472
2473Mac
2474---
2475
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002476- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2477 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002478
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002479- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2480 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002481
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002482- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2483 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2484 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002485
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002486- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002487 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2488 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002489
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002490- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2491 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002492
2493
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002494What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2495=================================
2496
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002497*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002498
2499Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002500-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002501
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002502- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2503 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2504 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2505
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002506- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2507 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2508 (SF patch #664376.)
2509
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002510- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2511 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2512 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2513 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2514 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2515 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002516 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002517
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002518- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2519 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2520 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2521 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002522 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002523
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002524- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2525 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2526 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2527 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2528 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2529 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2530 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2531 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2532 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2533 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2534 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2535
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002536- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2537 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2538 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2539 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2540 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2541 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2542
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002543- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2544 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2545
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002546- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2547 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2548 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2549 case.)
2550
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002551- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2552 passed as unicode strings.
2553
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002554- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2555 See SF bug #683467.
2556
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002557- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2558 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2559
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002560- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2561
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002562- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2563
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002564- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2565 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2566 arguments.
2567
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002568- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2569 See SF bug #667147.
2570
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002571- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002572 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002573 See SF bug #676155.
2574
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002575- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002576 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002577 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2578 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2579 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2580 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2581 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2582 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002583
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002584Extension modules
2585-----------------
2586
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002587- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2588 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2589 tp_as_number pointer.
2590
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002591- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2592 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2593 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2594 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2595 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2596
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002597- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2598
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002599- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2600
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002601- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002602 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002603 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2604 patch #678531.)
2605
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002606- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2607 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2608
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002609- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2610 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2611
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002612- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2613
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002614- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2615 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2616 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2617
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002618- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2619
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002620- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2621 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2622
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002623- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002624
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002625- datetime changes:
2626
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002627 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2628
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002629 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2630 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2631 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2632 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2633 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2634 now.
2635
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002636 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002637 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2638 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002639
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002640 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002641 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002642 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2643 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2644 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2645 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002646
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002647 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2648 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2649 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002650 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2651
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002652 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2653 by a later example coded by Guido.
2654
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002655 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002656 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2657 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2658 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002659 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2660 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2661
2662 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2663 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2664 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2665 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2666 tzinfo subclass instance.
2667
2668 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2669 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2670 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2671 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2672 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2673 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2674 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2675 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002676
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002677 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2678 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2679 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2680 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2681 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002682 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2683
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002684 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002685
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002686 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2687 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2688 as a naive datetime object.
2689
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002690 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2691 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2692 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2693
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002694 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2695 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2696 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2697 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2698 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2699 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2700 comparison.
2701
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002702 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2703 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2704 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2705 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002706 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002707
2708 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002709
2710 and ::
2711
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002712 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2713
2714 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2715 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2716 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2717 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2718
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002719 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2720 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2721 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2722 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2723 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2724
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002725 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2726 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002727 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2728 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002729
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002730Library
2731-------
2732
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002733- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2734 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2735
2736- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2737 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2738 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2739 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2740 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2741 See PEP 307 for details.
2742
2743- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2744 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2745
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002746- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2747 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002748 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002749 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2750 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002751 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002752
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002753- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2754 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2755
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002756- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2757 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2758 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2759
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002760- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2761
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002762- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2763 exception.
2764
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002765- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2766 class.
2767
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002768- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2769 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2770 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2771
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002772- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2773 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2774
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002775- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002776 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2777 See SF bug #659228.
2778
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002779- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2780 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2781 See SF patch #651082.
2782
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002783- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002784
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002785- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2786 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2787
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002788- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002789 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002790
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002791- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2792 DOS paths from other platforms.
2793
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002794Tools/Demos
2795-----------
2796
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002797- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2798 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2799 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2800 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2801 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2802 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2803 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2804 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2805 example:
2806
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002807 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2808 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002809
2810 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2811
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002812
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002813Build
2814-----
2815
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002816- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2817 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2818 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002819 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2820
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002821 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2822
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002823- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2824 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2825 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2826 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2827 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2828 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2829 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2830 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2831 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2832
2833- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2834 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2835 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2836 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2837
2838- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2839 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2840
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002841C API
2842-----
2843
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002844- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2845 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002846
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002847- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2848 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2849 tp_as_number pointer.
2850
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002851- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2852 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2853 (SF #681367)
2854
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002855- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2856 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2857 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2858 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002859
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002860Tests
2861-----
2862
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002863- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002864 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2865 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2866 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2867 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2868 pydoc.)
2869
2870- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2871
2872- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002873
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002874Windows
2875-------
2876
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002877- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2878 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2879 time).
2880
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002881- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2882 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2883
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002884- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2885 release without strong cryptography.
2886
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002887- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002888 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002889
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002890- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2891 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2892
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002893Mac
2894---
2895
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002896- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2897 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002898
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002899- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2900 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2901 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002902
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002903- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2904 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002905
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002906- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2907 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2908 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2909 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002910
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002911- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002912 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2913 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2914 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002915
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002916
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002917What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002918=================================
2919
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002920*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002921
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002922Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002923--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002924
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002925- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2926
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002927- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2928 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002929 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002930 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002931 a different meaning than before.
2932
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002933- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002934 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002935 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002936
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002937- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002938 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002939 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002940
2941- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2942 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2943 and deallocation.
2944
2945- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2946 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2947
2948- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2949 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2950 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2951 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2952 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2953
2954- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2955 now detected by the garbage collector.
2956
2957- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2958 [SF bug 519621]
2959
2960- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2961 identifier.
2962
2963- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2964 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2965 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2966 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2967 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2968 [SF bug 563060]
2969
2970- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2971 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2972 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2973 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2974 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2975
2976- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2977 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2978 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2979
2980- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2981
2982- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2983 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2984 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2985 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2986 state of the slots would be lost.)
2987
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002988Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002989-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002990
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002991- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002992 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2993 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2994 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2995 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002996 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2997 Jython 2.1.
2998
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002999- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003000 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003001 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3002 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3003 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3004 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3005 these, see PEP 302.
3006
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003007- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3008 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3009 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3010
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003011- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3012 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3013 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3014
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003015- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3016 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3017 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3018
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003019- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3020 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3021 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3022 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3023 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3024 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3025 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3026 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3027 releases or implementations.
3028
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003029- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003030 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3031 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003032
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003033- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3034 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3035
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003036- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3037 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3038 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3039
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003040- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3041 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3042
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003043- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3044 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003045 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3046 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003047
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003048- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3049 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3050 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3051 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3052 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3053
3054 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3055 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3056 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3057 pattern.
3058
3059 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3060 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3061 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3062 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3063
3064 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3065 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3066 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3067 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3068 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3069 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3070
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003071- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3072 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3073 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3074 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3075 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3076 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3077 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3078 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003079
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003080- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3081 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3082 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3083 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3084 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003085 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3086 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3087 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3088 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3089 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3090 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3091 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003092
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003093- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3094 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3095
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003096- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3097 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3098 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3099 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3100 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3101 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3102 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3103 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3104 to Zack Weinberg!
3105
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003106- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3107 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3108 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3109 type. This has been fixed now.
3110
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003111- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3112 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3113 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3114
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003115- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3116 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3117 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3118 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3119 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3120 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3121 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3122 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003123 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003124
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003125- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3126 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3127 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003128
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003129- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3130 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3131 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3132 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3133 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3134 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3135 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3136 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003137 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003138 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3139 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3140
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003141- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3142 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3143 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3144 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3145 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3146 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3147 this.)
3148
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003149- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3150 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003151 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003152 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003153 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3154 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003155 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3156 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003157
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003158- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3159 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3160 currently running.
3161
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003162- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3163 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3164 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3165 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3166
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003167- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3168 as directory names.
3169
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003170- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3171 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3172
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003173- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3174 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3175
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003176- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003177 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3178 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003179
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003180- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3181 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3182 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3183 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3184 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3185
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003186- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3187 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3188 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3189 removed.
3190
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003191- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3192 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3193 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3194
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003195- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3196 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3197 to __debug__.
3198
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003199- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3200 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3201 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3202
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003203- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3204 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3205 deprecated now.
3206
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003207- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3208 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3209 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003210
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003211- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3212 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3213 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3214 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3215 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003216
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003217- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3218 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3219
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003220- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3221 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3222 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003223 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003224 is backward compatible.
3225
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003226- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3227 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3228 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3229 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3230 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3231
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003232- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3233 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3234 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3235 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3236 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3237 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003238
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003239- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3240 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3241
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003242- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3243 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3244
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003245- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3246 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3247 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3248 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3249 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3250
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003251- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3252 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3253 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3254
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003255- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003256 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3257
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003258- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3259 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3260 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003261
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003262- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3263 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3264
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003265- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3266 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3267 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3268
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003269- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3270
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003271Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003272-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003273
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003274- Added three operators to the operator module:
3275 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3276 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3277 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3278
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003279- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3280
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003281- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3282 archives.
3283
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003284- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3285 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3286 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3287
3288 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3289
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003290- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3291 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3292 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003293 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003294
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003295- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3296 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3297 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3298 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003299 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3300 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3301 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3302 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003303
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003304- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3305 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003306
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003307- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3308
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003309- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3310 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3311
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003312- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3313 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3314 supported.
3315
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003316- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3317
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003318- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3319 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003320
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003321- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3322 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3323
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003324- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3325
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003326- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3327 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3328
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003329- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3330 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3331 functions but callable type objects.
3332
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003333- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003334 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003335 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003336
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003337- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3338 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003339
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003340- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3341 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003342
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003343- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3344 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3345 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3346 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3347
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003348- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3349 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003350
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003351- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3352 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3353 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3354 and __imul__.
3355
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003356- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003357 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3358 is called.
3359
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003360- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3361 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3362 interpreter was compiled.
3363
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003364- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3365 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3366 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003367 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003368 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3369 1, not 2.
3370
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003371- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3372 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3373 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3374 limit.
3375
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003376- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3377 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3378 bug #623464.
3379
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003380- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3381 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3382 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3383 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3384
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003385Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003386-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003387
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003388- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3389
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003390- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3391 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3392 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3393 with Python 2.3a2.
3394
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003395- os.path exposes getctime.
3396
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003397- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003398 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003399 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003400 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003401 unit tests of floating point results.
3402
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003403- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3404 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3405 has been increased.
3406
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003407- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3408 executed.
3409
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003410- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3411 postinstallation script.
3412
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003413- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3414 test the current module.
3415
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003416- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003417 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3418 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3419 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3420 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3421
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003422- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003423 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003424 Ward's Optik package.
3425
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003426- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3427 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3428 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3429 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3430
3431- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3432 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003433 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003434
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003435- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3436 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3437 shelf are binary pickles.
3438
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003439- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3440 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3441
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003442- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3443 modules are iterators now.
3444
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003445- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3446 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3447 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3448 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3449 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3450 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003451
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003452- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3453 with their entity value.
3454
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003455- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3456
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003457- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3458 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003459
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003460- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3461 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003462 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003463
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003464- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3465 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3466 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3467 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3468 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3469 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3470 main():
3471
3472 import locale
3473 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3474
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003475- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3476 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3477
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003478- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3479 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3480 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3481 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3482 to the new standard.
3483
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003484- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3485 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3486 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3487 an extension to the database.
3488
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003489- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3490 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3491 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3492 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003493 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003494
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003495- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003496 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003497
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003498- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3499 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3500 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3501 bounded integers.
3502
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003503- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3504 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3505 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3506 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3507 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3508 in existence.
3509
3510 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3511 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3512 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3513 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3514 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3515 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3516
3517 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3518 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3519 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3520 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3521
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003522- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3523 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3524 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3525
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003526- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3527
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003528- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3529 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3530 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3531 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3532
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003533- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3534 argument.
3535
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003536- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3537 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3538 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3539 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3540 [SF patch 560794].
3541
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003542- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3543 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3544 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003545 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3546 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3547 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003548
3549- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3550 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003551
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003552- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3553 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3554 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3555 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003556
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003557- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3558 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3559 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3560 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3561 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3562
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003563- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003564
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003565- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3566
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003567- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3568 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3569 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3570 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3571 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3572 identical to None.
3573
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003574- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3575 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3576 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3577 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3578 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3579 results now.
3580
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003581- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3582 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3583
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003584- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3585 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3586 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3587 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3588 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3589 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3590 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3591 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3592
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003593- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3594
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003595- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3596 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3597
3598- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3599 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3600 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3601 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3602 and other systems.
3603
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003604- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3605 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3606 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3607 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 +00003608 work well with these.
3609
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003610- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3611
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003612- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003613 connections.
3614
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003615- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3616 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3617 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3618
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003619- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3620 sets
3621
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003622- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3623 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3624 name.
3625
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003626- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3627 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3628 passed in.
3629
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003630- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003631 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003632 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3633 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003634
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003635- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3636
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003637- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3638
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003639- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3640 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3641 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3642
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003643- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3644 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3645 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3646 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003647 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003648
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003649- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003650 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003651 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003652
3653- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3654 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3655 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3656
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003657- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003658 the value of its expression argument.
3659
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003660- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3661 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3662 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3663
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003664- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3665 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3666 skipstone browser was included.
3667
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003668- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3669 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3670
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003671Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003672-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003673
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003674- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3675 names in addition to accepting file names.
3676
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003677- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3678 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3679 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3680 still used and useful.)
3681
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003682- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3683 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3684 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3685 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003686
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003687- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3688 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3689 the generated binary.
3690
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003691Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003692-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003693
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003694- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3695
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003696- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3697 except in the hands of experts.
3698
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003699- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003700 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3701 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3702 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003703
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003704- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3705 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3706 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3707 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3708 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3709 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3710 builds.
3711
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003712- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3713 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3714 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3715 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3716 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3717 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3718 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3719 new type.
3720
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003721- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003722
3723 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3724 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3725 positive infinities.
3726
3727 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3728 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3729 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3730 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3731 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3732 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3733 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3734
3735 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3736
3737 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3738
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003739- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3740 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3741 size of the executable.
3742
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003743- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3744 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3745 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3746 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003747
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003748- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3749
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003750- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3751 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3752 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003753
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003754- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3755 well as Unix.
3756
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003757- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3758 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3759 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3760 modules in the README file for details.
3761
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003762C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003763-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003764
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003765- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3766 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003767 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003768 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003769 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003770
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003771- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3772 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3773 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3774 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3775 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3776 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003777 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003778 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3779 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3780 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3781 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3782 aligned.)
3783
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003784- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3785 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3786 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3787
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003788- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3789 level.
3790
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003791- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3792 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3793 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3794 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3795 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3796
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003797- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3798 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3799 code.
3800
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003801- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3802 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3803 adjusting for negative indices.
3804
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003805- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3806 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3807 object.
3808
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003809- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3810 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3811 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3812
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003813- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3814 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003815
3816- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3817
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003818- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3819 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3820 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3821 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3822
3823- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3824
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003825- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003826
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003827- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003828 without going through the buffer API.
3829
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003830- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003831
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003832- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3833 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3834 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3835 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3836
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003837- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3838 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3839
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003840- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003841 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3842
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003843New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003844-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003845
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003846- OpenVMS is now supported.
3847
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003848- AtheOS is now supported.
3849
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003850- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3851
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003852- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3853
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003854Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003855-----
3856
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003857- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3858 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3859 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003860
3861Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003862-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003863
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003864- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3865 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3866 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3867 bugs.
3868 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003869 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003870 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3871 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003872 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003873
3874- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003875 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003876
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003877- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3878 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3879
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003880- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3881 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003882 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003883 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3884
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003885- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3886 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3887 use files" uninstall option).
3888
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003889- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3890
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003891- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3892 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3893
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003894- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3895 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3896 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3897
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003898- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3899 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3900 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3901 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3902 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003903 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3904 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3905 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003906
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003907- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003908 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003909 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3910 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3911 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3912 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3913 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3914 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3915 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3916 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3917 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3918 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3919 work around.
3920
3921- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3922 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3923 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3924 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3925 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3926 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3927 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3928 specified with O_CREAT too).
3929
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003930Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003931----
3932
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003933- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003934
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003935- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3936 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3937 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3938
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003939- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3940 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3941 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3942
3943- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3944 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3945 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3946 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3947 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3948 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3949 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3950 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003951
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003952- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3953 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3954 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003955
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003956- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3957 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3958 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3959 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3960 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003961
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003962- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3963 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3964 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003965
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003966- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3967 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003968
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003969- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3970 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3971 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3972 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3973 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003974
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003975- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3976 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3977 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3978
3979- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3980 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3981 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003982
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003983- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3984 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3985 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3986 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003987 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003988
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003989- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3990 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003991
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003992- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3993 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003994
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003995- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003996 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003997 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3998 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003999
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004000
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004001What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004002===============================
4003
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004004*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4005
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004006Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004007--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004008
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004009- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4010 with a custom metaclass.
4011
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004012Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004013-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004014
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004015- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4016 are proxies.
4017
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004018Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004019-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004020
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004021- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4022 very short strings.
4023
4024- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4025 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4026 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4027 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4028 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4029
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004030Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004031-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004032
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004033- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4034 close or delete time).
4035
4036- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4037 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4038
4039- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4040
4041- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004042 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004043
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004044Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004045-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004046
4047Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004048-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004049
4050C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004051-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004052
4053New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004054-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004055
4056Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004057-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004058
4059Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004060-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004061
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004062- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4063
4064- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4065 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4066
4067- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4068 deleted at process exit time.
4069
4070- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4071 in backslash.
4072
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004073Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004074----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004075
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004076- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4077 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4078 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4079
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004080
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004081What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004082===========================
4083
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004084*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4085
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004086Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004087--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004088
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004089- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4090 been extensively updated. See
4091
4092 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4093
4094 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4095
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004096- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4097 deleted!
4098
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004099- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4100 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4101 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4102 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4103 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4104
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004105- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4106
4107 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4108 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4109
4110 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4111 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4112 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4113 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4114 supported anyway.
4115
4116 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4117 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4118
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004119- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4120 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4121 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4122 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4123 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004124
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004125- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4126 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4127 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4128
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004129Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004130-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004131
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004132- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4133 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4134 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4135 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4136 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4137 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004138 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4139 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4140 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4141 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004142
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004143- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4144 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4145 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4146
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004147Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004148-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004149
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004150- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4151
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004152Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004153-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004154
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004155- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4156 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4157 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4158 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4159 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4160 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4161
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004162- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4163
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004164- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4165
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004166- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4167
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004168- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4169 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4170 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4171
4172- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4173
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004174Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004175-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004176
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004177- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4178 off a search on Google.
4179
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004180Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004181-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004182
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004183- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4184 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4185 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4186 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4187 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4188 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4189 other platforms should do likewise.
4190
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004191- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4192 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4193 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4194
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004195C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004196-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004197
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004198- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4199 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4200 producing key-value pairs.
4201
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004202- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004203 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004204 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4205 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4206 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4207 previously went unchallenged.
4208
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004209New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004210-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004211
4212Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004213-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004214
4215Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004216-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004217
4218Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004219----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004220
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004221- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4222 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004223
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004224- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4225 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4226 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4227 home.
4228
4229
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004230What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004231===========================
4232
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004233*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4234
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004235Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004236--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004237
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004238- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4239 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004240
4241 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004242 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004243
4244 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4245 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004246 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004247 This needs to be documented.
4248
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004249- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4250 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4251
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004252- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4253 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4254 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4255
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004256- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4257 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4258
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004259- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4260 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4261 class forbids it).
4262
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004263- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4264 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4265 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4266
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004267- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4268
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004269Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004270-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004271
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004272- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4273 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004274 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004275
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004276- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4277 (like 1 + '').
4278
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004279Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004280-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004281
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004282- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4283 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4284 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4285 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004286 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004287 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4288
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004289- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4290 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4291 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4292 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4293
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004294- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4295 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004296 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4297 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4298 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004299
4300- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4301 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004302
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004303- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4304 bytes on its input.
4305
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004306Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004307-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004308
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004309- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004310 convenience function.
4311
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004312- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4313 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4314 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004315 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4316 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4317 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4318 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4319 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4320 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004321
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004322- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4323 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4324 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4325 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4326
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004327- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4328 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4329 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4330
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004331- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4332 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4333 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4334 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4335
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004336- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4337 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004338 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004339 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4340 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4341 new -l and -e options.
4342
4343- statcache is now deprecated.
4344
4345- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4346 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004347 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004348 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4349 time properly taken into account.
4350
4351- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4352 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4353 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4354 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4355
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004356Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004357-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004358
4359Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004360-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004361
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004362- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4363 is built with libdb3 if available.
4364
4365- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4366
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004367C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004368-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004369
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004370- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4371 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4372 PySequence_Size().
4373
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004374- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4375
4376- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4377 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4378 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4379
4380- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4381 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4382
4383- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4384 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4385
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004386New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004387-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004388
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004389- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4390 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4391
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004392- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4393 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4394
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004395- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4396
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004397Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004398-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004399
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004400- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4401 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4402
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004403Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004404-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004405
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004406Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004407----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004408
4409- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4410 removed completely in the next release.
4411
4412- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4413 OSX.
4414
4415- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4416 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4417
4418- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4419
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004420
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004421What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004422===========================
4423
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004424*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4425
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004426Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004427--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004428
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004429- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004430 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004431 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004432 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4433 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004434 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4435 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004436 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4437 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004438
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004439- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4440 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4441
4442- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4443 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4444
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004445Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004446-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004447
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004448- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4449 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4450 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4451 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4452 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4453 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4454 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4455 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4456
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004457- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4458 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4459 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4460 example).
4461
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004462- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004463 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004464 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004465 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004466
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004467- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4468 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4469 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004470 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004471
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004472- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4473 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4474 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4475 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4476 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4477 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4478
4479 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4480
4481 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4482
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004483Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004484-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004485
4486- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4487
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004488- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4489
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004490- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4491 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004492
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004493- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4494 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4495 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4496 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4497 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4498 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004499 attributes.
4500
4501- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4502 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4503 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004504
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004505- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4506 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4507 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004508
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004509- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4510 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4511 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004512 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4513 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4514
4515- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4516 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004517
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004518Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004519-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004520
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004521- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4522 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4523
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004524- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4525 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4526 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4527 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4528
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004529- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4530 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4531 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4532 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4533
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004534 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4535 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4536 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4537 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4538 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4539 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4540 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4541 without losing information).
4542
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004543- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004544 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4545 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4546 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4547 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4548 module).
4549
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004550 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004551 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4552 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4553 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4554 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004555
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004556- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004557 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4558 encoding.
4559
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004560- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4561 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4562
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004563- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004564 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4565
4566- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4567 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4568 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4569 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4570
4571- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4572
4573- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4574 ON, and OFF.
4575
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004576- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4577 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4578
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004579Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004580-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004581
4582- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4583 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4584 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004585
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004586- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4587 been added: -X and -E.
4588
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004589Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004590-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004591
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004592- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4593 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4594
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004595C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004596-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004597
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004598- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4599 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4600 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4601 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4602 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4603
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004604- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4605 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4606 as long) arguments.
4607
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004608- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4609 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4610 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4611 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4612 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4613 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4614
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004615- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4616 input.
4617
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004618New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004619-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004620
4621Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004622-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004623
4624Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004625-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004626
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004627- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4628 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4629 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4630
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004631- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4632 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4633 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004634 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004635
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004636 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4637 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4638 import signal
4639 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004640
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004641 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004642 while 1:
4643 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004644 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004645 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4646 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4647 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4648 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004649
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004650
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004651What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4652===========================
4653
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004654*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4655
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004656Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004657--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004658
4659- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4660 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4661 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4662
4663- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4664 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4665 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4666 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4667 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4668 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4669 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004670
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004671- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004672 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004673 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4674 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4675 associate a docstring with a property.
4676
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004677- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4678 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4679 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4680 other built-in object types.
4681
4682- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4683 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4684 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4685 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4686 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4687
4688- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4689 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4690
4691- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4692 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004693 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004694 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4695 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4696 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4697 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4698 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4699
4700- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4701 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4702 class.
4703
4704- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4705 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4706 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4707 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4708
4709- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4710 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4711 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4712 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4713
4714- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4715 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4716
4717- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4718 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4719 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4720 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4721 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004722 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004723 with the same value as s.
4724
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004725- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4726
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004727Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004728----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004729
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004730- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4731
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004732- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4733 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4734 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4735 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4736 objects.
4737
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004738- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4739 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004740 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4741 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4742
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004743- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4744 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4745 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4746
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004747Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004748-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004749
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004750- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4751 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4752 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4753 by the instances.
4754
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004755- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4756 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4757 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4758
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004759- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4760 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4761 before the entire comparison is complete.
4762
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004763- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4764 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4765 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4766
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004767- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4768 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4769 getwriter().
4770
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004771- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4772 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4773
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004774- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004775 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4776 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4777
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004778- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4779 iterable object.
4780
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004781- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4782 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004783
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004784- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4785 authentication.
4786
4787- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4788 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004789
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004790- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004791 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4792 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4793 a sample driver.)
4794
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004795Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004796-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004797
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004798- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4799 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4800 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4801 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4802 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4803 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4804 kernel has large file support.
4805
4806- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4807 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4808 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4809 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4810 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4811
4812- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4813 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4814 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4815
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004816C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004817-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004818
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004819- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4820 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4821
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004822New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004823-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004824
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004825- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4826 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4827
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004828Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004829-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004830
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004831- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4832 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4833 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4834 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4835 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4836
4837- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4838 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4839 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4840 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4841
4842- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4843 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4844
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004845Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004846-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004847
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004848- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004849 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4850 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004851
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004852
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004853What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4854===========================
4855
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004856*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4857
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004858Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004859----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004860
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004861- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4862 big to represent as a C double.
4863
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004864- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4865 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4866 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4867 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4868 restriction).
4869
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004870- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4871 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4872 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4873 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4874 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4875
4876 >>> dir([])
4877 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4878 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4879 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4880 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4881 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4882 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4883 'reverse', 'sort']
4884
4885 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4886
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004887- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004888 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4889 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4890 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4891 OverflowError exception.
4892
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004893- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004894 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004895 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4896 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4897 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4898 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4899 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004900 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004901 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4902 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4903
4904 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4905 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4906 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4907 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004908
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004909- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004910 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4911 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4912 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4913 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4914 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4915 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4916 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4917 once it is created.
4918
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004919- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4920 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4921 (key, value) pairs.
4922
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004923- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004924 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4925 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4926
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004927- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4928 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4929 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4930 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4931 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004932
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004933- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004934 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4935 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4936
4937 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4938
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004939- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004940 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4941
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004942Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004943-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004944
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004945- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004946 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4947 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004948
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004949- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4950 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4951 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4952 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4953 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4954 in this area anymore).
4955
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004956- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4957 threading.Timer.
4958
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004959- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4960 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4961
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004962- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004963 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4964
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004965- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004966 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4967 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4968 converted to Python longs.
4969
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004970- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004971 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4972
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004973- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4974 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4975 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4976
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004977Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004978-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004979
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004980- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4981 division operators as per PEP 238.
4982
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004983Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004984-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004985
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004986- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4987 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4988 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4989 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4990
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004991C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004992-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004993
4994- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004995
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004996- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4997 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004998 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004999
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005000 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5001 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005002 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005003 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005004
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005005- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005006 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5007 module:
5008
5009 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005010
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005011 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5012 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005013
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005014 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5015 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005016
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005017 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5018
5019 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5020
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005021- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005022 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5023 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5024 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005025
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005026New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005027-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005028
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005029- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5030 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5031 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5032 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5033 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005034
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005035Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005036-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005037
5038Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005039-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005040
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005041- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5042 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5043 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5044 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005045 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5046 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5047 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5048 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5049 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005050
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005051- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005052 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5053
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005054
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005055What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5056===========================
5057
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005058*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5059
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005060Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005061-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005062
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005063- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5064 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5065
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005066- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5067 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5068 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005069
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005070- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5071 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5072 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5073 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005074
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005075- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5076
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005077- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005078
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005079Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005080-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005081
5082- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005083 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005084 the module docstring for details.
5085
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005086Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005087-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005088
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005089- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005090 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5091 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5092 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005093
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005094- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5095 Nick Mathewson.
5096
5097Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005098----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005099
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005100- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5101 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5102 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5103 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5104 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5105 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5106 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5107 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5108
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005109- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5110 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5111 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5112 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5113
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005114- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5115 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5116 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5117 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5118 come a long way).
5119
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005120- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5121 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5122 write filters for these warnings).
5123
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005124- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5125 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5126 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5127 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5128 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5129
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005130- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5131 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5132 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5133 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5134 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5135 older distribution.
5136
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005137Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005138-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005139
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005140- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5141 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005142 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005143
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005144- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5145 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5146 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5147
5148- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5149
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005150- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5151
5152- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5153
5154- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5155
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005156- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005157
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005158- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5159
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005160New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005161-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005162
5163C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005164-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005165
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005166- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5167 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5168 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5169 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5170 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5171 against buffer overruns.
5172
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005173- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005174 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5175 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005176 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5177 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5178 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5179
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005180- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5181 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5182 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5183 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5184 deprecated.
5185
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005186Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005187-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005188
5189- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5190 relevant is found.
5191
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005192
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005193What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005194===========================
5195
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005196*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5197
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005198Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005199----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005200
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005201- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5202 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5203 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5204 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5205 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5206 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5207 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5208 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005209 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005210 repaired.
5211
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005212- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005213 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005214 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5215 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5216 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5217 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5218 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5219 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5220 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5221 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5222
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005223- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5224 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5225 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5226 leading BMO character).
5227
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005228- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5229 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5230 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5231
5232 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5233 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5234 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005235
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005236 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5237 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5238 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5239 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5240 for various simple to use conversions.
5241
5242 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5243 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5244
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005245 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5246 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5247 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5248 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5249 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5250 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5251 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5252 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5253 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5254 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5255 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5256 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5257 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5258 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5259 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005260
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005261- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5262 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5263 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005264 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005265 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005266
5267 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005268 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5269 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5270 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5271 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5272 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005273 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5274 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005275
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005276 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5277 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5278 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005279 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005280
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005281- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5282 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5283 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5284 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5285 floating arithmetic,
5286
5287 x = 9007199254740992.0
5288 print long(x)
5289
5290 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5291 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5292 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5293 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5294 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5295 functions are of good quality).
5296
5297 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5298 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5299 algorithms to break.
5300
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005301- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5302 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5303 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5304 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5305 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5306 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5307 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5308 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5309 order.
5310
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005311- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5312 operation along the most common code paths.
5313
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005314- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5315 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5316
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005317- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5318 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5319 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5320 {}.update(UserDict())
5321
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005322- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5323 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5324 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5325 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5326 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5327 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5328 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5329 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5330
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005331- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005332 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005333
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005334 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005335 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5336 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005337 join() method of strings
5338 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005339 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5340 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005341 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005342 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005343
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005344- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5345 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5346
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005347- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5348 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5349
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005350- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5351 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5352 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5353 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5354
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005355- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5356 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005357 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005358 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5359 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005360
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005361- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5362
5363
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005364Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005365-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005366
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005367- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005368 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005369 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5370 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5371
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005372- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5373 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5374
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005375- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5376 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5377 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5378 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5379
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005380- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5381 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5382 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5383
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005384- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5385
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005386- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5387
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005388- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5389 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5390 that are still imported into string.py).
5391
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005392- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5393
5394- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5395 Now it does.
5396
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005397- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5398
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005399- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5400 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5401 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5402 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5403 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005404 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5405 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005406
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005407- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5408 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5409 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5410 'help(object)'.
5411
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005412Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005413-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005414
5415- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005416 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005417 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5418 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5419
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005420- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005421 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5422 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005423
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005424C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005425-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005426
5427- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5428 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005429
5430----
5431
5432**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**