blob: 10e43bc214eaaf4ddae041c268e4ca5f55392cfc [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000015- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
16 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
17 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
18
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000019- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
20
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000021- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
22 reference counts in some error exit cases.
23
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000024- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
25 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
26 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
27 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
28 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
29 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
30 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
31 realloc.
32
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000033- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
34 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
35
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000036- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
37 like their int counterparts.
38
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000039- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
40 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
41 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
42 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
43 for a longer write-up of the problem).
44
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000045- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
46 serializing floats.
47
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000048- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
49 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
50 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
51
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000052- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
53 278.
54
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000055- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
56 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
57 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
58 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
59 to the base class has been moved the prroper nb_* magic slot and out of
60 PyNumber_*().
61 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
62
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000063- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
64 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
65 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
66 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
67
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000068- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
69 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
70 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
71 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
72 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
73
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000074- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
75 disabled caused a crash.
76
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000077- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
78 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
79
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000080- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000081 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
82
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000083- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
84
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000085- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000086 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
87 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
88 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000089
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000090- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
91
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000092- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
93 returning None.
94
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000095- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000096 ('\') with a specific error message.
97
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000098- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
99
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000100- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
101 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
102
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000103- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000104 an ferror() call.
105
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000106- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
107 list.sort().
108
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000109- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
110 (2+3) --> (5).
111
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000112- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
113
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000114- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
115 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000116
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000117- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
118 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
119 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
120
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000121Extension Modules
122-----------------
123
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000124- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
125 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
126 for large or negative values.
127
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000128- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000129 implemented treated all integer values except 1 as false.
130
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000131- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
132
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000133- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
134 if available on the platform.
135
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000136- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
137 available on the platform.
138
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000139- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
140 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
141
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000142- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
143
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000144- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
145 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
146 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
147
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000148- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
149
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000150- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
151 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
152
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000153- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000154 file size.
155
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000156- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
157
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000158- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
159 {remove_history,replace_history}
160
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000161- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
162 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000163
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000164- stat_float_times is now True.
165
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000166- array.array objects are now picklable.
167
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000168- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
169 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
170
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000171- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
172 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
173 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
174
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000175- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
176 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000177
178Library
179-------
180
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000181- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
182
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000183- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
184 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
185
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000186- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
187 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
188 Tkdnd.
189
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000190- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
191 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
192
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000193- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
194 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
195
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000196- textwrap now processes text chucks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
197 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
198
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000199- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
200 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
201
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000202- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
203 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
204
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000205- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
206 though this can be missing in embedded interpreters
207
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000208- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
209
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000210- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
211 error messages.
212
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000213- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
214
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000215- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
216 Bug #1224621.
217
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000218- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
219 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
220 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
221 terminates by raising StopIteration.
222
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000223- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
224
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000225- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
226 component of the path.
227
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000228- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
229 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
230 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
231 class at all.
232
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000233- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
234 files to PyPI.
235
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000236- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
237 them to PyPI.
238
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000239- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
240 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
241 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
242 work as expected.
243
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000244- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
245 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
246
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000247- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000248 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
249
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000250- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
251
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000252- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
253 to build.
254
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000255- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
256 symbolic links on Windows.
257
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000258- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000259 profile.py if available.
260
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000261- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
262
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000263- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
264 in LWPCookieJar.
265
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000266- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
267
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000268- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
269
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000270- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
271
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000272- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
273
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000274- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
275
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000276- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
277
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000278- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
279
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000280- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
281
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000282- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
283 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
284 be exploited in various ways.
285
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000286- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
287
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000288- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
289
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000290- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
291
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000292- Enhancements to the csv module:
293
294 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000295 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000296 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000297 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
298 reporting.
299 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
300 dictates.
301 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000302 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000303 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000304 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
305 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000306 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
307 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000308 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000309 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
310 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
311 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
312 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
313 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
314 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
315 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
316 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
317 without first creating a dialect class.
318 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
319 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
320 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000321 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000322 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
323 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000324 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
325 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
326 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
327 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000328 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
329 This has been fixed.
330
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000331- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
332 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
333 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
334 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
335
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000336- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
337
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000338- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
339 (Bug #951915).
340
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000341- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
342 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
343 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
344 encoding alias table
345
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000346- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
347
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000348- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
349 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
350
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000351- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
352
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000353- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
354
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000355- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
356
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000357- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
358
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000359- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
360
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000361- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
362 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
363 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
364
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000365- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000366 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000367
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000368- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
369 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
370 tokenizer with very long source lines.
371
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000372- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
373 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
374
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000375- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
376 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000377
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000378- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
379 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
380
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000381- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
382 correctly.
383
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000384- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
385 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
386 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
387 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
388 between two lines.
389
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000390
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000391Build
392-----
393
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000394- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
395 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
396
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000397- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
398 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
399
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000400- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
401 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
402 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000403 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000404
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000405- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
406 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
407 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
408
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000409- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
410
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000411- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
412 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
413
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000414- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
415 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
416 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
417 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
418 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
419 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
420 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
421 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
422
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000423- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
424 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
425 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
426 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
427
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000428
429C API
430-----
431
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000432- Removed PyRange_New().
433
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000434
435Tests
436-----
437
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000438- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000439
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000440
441Documentation
442-------------
443
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000444- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
445
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000446- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
447
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000448- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
449
450- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
451
452- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
453
454- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
455
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000456- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
457 Closes bug #1166582.
458
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000459- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
460 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
461 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
462
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000463Mac
464---
465
466
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000467New platforms
468-------------
469
470- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
471
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000472
473Tools/Demos
474-----------
475
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000476- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
477
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000478- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000479
480
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000481What's New in Python 2.4 final?
482===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000483
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000484*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000485
486Core and builtins
487-----------------
488
489- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
490 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
491 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
492
493
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000494What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
495==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000496
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000497*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000498
499Core and builtins
500-----------------
501
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000502- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
503 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
504 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
505
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000506
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000507Library
508-------
509
510- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
511 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
512 raised is re-raised.
513
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000514- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
515 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
516
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000517- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
518 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
519 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
520 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
521 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
522 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
523 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
524 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
525 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
526 by the slice are recomputed now.
527
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000528- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000529
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000530Build
531-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000532
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000533- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
534 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
535 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000536
537C API
538-----
539
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000540- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
541
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000542
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000543What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
544================================
545
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000546*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000547
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000548License
549-------
550
551The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
552is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
553changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
554Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
555intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
556durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
557the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
558License::
559
560 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
561
562says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
563to Python 2.1.1.
564
565The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
566License Version 2.
567
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000568Core and builtins
569-----------------
570
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000571- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
572 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
573 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
574 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
575 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
576 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
577 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
578 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
579 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
580 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
581
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000582- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000583
584Extension Modules
585-----------------
586
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000587- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
588 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
589 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
590 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000591
592Library
593-------
594
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000595- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
596 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
597 returned.
598
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000599- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
600
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000601- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
602 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
603
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000604- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
605
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000606- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
607 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000608
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000609- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
610
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000611- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
612
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000613- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000614 the source code is updated and reloaded.
615
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000616Build
617-----
618
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000619- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000620
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000621What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
622================================
623
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000624*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000625
626Core and builtins
627-----------------
628
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000629- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000630 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
631
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000632- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
633 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
634 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
635 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
636
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000637- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
638 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
639
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000640- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
641 constant.
642
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000643- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
644 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
645 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
646 large), and to anomalies such as
647 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
648 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
649 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
650 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000651
652Extension modules
653-----------------
654
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000655- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
656 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000657 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
658 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
659 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000660
661Library
662-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000663
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000664- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000665 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000666 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
667 --swig-cpp.
668
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000669- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
670 it is set.
671
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000672- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000673
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000674- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
675 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
676 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
677 Closes bug #1039270.
678
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000679- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000680
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000681 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000682 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
683 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
684 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
685 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
686 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
687 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
688 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
689 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
690 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
691 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
692 + Updates to documentation.
693
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000694- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
695 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
696 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
697 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
698
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000699- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000700
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000701- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
702 applications should use the getmember function.
703
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000704- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
705
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000706- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
707 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
708 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
709 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
710 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
711 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
712 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
713 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
714 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
715
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000716- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
717 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000718 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000719
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000720- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
721 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
722 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
723 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
724 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
725 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
726 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
727 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000728
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000729- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
730 the new public features (of which there are many).
731
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000732- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000733 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
734 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
735 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
736 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000737 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000738
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000739- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
740
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000741- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
742 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
743 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
744 options.
745
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000746- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
747 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
748 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
749 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
750 conditions under which non-string values work.
751
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000752Build
753-----
754
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000755- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
756 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
757 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
758
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000759- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
760 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
761 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
762 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
763 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000764
765C API
766-----
767
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000768- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
769 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
770
771- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
772
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000773- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
774 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
775 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
776 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
777 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
778 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
779 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
780 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
781 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
782
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000783- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
784
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000785- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
786 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
787 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000788
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000789Tests
790-----
791
792- test__locale ported to unittest
793
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000794Mac
795---
796
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000797- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
798 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
799 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000800
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000801Tools/Demos
802-----------
803
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000804- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
805 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
806 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
807 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
808 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000809
810
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000811What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
812=================================
813
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000814*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000815
816Core and builtins
817-----------------
818
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000819- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000820 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
821
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000822- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
823 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
824 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
825 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
826 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
827 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
828 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
829 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000830 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
831 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
832 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
833 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
834 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000835
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000836- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
837 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
838 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
839 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
840 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
841
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000842- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
843
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000844- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
845 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
846
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000847- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
848 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
849 modified the list.
850
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000851- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
852 functions is now writable.
853
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000854- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
855 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
856 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
857 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
858
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000859- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
860 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
861 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
862 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
863 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000864
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000865- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
866 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
867
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000868Extension modules
869-----------------
870
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000871- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
872
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000873- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
874 data.
875
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000876- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
877 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
878 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
879 supposed to have been truncated away.
880
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000881- Added socket.socketpair().
882
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000883- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
884 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
885
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000886- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000887 versions of Python, have now been removed.
888
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000889Library
890-------
891
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000892- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000893 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000894
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000895- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
896 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
897
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000898- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
899 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
900
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000901- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
902
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000903- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
904 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000905
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000906- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
907 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
908
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000909- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
910
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000911- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
912
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000913- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
914
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000915- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
916 Percivall.
917
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000918- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
919 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
920
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000921- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
922 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
923 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000924 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000925
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000926- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
927 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
928 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
929 and exponent.
930
931- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
932
933- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +0000934 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000935 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
936
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000937- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
938 to the readline module.
939
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000940- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000941 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
942 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000943
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000944- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
945 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
946 contains symlinks.
947
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000948- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
949 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
950
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000951- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
952 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
953 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
954
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000955- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
956 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
957 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
958 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
959 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
960 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
961 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
962 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
963 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
964 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
965 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
966 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
967 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
968
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000969- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
970
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000971Tools/Demos
972-----------
973
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000974- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
975 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
976
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000977- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
978
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000979Build
980-----
981
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000982- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
983 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
984 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
985 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
986 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
987 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
988 plans to do so.
989
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000990- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
991 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
992
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000993- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
994 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
995
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000996- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
997 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
998
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000999- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1000 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1001
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001002- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1003 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1004
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001005C API
1006-----
1007
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001008..
1009
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001010Documentation
1011-------------
1012
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001013- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1014 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1015
1016- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1017 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1018 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001019
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001020New platforms
1021-------------
1022
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001023- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1024
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001025Tests
1026-----
1027
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001028..
1029
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001030Windows
1031-------
1032
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001033- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1034 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1035 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1036 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1037 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1038 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1039 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1040 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1041 the problem.
1042
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001043Mac
1044---
1045
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001046..
1047
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001048
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001049What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1050=================================
1051
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001052*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001053
1054Core and builtins
1055-----------------
1056
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001057- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1058 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1059 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1060 sensitive code.
1061
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001062- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001063 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001064
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001065 @staticmethod
1066 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001067
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001068 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001069
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001070- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1071 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1072 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1073 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1074 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1075 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1076 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1077 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1078 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1079 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1080 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1081
1082 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1083 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1084 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1085 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1086 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1087 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1088 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1089
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001090- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1091 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1092
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001093- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001094 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001095
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001096- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001097 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001098 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1099
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001100- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001101 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1102 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1103
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001104- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1105 types that support garbage collection.
1106
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001107- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1108
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001109- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1110 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1111 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1112 Jython.
1113
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001114- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1115
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001116- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1117 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1118
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001119- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1120 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1121 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001122
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001123- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1124 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1125 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1126
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001127Extension modules
1128-----------------
1129
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001130- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1131
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001132Library
1133-------
1134
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001135- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1136 TIS-620
1137
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001138- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1139 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1140 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1141 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1142 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1143 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1144 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1145 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1146 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1147 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1148
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001149- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1150
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001151- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1152 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1153 same as when the argument is omitted).
1154 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1155
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001156- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1157
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001158- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1159 schemes are offered.
1160
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001161- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1162
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001163- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1164 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1165 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1166
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001167- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1168
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001169- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1170 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1171
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001172- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1173 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1174 when dummy_threading is being used.
1175
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001176- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1177 from a tarfile.
1178
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001179- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001180 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001181
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001182- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1183 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1184 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1185 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1186
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001187- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1188 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1189
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001190- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1191 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1192 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1193 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1194 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1195 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1196 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1197 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1198 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1199 by some other method in progress).
1200
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001201- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1202 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1203 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001204
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001205- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1206
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001207- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1208 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1209 AM Kuchling.
1210
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001211- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1212 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1213 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1214
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001215- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1216 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1217 instead of unsigned.
1218
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001219- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001220 no longer part of the public API.
1221
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001222- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1223 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1224 string methods of the same name).
1225
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001226- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001227 SF patch 945642.
1228
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001229- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1230
1231 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1232
1233 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1234 DocTestSuites.
1235
1236- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1237 that provide thread-local data.
1238
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001239- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1240 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1241
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001242- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1243
1244- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1245 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1246 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1247
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001248- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1249
1250 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1251 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1252 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001253
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001254 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1255 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1256 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1257 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1258
1259 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1260 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1261
1262 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1263 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1264 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1265 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1266
1267 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1268 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1269 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1270 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1271 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1272
1273 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1274 wrapping help output.
1275
1276 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1277 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1278 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001279
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001280C API
1281-----
1282
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001283- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1284 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1285 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1286 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1287 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1288 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1289 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1290 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1291 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1292 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1293 its visible semantics have not changed.
1294
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001295- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1296 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1297
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001298Documentation
1299-------------
1300
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001301- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001302
1303 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001304 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001305
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001306 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001307
1308 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1309
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001310- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001311
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001312Tests
1313-----
1314
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001315- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001316 platforms that use the Makefile.
1317
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001318- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1319 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1320 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1321
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001322
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001323What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1324=================================
1325
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001326*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001327
1328Core and builtins
1329-----------------
1330
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001331- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1332 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1333 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1334 objects now (one object instead of three).
1335
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001336- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1337 Windows DLLs.
1338
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001339- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1340 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001341
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001342- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1343 a new .pyc magic.
1344
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001345- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1346 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1347 be there.
1348
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001349- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1350 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1351 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1352
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001353- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1354 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1355 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1356
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001357- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1358
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001359- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1360 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1361 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001362
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001363- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1364 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1365
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001366- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1367
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001368- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001369 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001370
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001371- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1372
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001373- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1374
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001375- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1376 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1377
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001378- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1379 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1380 Fixes bug #858016 .
1381
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001382- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1383 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1384 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1385
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001386- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1387 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1388 improves their performance (about 35%).
1389
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001390- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1391 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1392 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1393
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001394- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1395 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1396 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1397 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1398
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001399- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1400 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001401 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001402 length is not known).
1403
1404- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1405 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001406 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1407 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001408 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1409
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001410- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1411 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1412
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001413- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1414 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1415 keyword arguments.
1416
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001417- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1418 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1419 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1420
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001421- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1422 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1423 cases.
1424
1425- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1426 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1427 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1428 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1429 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1430 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1431 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1432 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1433 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1434 a release build.
1435
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001436- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1437 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1438
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001439- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001440 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001441
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001442- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1443 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1444 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1445 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1446 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1447 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1448 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1449 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1450 destroyed.
1451
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001452- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1453 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1454 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1455 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1456 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1457 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1458 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1459 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1460
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001461- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1462 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1463 character other than a space.
1464
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001465- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1466 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1467 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1468 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1469 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1470 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1471 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1472 attributes with the same name.
1473
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001474- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1475 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1476 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1477 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1478 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1479 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1480 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1481 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1482 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1483 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1484 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1485 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1486 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1487 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001488
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001489- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1490 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1491 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1492 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1493 This has been repaired.
1494
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001495- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1496
1497- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1498
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001499- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1500 over a sequence.
1501
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001502- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001503 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001504
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001505- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1506
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001507- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1508 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1509 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1510 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1511 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1512 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1513 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1514 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1515
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001516- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1517 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1518 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1519
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001520- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1521 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1522 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1523 freelist.
1524
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001525- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1526 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1527
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001528- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1529 number.
1530
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001531- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1532 a TypeError exception.
1533
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001534- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1535 820195.
1536
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001537- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1538 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1539 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1540
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001541- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001542 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1543 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001544
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001545- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1546 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1547 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1548
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001549- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1550 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001551 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001552
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001553- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001554 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1555 the first call.
1556
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001557
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001558Extension modules
1559-----------------
1560
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001561- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1562 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1563
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001564- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1565 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1566 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1567 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1568 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1569 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1570 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001571
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001572- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1573
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001574- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1575
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001576- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1577 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1578
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001579- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1580 fewer false positives.
1581
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001582- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1583 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1584
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001585- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001586 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1587
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001588- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001589 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001590 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001591 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1592 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001593
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001594- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1595 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1596 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1597 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1598
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001599- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1600 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1601 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1602 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1603 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1604 #897625.
1605
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001606- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1607 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1608
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001609- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1610 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1611 and pops on either side of the deque.
1612
1613- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1614 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1615
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001616- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1617 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1618 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1619 other functions that expect a function argument.
1620
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001621- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1622
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001623- os.getsid was added.
1624
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001625- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1626 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1627 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1628
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001629- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1630
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001631- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1632
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001633- readline.clear_history was added.
1634
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001635- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1636
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001637- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1638
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001639- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1640
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001641- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1642
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001643- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1644
1645- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1646
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001647- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1648
1649- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1650
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001651- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1652 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1653 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1654
1655- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1656 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1657 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1658 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1659 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1660 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1661 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1662
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001663- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1664 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1665 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1666 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001667
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001668- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001669 iterators from a single iterable.
1670
1671- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1672 of raising a TypeError exception.
1673
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001674- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1675 as parameter.
1676
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001677Library
1678-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001679
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001680- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1681 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1682 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001683
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001684- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1685 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1686 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001687
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001688- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001689
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001690- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1691 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001692
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001693- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1694 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1695
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001696- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1697
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001698- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001699 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001700
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001701- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001702 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001703
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001704- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1705
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001706- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1707 on cygwin and mingw32.
1708
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001709- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1710
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001711- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1712 module.
1713
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001714- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1715 installation scheme for all platforms.
1716
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001717- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001718 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001719
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001720- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1721 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1722 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1723
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001724- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1725 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1726 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1727
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001728- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1729
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001730- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1731
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001732- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1733 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1734
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001735- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1736 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1737 type pattern with the same value exists.
1738
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001739- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1740 when run from the command prompt).
1741
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001742- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1743 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1744
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001745- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1746 default sort).
1747
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001748- Added global runctx function to profile module
1749
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001750- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1751
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001752- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1753
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001754- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1755
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001756- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001757 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1758 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1759 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1760 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1761 accordingly.
1762
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001763- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1764 decoding standards.
1765
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001766- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1767 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1768 called for all requests.
1769
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001770- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1771 they are passed to the compiler.
1772
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001773- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1774 indent, width and depth.
1775
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001776- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1777 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1778
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001779- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1780 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1781
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001782- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1783
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001784- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1785
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001786- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1787
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001788- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1789 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1790
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001791- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001792 for better performance.
1793
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001794- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001795
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001796- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1797 a string).
1798
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001799- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1800
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001801- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1802
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001803- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1804
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001805- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1806
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001807- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1808 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1809 list of fieldnames.
1810
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001811- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1812 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1813
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001814- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1815
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001816- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1817 empty lists.
1818
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001819- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1820 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1821 and shelves.
1822
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001823- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1824 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1825
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001826- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001827 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1828 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001829
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001830- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1831 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001832 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001833
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001834- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001835 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1836 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1837
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001838- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1839 and removed in Py2.4.
1840
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001841- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1842
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001843- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1844
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001845Tools/Demos
1846-----------
1847
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001848- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1849 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1850
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001851- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1852
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001853- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1854 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1855 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1856 destination in situations where both files are given.
1857
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001858- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1859 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1860 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1861 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1862
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001863- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1864
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001865- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1866 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1867 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1868 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1869 now.
1870
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001871- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1872 in effect
1873
1874- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1875 C-c C-h
1876
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001877- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1878 -d option was given.
1879
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001880Build
1881-----
1882
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001883- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1884 build under OS X.
1885
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001886- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1887 --enable-profiling.
1888
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001889- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1890 is configured --with-tsc.
1891
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001892- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1893 on AMD64.
1894
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001895- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1896 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1897
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001898- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1899 removed.
1900
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001901- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1902 supported (see PEP 11).
1903
1904- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1905
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001906- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1907
1908- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1909 (see PEP 11).
1910
1911- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1912 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1913
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001914C API
1915-----
1916
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001917- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1918 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1919 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1920
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001921- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1922 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1923 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1924 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1925
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001926- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1927 generator objects.
1928
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001929- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1930 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001931 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1932 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001933
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001934- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1935 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1936
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001937- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1938 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1939 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1940 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1941 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1942
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001943- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1944 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1945 about 10% faster.
1946
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001947- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1948 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1949
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001950- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1951 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1952 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1953 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1954
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001955Windows
1956-------
1957
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001958- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1959 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1960 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1961 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1962
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001963- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1964 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1965 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1966
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001967
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001968What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1969===============================
1970
1971*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1972
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001973IDLE
1974----
1975
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001976- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1977 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1978 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1979 context-menu actions.
1980
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001981- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1982 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1983 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1984 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1985 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1986 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1987 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1988 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1989 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1990
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001991
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001992What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1993=============================================
1994
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001995*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001996
1997Core and builtins
1998-----------------
1999
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002000- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002001 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002002 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2003
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002004Extension modules
2005-----------------
2006
2007- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2008 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2009 than once. This has been fixed.
2010
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002011- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2012 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2013 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2014 call.
2015
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002016- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2017
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002018Library
2019-------
2020
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002021- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2022 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2023
2024- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2025 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2026 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2027 restored.
2028
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002029IDLE
2030----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002031
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002032- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002033
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002034Build
2035-----
2036
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002037- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2038 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2039
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002040C API
2041-----
2042
2043Windows
2044-------
2045
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002046- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2047 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2048
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002049- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2050
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002051Mac
2052---
2053
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002054- Various fixes to pimp.
2055
2056- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2057
2058- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2059 more problems than it solves.
2060
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002061
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002062What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2063=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002064
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002065*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2066
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002067Core and builtins
2068-----------------
2069
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002070- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2071 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2072
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002073- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2074 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002075 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002076
2077- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2078 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2079 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002080 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002081
2082- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2083 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002084
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002085- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2086 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2087 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2088
2089- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002090 770247.
2091
2092- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002093
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002094Extension modules
2095-----------------
2096
2097- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2098 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2099
2100- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2101
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002102- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2103
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002104- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2105 contained within the _strptime module.
2106
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002107- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2108 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2109
2110- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002111 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2112
2113- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2114 the find_class attribute, if present.
2115
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002116- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002117
2118 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2119 (SF bug 763298).
2120
2121 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002122 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2123 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2124 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002125
2126 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2127
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002128Library
2129-------
2130
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002131- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2132
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002133- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2134 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2135 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2136 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2137 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2138 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2139 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2140 or Tester().
2141
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002142- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2143 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2144 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2145 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2146 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2147 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2148 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2149 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2150 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002151
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002152 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002153
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002154- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2155 weren't before was an oversight.
2156
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002157- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2158 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2159
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002160- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2161 when there are no lines.
2162
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002163- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2164 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2165
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002166- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2167 to child processes.
2168
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002169- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2170
2171- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2172
2173- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2174 xmlrpclib.
2175
2176- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2177 responses.
2178
2179- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2180 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2181
2182- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2183 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2184 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2185
2186- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2187 used as patterns.
2188
2189- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2190 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2191 than Tk 8.3.
2192
2193- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2194
2195- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002196
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002197Tools/Demos
2198-----------
2199
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002200- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2201
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002202- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2203
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002204- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002205
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002206Build
2207-----
2208
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002209- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2210
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002211- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2212
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002213- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2214 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002215
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002216- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2217 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2218 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002219
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002220C API
2221-----
2222
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002223- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2224 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2225
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002226Windows
2227-------
2228
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002229- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2230 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2231 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2232 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2233 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2234 Python exception ::
2235
2236 thread.error: can't start new thread
2237
2238 is raised now.
2239
2240- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2241 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2242 instead of from DLL teardown.
2243
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002244Mac
2245---
2246
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002247- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002248 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002249 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2250 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2251 the executable in the bundle.
2252
2253- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002254
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002255- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2256
2257- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2258 on Panther.
2259
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002260What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2261================================
2262
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002263*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002264
2265Core and builtins
2266-----------------
2267
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002268- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2269 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2270 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2271 with the -i option.
2272
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002273- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2274 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2275
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002276- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2277 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2278
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002279- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2280 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2281 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2282 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2283 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2284 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2285 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2286 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2287 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2288 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2289 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2290 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2291 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002292
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002293- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2294 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2295 embedded in a lambda expression.
2296
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002297- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2298 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2299 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2300 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2301 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2302
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002303- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2304 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2305 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2306
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002307- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2308 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2309
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002310- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2311 It's writable again.
2312
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002313- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2314 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2315 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002316 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002317
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002318- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2319 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2320 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2321
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002322Extension modules
2323-----------------
2324
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002325- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2326 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2327
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002328- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2329 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2330 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2331 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2332
2333- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2334 collection.
2335
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002336- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2337 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2338 unique within a single program run.
2339
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002340- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2341 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2342
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002343- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2344 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2345
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002346- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2347 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002348
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002349- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2350
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002351- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2352 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2353
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002354- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2355 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2356 for many BSD-derived systems.
2357
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002358
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002359Library
2360-------
2361
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002362- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2363 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2364 primary ones:
2365
2366 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2367 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2368 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2369
2370 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2371 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2372 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2373 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2374 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2375 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2376
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002377- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2378 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2379 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2380 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2381 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2382 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2383 argument.
2384
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002385- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2386 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2387 in the archive.
2388
2389- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2390 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2391
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002392- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2393 569574).
2394
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002395- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2396 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2397 no more.
2398
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002399- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2400 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2401 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2402 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2403 code coverage.
2404
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002405- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2406 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2407 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002408 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2409 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002410
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002411- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2412 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2413 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002414 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002415
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002416- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2417
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002418- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2419 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2420 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2421 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2422
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002423- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2424 handling.
2425
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002426- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2427 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2428
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002429- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2430 in socket.py.
2431
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002432- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2433
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002434- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2435 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2436 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2437 opener with proxy support.
2438
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002439- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2440
2441- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2442
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002443Tools/Demos
2444-----------
2445
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002446- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2447
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002448- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2449
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002450- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2451 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002452
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002453- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2454 files.
2455
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002456Build
2457-----
2458
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002459- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002460 different root directory.
2461
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002462C API
2463-----
2464
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002465- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2466 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2467 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2468 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2469 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2470 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2471 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2472 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2473 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2474 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2475
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002476- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2477 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2478 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2479 from Python.
2480
2481
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002482New platforms
2483-------------
2484
2485None this time.
2486
2487Tests
2488-----
2489
2490- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2491 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2492
2493Windows
2494-------
2495
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002496- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2497
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002498- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2499 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2500 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2501 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2502 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2503 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2504 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2505 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2506 that's what it's for.
2507
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002508Mac
2509---
2510
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002511- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2512 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2513 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2514 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002515- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2516 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2517- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002518
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002519SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2520------------------------------------
2521
2522430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2523598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2524622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2525661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2526683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2527697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2528713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2529724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2530727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2531729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2532730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2533731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2534732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2535733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2536735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2537740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2538744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2539745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2540747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2541749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2542751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2543753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2544755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2545757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2546760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2547
2548
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002549What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2550================================
2551
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002552*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002553
2554Core and builtins
2555-----------------
2556
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002557- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2558 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2559
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002560- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2561 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2562 and cannot be strings).
2563
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002564- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2565 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2566 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2567 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2568
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002569- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2570 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2571 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2572 Python itself.
2573
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002574- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2575 the referenced object, if it has one.
2576
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002577- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2578 the thread started at
2579 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2580
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002581- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2582 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2583 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2584 placed on a list index.
2585
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002586- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2587 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2588 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2589 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2590
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002591- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2592 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2593 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2594 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2595 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2596 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2597 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2598
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002599- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2600 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2601 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2602 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2603 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2604
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002605- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2606 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002607
2608- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2609 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2610 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2611 #693195.)
2612
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002613- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2614 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002615
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002616- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002617 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002618 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2619 interpreter executions, would fail.
2620
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002621- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002622 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002623 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002624
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002625Extension modules
2626-----------------
2627
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002628- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2629 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2630 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2631 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2632
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002633- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2634 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2635
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002636- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2637 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2638 and Greg Chapman.)
2639
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002640- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2641 recursively.
2642
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002643- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002644 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2645 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2646 leaks.
2647
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002648- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2649
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002650- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2651 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2652 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2653 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2654 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2655 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2656 #705836.
2657
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002658- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002659 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2660
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002661- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2662 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2663 See SF bug #692416.
2664
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002665- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2666 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2667
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002668- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2669 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2670 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002671
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002672- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002673 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2674 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2675
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002676- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2677 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2678 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2679 timeouts to work properly.
2680
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002681Library
2682-------
2683
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002684- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2685 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2686 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2687 future release.
2688
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002689- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2690 for querying platform dependent features.
2691
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002692- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002693
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002694- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2695 pickle protocol versions.
2696
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002697- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2698 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2699 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2700
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002701- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2702
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002703- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2704 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2705 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2706 modules.
2707
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002708- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2709 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2710 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2711
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002712- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2713 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2714
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002715- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2716 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2717 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2718
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002719- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002720 MS Office extensions.
2721
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002722- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2723 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2724
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002725- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2726 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2727
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002728- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2729 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2730 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2731 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2732 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2733 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2734
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002735- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2736 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2737 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002738
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002739- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2740 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2741 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2742
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002743- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2744
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002745- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2746 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2747 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2748
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002749Tools/Demos
2750-----------
2751
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002752- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2753 See the module docstring for details.
2754
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002755Build
2756-----
2757
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002758- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2759 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002760
2761C API
2762-----
2763
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002764- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2765
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002766- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2767 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2768 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2769
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002770- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2771 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002772
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002773 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2774 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2775 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002776
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002777- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002778 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2779
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002780- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2781 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2782 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002783
2784New platforms
2785-------------
2786
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002787None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002788
2789Tests
2790-----
2791
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002792- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2793 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002794
2795Windows
2796-------
2797
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002798- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2799 function.
2800
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002801- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2802 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002803
2804Mac
2805---
2806
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002807- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2808 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002809
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002810- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2811 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002812
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002813- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2814 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2815 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002816
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002817- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002818 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2819 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002820
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002821- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2822 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002823
2824
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002825What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2826=================================
2827
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002828*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002829
2830Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002831-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002832
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002833- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2834 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2835 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2836
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002837- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2838 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2839 (SF patch #664376.)
2840
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002841- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2842 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2843 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2844 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2845 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2846 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002847 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002848
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002849- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2850 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2851 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2852 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002853 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002854
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002855- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2856 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2857 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2858 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2859 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2860 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2861 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2862 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2863 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2864 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2865 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2866
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002867- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2868 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2869 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2870 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2871 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2872 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2873
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002874- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2875 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2876
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002877- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2878 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2879 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2880 case.)
2881
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002882- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2883 passed as unicode strings.
2884
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002885- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2886 See SF bug #683467.
2887
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002888- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2889 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2890
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002891- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2892
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002893- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2894
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002895- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2896 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2897 arguments.
2898
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002899- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2900 See SF bug #667147.
2901
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002902- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002903 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002904 See SF bug #676155.
2905
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002906- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002907 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002908 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2909 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2910 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2911 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2912 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2913 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002914
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002915Extension modules
2916-----------------
2917
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002918- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2919 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2920 tp_as_number pointer.
2921
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002922- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2923 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2924 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2925 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2926 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2927
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002928- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2929
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002930- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2931
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002932- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002933 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002934 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2935 patch #678531.)
2936
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002937- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2938 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2939
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002940- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2941 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2942
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002943- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2944
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002945- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2946 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2947 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2948
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002949- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2950
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002951- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2952 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2953
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002954- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002955
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002956- datetime changes:
2957
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002958 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2959
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002960 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2961 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2962 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2963 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2964 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2965 now.
2966
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002967 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002968 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2969 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002970
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002971 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002972 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002973 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2974 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2975 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2976 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002977
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002978 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2979 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2980 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002981 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2982
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002983 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2984 by a later example coded by Guido.
2985
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002986 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002987 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2988 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2989 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002990 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2991 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2992
2993 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2994 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2995 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2996 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2997 tzinfo subclass instance.
2998
2999 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3000 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3001 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3002 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3003 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3004 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3005 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3006 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003007
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003008 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3009 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3010 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3011 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3012 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003013 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3014
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003015 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003016
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003017 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3018 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3019 as a naive datetime object.
3020
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003021 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3022 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3023 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3024
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003025 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3026 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3027 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3028 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3029 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3030 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3031 comparison.
3032
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003033 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3034 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3035 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3036 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003037 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003038
3039 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003040
3041 and ::
3042
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003043 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3044
3045 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3046 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3047 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3048 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3049
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003050 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3051 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3052 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3053 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3054 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3055
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003056 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3057 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003058 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3059 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003060
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003061Library
3062-------
3063
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003064- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3065 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3066
3067- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3068 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3069 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3070 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3071 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3072 See PEP 307 for details.
3073
3074- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3075 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3076
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003077- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3078 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003079 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003080 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3081 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003082 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003083
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003084- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3085 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3086
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003087- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3088 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3089 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3090
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003091- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3092
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003093- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3094 exception.
3095
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003096- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3097 class.
3098
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003099- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3100 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3101 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3102
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003103- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3104 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3105
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003106- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003107 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3108 See SF bug #659228.
3109
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003110- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3111 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3112 See SF patch #651082.
3113
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003114- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003115
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003116- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3117 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3118
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003119- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003120 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003121
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003122- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3123 DOS paths from other platforms.
3124
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003125Tools/Demos
3126-----------
3127
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003128- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3129 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3130 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3131 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3132 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3133 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3134 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3135 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3136 example:
3137
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003138 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3139 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003140
3141 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3142
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003143
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003144Build
3145-----
3146
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003147- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3148 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3149 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003150 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3151
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003152 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3153
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003154- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3155 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3156 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3157 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3158 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3159 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3160 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3161 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3162 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3163
3164- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3165 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3166 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3167 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3168
3169- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3170 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3171
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003172C API
3173-----
3174
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003175- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3176 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003177
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003178- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3179 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3180 tp_as_number pointer.
3181
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003182- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3183 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3184 (SF #681367)
3185
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003186- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3187 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3188 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3189 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003190
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003191Tests
3192-----
3193
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003194- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003195 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3196 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3197 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3198 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3199 pydoc.)
3200
3201- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3202
3203- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003204
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003205Windows
3206-------
3207
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003208- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3209 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3210 time).
3211
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003212- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3213 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3214
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003215- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3216 release without strong cryptography.
3217
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003218- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003219 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003220
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003221- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3222 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3223
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003224Mac
3225---
3226
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003227- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3228 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003229
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003230- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3231 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3232 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003233
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003234- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3235 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003236
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003237- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3238 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3239 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3240 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003241
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003242- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003243 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3244 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3245 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003246
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003247
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003248What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003249=================================
3250
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003251*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003252
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003253Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003254--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003255
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003256- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3257
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003258- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3259 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003260 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003261 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003262 a different meaning than before.
3263
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003264- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003265 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003266 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003267
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003268- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003269 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003270 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003271
3272- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3273 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3274 and deallocation.
3275
3276- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3277 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3278
3279- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3280 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3281 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3282 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3283 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3284
3285- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3286 now detected by the garbage collector.
3287
3288- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3289 [SF bug 519621]
3290
3291- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3292 identifier.
3293
3294- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3295 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3296 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3297 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3298 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3299 [SF bug 563060]
3300
3301- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3302 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3303 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3304 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3305 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3306
3307- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3308 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3309 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3310
3311- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3312
3313- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3314 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3315 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3316 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3317 state of the slots would be lost.)
3318
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003319Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003320-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003321
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003322- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003323 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3324 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3325 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3326 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003327 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3328 Jython 2.1.
3329
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003330- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003331 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003332 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3333 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3334 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3335 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3336 these, see PEP 302.
3337
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003338- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3339 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3340 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3341
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003342- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3343 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3344 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3345
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003346- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3347 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3348 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3349
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003350- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3351 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3352 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3353 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3354 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3355 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3356 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3357 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3358 releases or implementations.
3359
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003360- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003361 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3362 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003363
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003364- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3365 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3366
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003367- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3368 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3369 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3370
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003371- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3372 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3373
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003374- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3375 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003376 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3377 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003378
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003379- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3380 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3381 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3382 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3383 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3384
3385 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3386 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3387 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3388 pattern.
3389
3390 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3391 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3392 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3393 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3394
3395 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3396 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3397 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3398 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3399 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3400 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3401
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003402- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3403 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3404 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3405 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3406 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3407 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3408 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3409 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003410
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003411- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3412 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3413 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3414 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3415 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003416 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3417 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3418 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3419 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3420 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3421 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3422 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003423
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003424- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3425 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3426
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003427- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3428 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3429 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3430 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3431 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3432 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3433 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3434 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3435 to Zack Weinberg!
3436
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003437- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3438 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3439 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3440 type. This has been fixed now.
3441
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003442- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3443 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3444 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3445
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003446- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3447 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3448 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3449 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3450 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3451 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3452 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3453 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003454 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003455
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003456- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3457 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3458 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003459
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003460- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3461 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3462 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3463 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3464 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3465 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3466 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3467 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003468 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003469 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3470 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3471
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003472- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3473 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3474 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3475 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3476 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3477 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3478 this.)
3479
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003480- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3481 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003482 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003483 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003484 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3485 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003486 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3487 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003488
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003489- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3490 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3491 currently running.
3492
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003493- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3494 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3495 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3496 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3497
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003498- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3499 as directory names.
3500
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003501- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3502 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3503
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003504- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3505 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3506
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003507- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003508 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3509 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003510
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003511- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3512 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3513 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3514 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3515 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3516
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003517- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3518 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3519 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3520 removed.
3521
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003522- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3523 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3524 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3525
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003526- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3527 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3528 to __debug__.
3529
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003530- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3531 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3532 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3533
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003534- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3535 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3536 deprecated now.
3537
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003538- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3539 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3540 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003541
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003542- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3543 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3544 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3545 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3546 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003547
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003548- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3549 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3550
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003551- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3552 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3553 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003554 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003555 is backward compatible.
3556
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003557- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3558 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3559 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3560 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3561 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3562
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003563- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3564 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3565 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3566 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3567 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3568 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003569
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003570- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3571 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3572
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003573- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3574 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3575
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003576- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3577 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3578 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3579 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3580 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3581
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003582- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3583 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3584 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3585
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003586- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003587 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3588
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003589- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3590 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3591 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003592
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003593- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3594 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3595
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003596- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3597 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3598 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3599
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003600- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3601
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003602Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003603-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003604
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003605- Added three operators to the operator module:
3606 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3607 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3608 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3609
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003610- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3611
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003612- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3613 archives.
3614
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003615- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3616 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3617 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3618
3619 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3620
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003621- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3622 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3623 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003624 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003625
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003626- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3627 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3628 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3629 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003630 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3631 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3632 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3633 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003634
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003635- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3636 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003637
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003638- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3639
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003640- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3641 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3642
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003643- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3644 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3645 supported.
3646
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003647- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3648
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003649- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3650 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003651
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003652- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3653 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3654
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003655- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3656
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003657- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3658 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3659
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003660- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3661 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3662 functions but callable type objects.
3663
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003664- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003665 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003666 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003667
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003668- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3669 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003670
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003671- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3672 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003673
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003674- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3675 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3676 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3677 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3678
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003679- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3680 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003681
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003682- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3683 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3684 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3685 and __imul__.
3686
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003687- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003688 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3689 is called.
3690
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003691- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3692 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3693 interpreter was compiled.
3694
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003695- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3696 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3697 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003698 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003699 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3700 1, not 2.
3701
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003702- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3703 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3704 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3705 limit.
3706
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003707- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3708 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3709 bug #623464.
3710
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003711- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3712 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3713 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3714 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3715
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003716Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003717-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003718
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003719- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3720
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003721- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3722 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3723 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3724 with Python 2.3a2.
3725
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003726- os.path exposes getctime.
3727
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003728- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003729 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003730 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003731 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003732 unit tests of floating point results.
3733
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003734- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3735 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3736 has been increased.
3737
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003738- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3739 executed.
3740
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003741- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3742 postinstallation script.
3743
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003744- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3745 test the current module.
3746
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003747- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003748 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3749 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3750 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3751 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3752
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003753- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003754 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003755 Ward's Optik package.
3756
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003757- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3758 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3759 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3760 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3761
3762- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3763 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003764 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003765
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003766- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3767 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3768 shelf are binary pickles.
3769
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003770- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3771 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3772
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003773- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3774 modules are iterators now.
3775
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003776- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3777 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3778 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3779 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3780 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3781 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003782
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003783- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3784 with their entity value.
3785
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003786- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3787
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003788- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3789 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003790
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003791- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3792 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003793 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003794
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003795- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3796 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3797 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3798 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3799 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3800 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3801 main():
3802
3803 import locale
3804 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3805
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003806- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3807 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3808
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003809- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3810 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3811 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3812 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3813 to the new standard.
3814
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003815- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3816 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3817 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3818 an extension to the database.
3819
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003820- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3821 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3822 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3823 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003824 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003825
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003826- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003827 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003828
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003829- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3830 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3831 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3832 bounded integers.
3833
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003834- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3835 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3836 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3837 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3838 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3839 in existence.
3840
3841 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3842 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3843 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3844 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3845 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3846 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3847
3848 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3849 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3850 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3851 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3852
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003853- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3854 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3855 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3856
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003857- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3858
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003859- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3860 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3861 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3862 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3863
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003864- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3865 argument.
3866
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003867- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3868 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3869 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3870 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3871 [SF patch 560794].
3872
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003873- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3874 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3875 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003876 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3877 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3878 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003879
3880- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3881 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003882
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003883- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3884 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3885 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3886 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003887
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003888- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3889 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3890 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3891 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3892 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3893
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003894- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003895
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003896- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3897
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003898- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3899 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3900 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3901 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3902 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3903 identical to None.
3904
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003905- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3906 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3907 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3908 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3909 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3910 results now.
3911
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003912- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3913 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3914
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003915- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3916 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3917 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3918 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3919 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3920 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3921 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3922 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3923
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003924- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3925
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003926- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3927 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3928
3929- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3930 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3931 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3932 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3933 and other systems.
3934
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003935- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3936 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3937 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3938 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 +00003939 work well with these.
3940
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003941- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3942
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003943- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003944 connections.
3945
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003946- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3947 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3948 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3949
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003950- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3951 sets
3952
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003953- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3954 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3955 name.
3956
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003957- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3958 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3959 passed in.
3960
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003961- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003962 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003963 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3964 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003965
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003966- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3967
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003968- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3969
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003970- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3971 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3972 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3973
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003974- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3975 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3976 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3977 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003978 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003979
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003980- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003981 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003982 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003983
3984- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3985 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3986 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3987
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003988- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003989 the value of its expression argument.
3990
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003991- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3992 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3993 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3994
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003995- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3996 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3997 skipstone browser was included.
3998
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003999- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4000 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4001
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004002Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004003-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004004
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004005- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4006 names in addition to accepting file names.
4007
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004008- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4009 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4010 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4011 still used and useful.)
4012
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004013- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4014 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4015 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4016 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004017
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004018- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4019 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4020 the generated binary.
4021
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004022Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004023-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004024
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004025- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4026
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004027- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4028 except in the hands of experts.
4029
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004030- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004031 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4032 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4033 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004034
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004035- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4036 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4037 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4038 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4039 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4040 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4041 builds.
4042
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004043- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4044 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4045 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4046 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4047 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4048 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4049 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4050 new type.
4051
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004052- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004053
4054 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4055 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4056 positive infinities.
4057
4058 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4059 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4060 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4061 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4062 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4063 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4064 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4065
4066 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4067
4068 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4069
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004070- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4071 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4072 size of the executable.
4073
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004074- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4075 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4076 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4077 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004078
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004079- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4080
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004081- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4082 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4083 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004084
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004085- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4086 well as Unix.
4087
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004088- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4089 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4090 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4091 modules in the README file for details.
4092
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004093C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004094-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004095
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004096- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4097 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004098 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004099 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004100 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004101
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004102- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4103 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4104 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4105 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4106 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4107 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004108 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004109 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4110 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4111 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4112 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4113 aligned.)
4114
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004115- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4116 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4117 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4118
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004119- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4120 level.
4121
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004122- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4123 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4124 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4125 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4126 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4127
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004128- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4129 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4130 code.
4131
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004132- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4133 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4134 adjusting for negative indices.
4135
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004136- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4137 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4138 object.
4139
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004140- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4141 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4142 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4143
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004144- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4145 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004146
4147- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4148
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004149- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4150 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4151 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4152 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4153
4154- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4155
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004156- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004157
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004158- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004159 without going through the buffer API.
4160
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004161- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004162
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004163- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4164 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4165 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4166 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4167
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004168- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4169 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4170
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004171- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004172 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4173
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004174New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004175-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004176
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004177- OpenVMS is now supported.
4178
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004179- AtheOS is now supported.
4180
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004181- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4182
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004183- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4184
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004185Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004186-----
4187
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004188- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4189 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4190 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004191
4192Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004193-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004194
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004195- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4196 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4197 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4198 bugs.
4199 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004200 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004201 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4202 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004203 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004204
4205- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004206 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004207
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004208- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4209 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4210
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004211- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4212 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004213 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004214 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4215
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004216- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4217 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4218 use files" uninstall option).
4219
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004220- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4221
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004222- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4223 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4224
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004225- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4226 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4227 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4228
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004229- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4230 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4231 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4232 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4233 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004234 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4235 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4236 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004237
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004238- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004239 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004240 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4241 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4242 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4243 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4244 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4245 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4246 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4247 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4248 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4249 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4250 work around.
4251
4252- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4253 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4254 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4255 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4256 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4257 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4258 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4259 specified with O_CREAT too).
4260
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004261Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004262----
4263
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004264- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004265
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004266- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4267 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4268 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4269
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004270- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4271 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4272 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4273
4274- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4275 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4276 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4277 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4278 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4279 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4280 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4281 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004282
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004283- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4284 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4285 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004286
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004287- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4288 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4289 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4290 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4291 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004292
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004293- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4294 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4295 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004296
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004297- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4298 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004299
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004300- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4301 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4302 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4303 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4304 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004305
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004306- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4307 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4308 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4309
4310- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4311 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4312 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004313
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004314- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4315 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4316 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4317 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004318 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004319
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004320- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4321 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004322
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004323- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4324 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004325
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004326- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004327 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004328 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4329 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004330
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004331
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004332What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004333===============================
4334
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004335*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4336
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004337Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004338--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004339
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004340- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4341 with a custom metaclass.
4342
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004343Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004344-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004345
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004346- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4347 are proxies.
4348
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004349Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004350-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004351
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004352- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4353 very short strings.
4354
4355- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4356 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4357 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4358 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4359 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4360
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004361Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004362-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004363
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004364- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4365 close or delete time).
4366
4367- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4368 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4369
4370- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4371
4372- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004373 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004374
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004375Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004376-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004377
4378Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004379-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004380
4381C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004382-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004383
4384New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004385-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004386
4387Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004388-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004389
4390Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004391-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004392
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004393- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4394
4395- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4396 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4397
4398- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4399 deleted at process exit time.
4400
4401- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4402 in backslash.
4403
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004404Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004405----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004406
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004407- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4408 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4409 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4410
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004411
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004412What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004413===========================
4414
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004415*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4416
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004417Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004418--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004419
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004420- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4421 been extensively updated. See
4422
4423 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4424
4425 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4426
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004427- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4428 deleted!
4429
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004430- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4431 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4432 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4433 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4434 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4435
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004436- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4437
4438 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4439 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4440
4441 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4442 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4443 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4444 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4445 supported anyway.
4446
4447 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4448 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4449
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004450- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4451 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4452 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4453 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4454 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004455
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004456- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4457 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4458 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4459
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004460Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004461-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004462
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004463- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4464 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4465 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4466 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4467 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4468 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004469 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4470 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4471 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4472 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004473
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004474- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4475 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4476 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4477
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004478Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004479-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004480
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004481- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4482
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004483Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004484-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004485
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004486- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4487 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4488 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4489 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4490 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4491 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4492
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004493- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4494
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004495- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4496
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004497- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4498
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004499- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4500 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4501 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4502
4503- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4504
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004505Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004506-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004507
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004508- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4509 off a search on Google.
4510
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004511Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004512-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004513
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004514- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4515 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4516 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4517 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4518 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4519 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4520 other platforms should do likewise.
4521
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004522- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4523 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4524 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4525
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004526C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004527-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004528
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004529- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4530 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4531 producing key-value pairs.
4532
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004533- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004534 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004535 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4536 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4537 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4538 previously went unchallenged.
4539
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004540New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004541-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004542
4543Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004544-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004545
4546Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004547-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004548
4549Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004550----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004551
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004552- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4553 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004554
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004555- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4556 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4557 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4558 home.
4559
4560
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004561What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004562===========================
4563
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004564*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4565
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004566Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004567--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004568
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004569- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4570 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004571
4572 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004573 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004574
4575 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4576 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004577 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004578 This needs to be documented.
4579
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004580- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4581 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4582
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004583- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4584 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4585 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4586
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004587- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4588 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4589
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004590- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4591 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4592 class forbids it).
4593
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004594- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4595 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4596 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4597
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004598- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4599
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004600Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004601-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004602
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004603- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4604 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004605 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004606
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004607- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4608 (like 1 + '').
4609
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004610Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004611-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004612
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004613- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4614 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4615 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4616 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004617 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004618 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4619
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004620- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4621 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4622 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4623 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4624
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004625- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4626 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004627 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4628 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4629 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004630
4631- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4632 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004633
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004634- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4635 bytes on its input.
4636
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004637Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004638-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004639
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004640- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004641 convenience function.
4642
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004643- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4644 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4645 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004646 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4647 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4648 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4649 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4650 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4651 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004652
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004653- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4654 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4655 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4656 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4657
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004658- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4659 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4660 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4661
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004662- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4663 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4664 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4665 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4666
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004667- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4668 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004669 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004670 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4671 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4672 new -l and -e options.
4673
4674- statcache is now deprecated.
4675
4676- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4677 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004678 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004679 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4680 time properly taken into account.
4681
4682- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4683 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4684 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4685 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4686
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004687Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004688-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004689
4690Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004691-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004692
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004693- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4694 is built with libdb3 if available.
4695
4696- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4697
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004698C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004699-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004700
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004701- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4702 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4703 PySequence_Size().
4704
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004705- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4706
4707- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4708 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4709 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4710
4711- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4712 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4713
4714- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4715 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4716
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004717New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004718-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004719
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004720- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4721 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4722
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004723- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4724 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4725
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004726- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4727
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004728Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004729-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004730
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004731- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4732 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4733
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004734Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004735-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004736
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004737Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004738----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004739
4740- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4741 removed completely in the next release.
4742
4743- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4744 OSX.
4745
4746- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4747 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4748
4749- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4750
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004751
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004752What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004753===========================
4754
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004755*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4756
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004757Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004758--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004759
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004760- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004761 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004762 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004763 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4764 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004765 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4766 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004767 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4768 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004769
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004770- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4771 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4772
4773- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4774 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4775
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004776Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004777-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004778
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004779- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4780 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4781 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4782 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4783 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4784 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4785 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4786 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4787
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004788- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4789 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4790 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4791 example).
4792
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004793- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004794 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004795 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004796 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004797
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004798- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4799 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4800 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004801 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004802
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004803- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4804 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4805 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4806 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4807 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4808 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4809
4810 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4811
4812 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4813
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004814Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004815-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004816
4817- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4818
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004819- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4820
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004821- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4822 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004823
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004824- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4825 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4826 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4827 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4828 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4829 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004830 attributes.
4831
4832- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4833 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4834 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004835
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004836- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4837 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4838 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004839
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004840- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4841 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4842 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004843 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4844 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4845
4846- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4847 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004848
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004849Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004850-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004851
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004852- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4853 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4854
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004855- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4856 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4857 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4858 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4859
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004860- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4861 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4862 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4863 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4864
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004865 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4866 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4867 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4868 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4869 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4870 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4871 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4872 without losing information).
4873
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004874- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004875 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4876 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4877 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4878 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4879 module).
4880
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004881 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004882 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4883 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4884 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4885 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004886
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004887- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004888 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4889 encoding.
4890
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004891- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4892 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4893
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004894- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004895 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4896
4897- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4898 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4899 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4900 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4901
4902- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4903
4904- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4905 ON, and OFF.
4906
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004907- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4908 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4909
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004910Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004911-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004912
4913- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4914 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4915 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004916
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004917- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4918 been added: -X and -E.
4919
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004920Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004921-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004922
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004923- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4924 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4925
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004926C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004927-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004928
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004929- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4930 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4931 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4932 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4933 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4934
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004935- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4936 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4937 as long) arguments.
4938
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004939- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4940 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4941 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4942 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4943 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4944 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4945
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004946- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4947 input.
4948
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004949New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004950-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004951
4952Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004953-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004954
4955Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004956-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004957
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004958- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4959 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4960 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4961
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004962- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4963 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4964 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004965 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004966
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004967 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4968 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4969 import signal
4970 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004971
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004972 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004973 while 1:
4974 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004975 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004976 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4977 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4978 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4979 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004980
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004981
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004982What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4983===========================
4984
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004985*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4986
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004987Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004988--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004989
4990- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4991 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4992 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4993
4994- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4995 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4996 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4997 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4998 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4999 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5000 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005001
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005002- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005003 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005004 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5005 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5006 associate a docstring with a property.
5007
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005008- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5009 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5010 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5011 other built-in object types.
5012
5013- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5014 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5015 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5016 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5017 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5018
5019- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5020 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5021
5022- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5023 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005024 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005025 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5026 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5027 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5028 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5029 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5030
5031- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5032 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5033 class.
5034
5035- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5036 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5037 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5038 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5039
5040- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5041 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5042 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5043 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5044
5045- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5046 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5047
5048- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5049 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5050 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5051 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5052 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005053 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005054 with the same value as s.
5055
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005056- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5057
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005058Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005059----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005060
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005061- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5062
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005063- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5064 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5065 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5066 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5067 objects.
5068
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005069- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5070 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005071 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5072 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5073
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005074- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5075 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5076 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5077
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005078Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005079-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005080
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005081- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5082 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5083 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5084 by the instances.
5085
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005086- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5087 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5088 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5089
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005090- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5091 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5092 before the entire comparison is complete.
5093
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005094- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5095 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5096 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5097
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005098- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5099 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5100 getwriter().
5101
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005102- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5103 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5104
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005105- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005106 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5107 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5108
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005109- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5110 iterable object.
5111
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005112- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5113 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005114
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005115- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5116 authentication.
5117
5118- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5119 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005120
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005121- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005122 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5123 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5124 a sample driver.)
5125
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005126Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005127-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005128
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005129- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5130 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5131 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5132 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5133 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5134 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5135 kernel has large file support.
5136
5137- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5138 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5139 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5140 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5141 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5142
5143- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5144 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5145 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5146
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005147C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005148-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005149
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005150- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5151 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5152
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005153New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005154-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005155
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005156- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5157 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5158
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005159Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005160-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005161
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005162- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5163 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5164 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5165 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5166 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5167
5168- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5169 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5170 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5171 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5172
5173- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5174 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5175
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005176Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005177-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005178
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005179- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005180 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5181 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005182
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005183
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005184What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5185===========================
5186
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005187*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5188
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005189Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005190----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005191
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005192- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5193 big to represent as a C double.
5194
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005195- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5196 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5197 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5198 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5199 restriction).
5200
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005201- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5202 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5203 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5204 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5205 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5206
5207 >>> dir([])
5208 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5209 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5210 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5211 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5212 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5213 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5214 'reverse', 'sort']
5215
5216 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5217
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005218- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005219 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5220 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5221 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5222 OverflowError exception.
5223
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005224- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005225 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005226 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5227 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5228 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5229 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5230 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005231 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005232 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5233 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5234
5235 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5236 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5237 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5238 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005239
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005240- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005241 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5242 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5243 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5244 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5245 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5246 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5247 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5248 once it is created.
5249
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005250- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5251 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5252 (key, value) pairs.
5253
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005254- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005255 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5256 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5257
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005258- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5259 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5260 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5261 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5262 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005263
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005264- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005265 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5266 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5267
5268 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5269
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005270- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005271 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5272
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005273Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005274-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005275
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005276- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005277 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5278 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005279
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005280- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5281 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5282 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5283 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5284 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5285 in this area anymore).
5286
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005287- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5288 threading.Timer.
5289
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005290- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5291 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5292
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005293- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005294 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5295
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005296- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005297 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5298 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5299 converted to Python longs.
5300
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005301- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005302 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5303
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005304- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5305 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5306 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5307
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005308Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005309-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005310
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005311- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5312 division operators as per PEP 238.
5313
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005314Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005315-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005316
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005317- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5318 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5319 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5320 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5321
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005322C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005323-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005324
5325- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005326
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005327- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5328 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005329 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005330
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005331 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5332 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005333 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005334 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005335
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005336- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005337 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5338 module:
5339
5340 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005341
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005342 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5343 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005344
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005345 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5346 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005347
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005348 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5349
5350 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5351
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005352- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005353 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5354 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5355 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005356
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005357New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005358-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005359
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005360- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5361 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5362 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5363 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5364 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005365
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005366Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005367-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005368
5369Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005370-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005371
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005372- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5373 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5374 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5375 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005376 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5377 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5378 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5379 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5380 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005381
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005382- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005383 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5384
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005385
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005386What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5387===========================
5388
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005389*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5390
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005391Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005392-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005393
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005394- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5395 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5396
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005397- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5398 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5399 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005400
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005401- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5402 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5403 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5404 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005405
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005406- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5407
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005408- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005409
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005410Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005411-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005412
5413- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005414 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005415 the module docstring for details.
5416
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005417Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005418-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005419
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005420- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005421 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5422 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5423 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005424
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005425- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5426 Nick Mathewson.
5427
5428Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005429----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005430
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005431- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5432 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5433 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5434 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5435 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5436 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5437 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5438 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5439
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005440- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5441 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5442 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5443 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5444
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005445- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5446 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5447 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5448 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5449 come a long way).
5450
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005451- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5452 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5453 write filters for these warnings).
5454
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005455- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5456 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5457 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5458 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5459 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5460
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005461- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5462 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5463 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5464 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5465 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5466 older distribution.
5467
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005468Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005469-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005470
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005471- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5472 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005473 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005474
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005475- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5476 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5477 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5478
5479- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5480
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005481- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5482
5483- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5484
5485- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5486
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005487- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005488
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005489- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5490
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005491New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005492-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005493
5494C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005495-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005496
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005497- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5498 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5499 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5500 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5501 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5502 against buffer overruns.
5503
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005504- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005505 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5506 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005507 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5508 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5509 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5510
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005511- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5512 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5513 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5514 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5515 deprecated.
5516
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005517Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005518-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005519
5520- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5521 relevant is found.
5522
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005523
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005524What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005525===========================
5526
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005527*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5528
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005529Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005530----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005531
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005532- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5533 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5534 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5535 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5536 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5537 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5538 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5539 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005540 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005541 repaired.
5542
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005543- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005544 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005545 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5546 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5547 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5548 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5549 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5550 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5551 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5552 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5553
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005554- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5555 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5556 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5557 leading BMO character).
5558
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005559- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5560 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5561 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5562
5563 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5564 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5565 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005566
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005567 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5568 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5569 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5570 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5571 for various simple to use conversions.
5572
5573 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5574 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5575
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005576 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5577 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5578 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5579 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5580 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5581 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5582 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5583 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5584 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5585 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5586 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5587 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5588 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5589 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5590 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005591
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005592- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5593 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5594 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005595 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005596 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005597
5598 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005599 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5600 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5601 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5602 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5603 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005604 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5605 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005606
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005607 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5608 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5609 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005610 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005611
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005612- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5613 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5614 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5615 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5616 floating arithmetic,
5617
5618 x = 9007199254740992.0
5619 print long(x)
5620
5621 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5622 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5623 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5624 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5625 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5626 functions are of good quality).
5627
5628 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5629 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5630 algorithms to break.
5631
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005632- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5633 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5634 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5635 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5636 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5637 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5638 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5639 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5640 order.
5641
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005642- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5643 operation along the most common code paths.
5644
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005645- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5646 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5647
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005648- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5649 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5650 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5651 {}.update(UserDict())
5652
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005653- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5654 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5655 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5656 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5657 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5658 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5659 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5660 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5661
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005662- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005663 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005664
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005665 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005666 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5667 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005668 join() method of strings
5669 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005670 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5671 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005672 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005673 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005674
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005675- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5676 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5677
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005678- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5679 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5680
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005681- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5682 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5683 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5684 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5685
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005686- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5687 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005688 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005689 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5690 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005691
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005692- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5693
5694
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005695Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005696-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005697
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005698- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005699 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005700 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5701 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5702
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005703- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5704 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5705
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005706- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5707 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5708 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5709 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5710
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005711- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5712 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5713 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5714
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005715- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5716
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005717- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5718
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005719- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5720 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5721 that are still imported into string.py).
5722
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005723- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5724
5725- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5726 Now it does.
5727
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005728- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5729
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005730- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5731 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5732 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5733 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5734 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005735 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5736 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005737
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005738- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5739 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5740 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5741 'help(object)'.
5742
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005743Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005744-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005745
5746- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005747 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005748 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5749 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5750
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005751- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005752 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5753 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005754
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005755C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005756-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005757
5758- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5759 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005760
5761----
5762
5763**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**