blob: 27d27632fe83e94bfeed288d2e1652756b8aefac [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
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000015- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
16
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000017- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
18 reference counts in some error exit cases.
19
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000020- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
21 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
22 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
23 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
24 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
25 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
26 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
27 realloc.
28
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000029- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
30 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
31
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000032- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
33 like their int counterparts.
34
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000035- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
36 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
37 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
38 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
39 for a longer write-up of the problem).
40
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000041- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
42 serializing floats.
43
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000044- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
45 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
46 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
47
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000048- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
49 278.
50
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000051- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
52 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
53 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
54 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
55 to the base class has been moved the prroper nb_* magic slot and out of
56 PyNumber_*().
57 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
58
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000059- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
60 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
61 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
62 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
63
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000064- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
65 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
66 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
67 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
68 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
69
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000070- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
71 disabled caused a crash.
72
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000073- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
74 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
75
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000076- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000077 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
78
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000079- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
80
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000081- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000082 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
83 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
84 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000085
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000086- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
87
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000088- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
89 returning None.
90
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000091- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000092 ('\') with a specific error message.
93
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000094- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
95
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000096- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
97 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
98
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000099- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000100 an ferror() call.
101
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000102- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
103 list.sort().
104
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000105- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
106 (2+3) --> (5).
107
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000108- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
109
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000110- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
111 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000112
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000113- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
114 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
115 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
116
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000117Extension Modules
118-----------------
119
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000120- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000121 implemented treated all integer values except 1 as false.
122
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000123- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
124
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000125- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
126 if available on the platform.
127
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000128- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
129 available on the platform.
130
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000131- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
132 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
133
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000134- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
135
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000136- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
137 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
138 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
139
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000140- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
141
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000142- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
143 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
144
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000145- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000146 file size.
147
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000148- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
149
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000150- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
151 {remove_history,replace_history}
152
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000153- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
154 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000155
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000156- stat_float_times is now True.
157
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000158- array.array objects are now picklable.
159
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000160- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
161 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
162
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000163- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
164 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
165 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
166
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000167- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
168 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000169
170Library
171-------
172
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000173- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
174 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
175
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000176- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
177 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
178
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000179- textwrap now processes text chucks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
180 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
181
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000182- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
183 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
184
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000185- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
186 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
187
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000188- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
189 though this can be missing in embedded interpreters
190
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000191- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
192
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000193- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
194 error messages.
195
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000196- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
197
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000198- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
199 Bug #1224621.
200
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000201- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
202 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
203 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
204 terminates by raising StopIteration.
205
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000206- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
207
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000208- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
209 component of the path.
210
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000211- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
212 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
213 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
214 class at all.
215
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000216- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
217 files to PyPI.
218
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000219- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
220 them to PyPI.
221
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000222- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
223 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
224 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
225 work as expected.
226
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000227- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
228 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
229
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000230- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000231 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
232
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000233- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
234
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000235- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
236 to build.
237
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000238- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
239 symbolic links on Windows.
240
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000241- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000242 profile.py if available.
243
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000244- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
245
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000246- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
247 in LWPCookieJar.
248
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000249- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
250
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000251- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
252
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000253- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
254
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000255- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
256
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000257- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
258
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000259- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
260
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000261- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
262
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000263- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
264
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000265- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
266 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
267 be exploited in various ways.
268
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000269- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
270
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000271- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
272
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000273- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
274
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000275- Enhancements to the csv module:
276
277 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
278 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000279 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000280 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
281 reporting.
282 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
283 dictates.
284 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000285 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000286 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000287 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
288 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000289 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
290 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000291 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000292 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
293 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
294 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
295 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
296 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
297 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
298 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
299 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
300 without first creating a dialect class.
301 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
302 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
303 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000304 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000305 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
306 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000307 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
308 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
309 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
310 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000311 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
312 This has been fixed.
313
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000314- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
315 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
316 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
317 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
318
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000319- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
320
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000321- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
322 (Bug #951915).
323
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000324- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
325 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
326 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
327 encoding alias table
328
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000329- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
330
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000331- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
332 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
333
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000334- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
335
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000336- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
337
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000338- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
339
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000340- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
341
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000342- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
343
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000344- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
345 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
346 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
347
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000348- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000349 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000350
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000351- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
352 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
353 tokenizer with very long source lines.
354
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000355- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
356 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
357
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000358- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
359 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000360
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000361- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
362 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
363
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000364- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
365 correctly.
366
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000367- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
368 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
369 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
370 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
371 between two lines.
372
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000373
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000374Build
375-----
376
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000377- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
378 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
379 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000380 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000381
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000382- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
383 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
384 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
385
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000386- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
387
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000388- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
389 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
390
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000391- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
392 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
393 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
394 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
395 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
396 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
397 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
398 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
399
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000400- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
401 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
402 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
403 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
404
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000405
406C API
407-----
408
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000409- Removed PyRange_New().
410
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000411
412Tests
413-----
414
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000415- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000416
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000417
418Documentation
419-------------
420
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000421- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
422
423- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
424
425- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
426
427- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
428
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000429- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
430 Closes bug #1166582.
431
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000432- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
433 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
434 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
435
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000436Mac
437---
438
439
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000440New platforms
441-------------
442
443- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
444
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000445
446Tools/Demos
447-----------
448
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000449- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
450
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000451- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000452
453
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000454What's New in Python 2.4 final?
455===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000456
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000457*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000458
459Core and builtins
460-----------------
461
462- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
463 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
464 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
465
466
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000467What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
468==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000469
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000470*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000471
472Core and builtins
473-----------------
474
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000475- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
476 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
477 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
478
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000479
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000480Library
481-------
482
483- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
484 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
485 raised is re-raised.
486
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000487- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
488 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
489
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000490- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
491 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
492 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
493 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
494 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
495 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
496 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
497 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
498 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
499 by the slice are recomputed now.
500
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000501- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000502
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000503Build
504-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000505
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000506- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
507 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
508 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000509
510C API
511-----
512
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000513- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
514
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000515
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000516What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
517================================
518
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000519*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000520
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000521License
522-------
523
524The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
525is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
526changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
527Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
528intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
529durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
530the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
531License::
532
533 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
534
535says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
536to Python 2.1.1.
537
538The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
539License Version 2.
540
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000541Core and builtins
542-----------------
543
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000544- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
545 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
546 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
547 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
548 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
549 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
550 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
551 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
552 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
553 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
554
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000555- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000556
557Extension Modules
558-----------------
559
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000560- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
561 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
562 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
563 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000564
565Library
566-------
567
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000568- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
569 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
570 returned.
571
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000572- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
573
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000574- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
575 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
576
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000577- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
578
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000579- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
580 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000581
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000582- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
583
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000584- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
585
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000586- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000587 the source code is updated and reloaded.
588
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000589Build
590-----
591
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000592- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000593
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000594What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
595================================
596
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000597*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000598
599Core and builtins
600-----------------
601
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000602- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000603 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
604
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000605- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
606 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
607 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
608 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
609
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000610- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
611 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
612
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000613- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
614 constant.
615
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000616- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
617 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
618 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
619 large), and to anomalies such as
620 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
621 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
622 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
623 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000624
625Extension modules
626-----------------
627
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000628- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
629 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000630 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
631 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
632 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000633
634Library
635-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000636
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000637- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000638 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000639 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
640 --swig-cpp.
641
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000642- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
643 it is set.
644
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000645- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000646
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000647- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
648 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
649 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
650 Closes bug #1039270.
651
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000652- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000653
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000654 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000655 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
656 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
657 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
658 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
659 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
660 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
661 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
662 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
663 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
664 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
665 + Updates to documentation.
666
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000667- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
668 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
669 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
670 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
671
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000672- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000673
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000674- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
675 applications should use the getmember function.
676
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000677- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
678
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000679- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
680 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
681 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
682 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
683 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
684 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
685 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
686 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
687 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
688
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000689- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
690 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000691 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000692
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000693- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
694 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
695 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
696 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
697 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
698 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
699 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
700 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000701
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000702- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
703 the new public features (of which there are many).
704
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000705- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000706 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
707 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
708 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
709 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000710 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000711
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000712- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
713
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000714- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
715 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
716 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
717 options.
718
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000719- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
720 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
721 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
722 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
723 conditions under which non-string values work.
724
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000725Build
726-----
727
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000728- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
729 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
730 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
731
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000732- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
733 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
734 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
735 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
736 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000737
738C API
739-----
740
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000741- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
742 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
743
744- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
745
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000746- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
747 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
748 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
749 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
750 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
751 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
752 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
753 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
754 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
755
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000756- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
757
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000758- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
759 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
760 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000761
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000762Tests
763-----
764
765- test__locale ported to unittest
766
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000767Mac
768---
769
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000770- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
771 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
772 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000773
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000774Tools/Demos
775-----------
776
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000777- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
778 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
779 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
780 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
781 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000782
783
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000784What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
785=================================
786
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000787*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000788
789Core and builtins
790-----------------
791
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000792- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000793 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
794
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000795- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
796 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
797 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
798 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
799 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
800 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
801 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
802 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000803 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
804 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
805 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
806 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
807 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000808
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000809- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
810 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
811 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
812 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
813 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
814
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000815- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
816
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000817- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
818 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
819
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000820- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
821 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
822 modified the list.
823
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000824- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
825 functions is now writable.
826
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000827- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
828 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
829 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
830 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
831
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000832- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
833 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
834 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
835 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
836 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000837
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000838- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
839 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
840
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000841Extension modules
842-----------------
843
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000844- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
845
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000846- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
847 data.
848
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000849- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
850 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
851 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
852 supposed to have been truncated away.
853
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000854- Added socket.socketpair().
855
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000856- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
857 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
858
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000859- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000860 versions of Python, have now been removed.
861
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000862Library
863-------
864
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000865- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000866 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000867
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000868- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
869 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
870
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000871- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
872 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
873
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000874- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
875
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000876- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
877 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000878
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000879- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
880 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
881
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000882- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
883
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000884- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
885
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000886- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
887
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000888- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
889 Percivall.
890
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000891- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
892 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
893
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000894- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
895 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
896 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000897 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000898
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000899- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
900 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
901 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
902 and exponent.
903
904- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
905
906- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
907 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
908 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
909
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000910- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
911 to the readline module.
912
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000913- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000914 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
915 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000916
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000917- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
918 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
919 contains symlinks.
920
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000921- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
922 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
923
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000924- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
925 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
926 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
927
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000928- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
929 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
930 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
931 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
932 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
933 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
934 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
935 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
936 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
937 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
938 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
939 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
940 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
941
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000942- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
943
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000944Tools/Demos
945-----------
946
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000947- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
948 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
949
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000950- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
951
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000952Build
953-----
954
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000955- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
956 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
957 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
958 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
959 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
960 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
961 plans to do so.
962
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000963- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
964 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
965
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000966- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
967 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
968
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000969- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
970 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
971
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000972- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
973 GNU/k*BSD systems.
974
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000975- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
976 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
977
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000978C API
979-----
980
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000981..
982
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000983Documentation
984-------------
985
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000986- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
987 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
988
989- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
990 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
991 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000992
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000993New platforms
994-------------
995
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000996- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
997
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000998Tests
999-----
1000
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001001..
1002
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001003Windows
1004-------
1005
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001006- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1007 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1008 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1009 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1010 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1011 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1012 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1013 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1014 the problem.
1015
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001016Mac
1017---
1018
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001019..
1020
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001021
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001022What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1023=================================
1024
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001025*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001026
1027Core and builtins
1028-----------------
1029
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001030- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1031 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1032 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1033 sensitive code.
1034
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001035- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001036 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001037
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001038 @staticmethod
1039 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001040
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001041 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001042
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001043- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1044 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1045 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1046 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1047 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1048 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1049 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1050 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1051 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1052 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1053 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1054
1055 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1056 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1057 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1058 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1059 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1060 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1061 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1062
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001063- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1064 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1065
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001066- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001067 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001068
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001069- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001070 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001071 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1072
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001073- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001074 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1075 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1076
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001077- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1078 types that support garbage collection.
1079
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001080- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1081
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001082- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1083 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1084 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1085 Jython.
1086
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001087- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1088
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001089- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1090 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1091
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001092- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1093 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1094 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001095
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001096- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1097 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1098 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1099
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001100Extension modules
1101-----------------
1102
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001103- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1104
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001105Library
1106-------
1107
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001108- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1109 TIS-620
1110
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001111- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1112 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1113 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1114 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1115 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1116 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1117 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1118 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1119 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1120 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1121
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001122- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1123
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001124- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1125 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1126 same as when the argument is omitted).
1127 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1128
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001129- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1130
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001131- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1132 schemes are offered.
1133
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001134- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1135
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001136- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1137 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1138 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1139
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001140- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1141
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001142- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1143 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1144
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001145- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1146 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1147 when dummy_threading is being used.
1148
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001149- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1150 from a tarfile.
1151
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001152- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001153 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001154
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001155- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1156 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1157 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1158 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1159
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001160- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1161 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1162
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001163- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1164 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1165 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1166 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1167 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1168 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1169 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1170 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1171 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1172 by some other method in progress).
1173
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001174- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1175 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1176 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001177
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001178- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1179
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001180- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1181 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1182 AM Kuchling.
1183
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001184- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1185 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1186 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1187
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001188- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1189 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1190 instead of unsigned.
1191
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001192- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001193 no longer part of the public API.
1194
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001195- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1196 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1197 string methods of the same name).
1198
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001199- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001200 SF patch 945642.
1201
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001202- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1203
1204 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1205
1206 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1207 DocTestSuites.
1208
1209- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1210 that provide thread-local data.
1211
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001212- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1213 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1214
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001215- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1216
1217- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1218 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1219 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1220
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001221- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1222
1223 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1224 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1225 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001226
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001227 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1228 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1229 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1230 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1231
1232 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1233 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1234
1235 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1236 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1237 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1238 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1239
1240 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1241 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1242 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1243 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1244 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1245
1246 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1247 wrapping help output.
1248
1249 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1250 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1251 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001252
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001253C API
1254-----
1255
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001256- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1257 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1258 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1259 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1260 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1261 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1262 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1263 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1264 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1265 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1266 its visible semantics have not changed.
1267
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001268- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1269 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1270
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001271Documentation
1272-------------
1273
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001274- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001275
1276 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001277 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001278
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001279 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001280
1281 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1282
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001283- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001284
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001285Tests
1286-----
1287
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001288- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001289 platforms that use the Makefile.
1290
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001291- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1292 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1293 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1294
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001295
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001296What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1297=================================
1298
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001299*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001300
1301Core and builtins
1302-----------------
1303
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001304- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1305 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1306 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1307 objects now (one object instead of three).
1308
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001309- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1310 Windows DLLs.
1311
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001312- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1313 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001314
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001315- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1316 a new .pyc magic.
1317
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001318- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1319 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1320 be there.
1321
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001322- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1323 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1324 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1325
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001326- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1327 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1328 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1329
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001330- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1331
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001332- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1333 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1334 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001335
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001336- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1337 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1338
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001339- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1340
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001341- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001342 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001343
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001344- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1345
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001346- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1347
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001348- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1349 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1350
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001351- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1352 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1353 Fixes bug #858016 .
1354
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001355- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1356 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1357 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1358
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001359- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1360 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1361 improves their performance (about 35%).
1362
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001363- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1364 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1365 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1366
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001367- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1368 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1369 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1370 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1371
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001372- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1373 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001374 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001375 length is not known).
1376
1377- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1378 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001379 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1380 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001381 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1382
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001383- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1384 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1385
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001386- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1387 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1388 keyword arguments.
1389
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001390- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1391 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1392 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1393
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001394- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1395 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1396 cases.
1397
1398- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1399 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1400 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1401 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1402 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1403 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1404 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1405 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1406 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1407 a release build.
1408
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001409- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1410 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1411
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001412- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001413 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001414
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001415- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1416 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1417 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1418 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1419 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1420 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1421 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1422 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1423 destroyed.
1424
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001425- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1426 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1427 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1428 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1429 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1430 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1431 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1432 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1433
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001434- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1435 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1436 character other than a space.
1437
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001438- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1439 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1440 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1441 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1442 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1443 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1444 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1445 attributes with the same name.
1446
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001447- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1448 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1449 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1450 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1451 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1452 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1453 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1454 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1455 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1456 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1457 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1458 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1459 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1460 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001461
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001462- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1463 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1464 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1465 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1466 This has been repaired.
1467
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001468- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1469
1470- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1471
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001472- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1473 over a sequence.
1474
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001475- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001476 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001477
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001478- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1479
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001480- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1481 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1482 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1483 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1484 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1485 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1486 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1487 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1488
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001489- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1490 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1491 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1492
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001493- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1494 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1495 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1496 freelist.
1497
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001498- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1499 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1500
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001501- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1502 number.
1503
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001504- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1505 a TypeError exception.
1506
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001507- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1508 820195.
1509
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001510- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1511 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1512 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1513
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001514- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001515 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1516 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001517
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001518- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1519 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1520 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1521
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001522- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1523 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001524 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001525
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001526- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001527 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1528 the first call.
1529
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001530
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001531Extension modules
1532-----------------
1533
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001534- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1535 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1536
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001537- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1538 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1539 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1540 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1541 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1542 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1543 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001544
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001545- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1546
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001547- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1548
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001549- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1550 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1551
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001552- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1553 fewer false positives.
1554
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001555- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1556 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1557
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001558- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001559 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1560
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001561- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001562 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001563 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001564 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1565 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001566
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001567- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1568 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1569 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1570 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1571
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001572- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1573 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1574 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1575 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1576 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1577 #897625.
1578
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001579- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1580 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1581
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001582- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1583 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1584 and pops on either side of the deque.
1585
1586- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1587 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1588
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001589- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1590 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1591 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1592 other functions that expect a function argument.
1593
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001594- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1595
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001596- os.getsid was added.
1597
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001598- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1599 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1600 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1601
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001602- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1603
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001604- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1605
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001606- readline.clear_history was added.
1607
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001608- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1609
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001610- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1611
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001612- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1613
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001614- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1615
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001616- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1617
1618- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1619
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001620- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1621
1622- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1623
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001624- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1625 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1626 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1627
1628- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1629 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1630 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1631 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1632 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1633 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1634 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1635
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001636- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1637 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1638 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1639 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001640
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001641- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001642 iterators from a single iterable.
1643
1644- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1645 of raising a TypeError exception.
1646
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001647- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1648 as parameter.
1649
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001650Library
1651-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001652
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001653- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1654 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1655 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001656
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001657- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1658 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1659 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001660
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001661- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001662
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001663- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1664 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001665
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001666- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1667 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1668
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001669- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1670
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001671- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001672 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001673
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001674- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001675 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001676
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001677- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1678
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001679- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1680 on cygwin and mingw32.
1681
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001682- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1683
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001684- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1685 module.
1686
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001687- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1688 installation scheme for all platforms.
1689
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001690- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001691 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001692
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001693- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1694 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1695 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1696
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001697- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1698 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1699 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1700
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001701- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1702
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001703- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1704
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001705- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1706 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1707
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001708- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1709 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1710 type pattern with the same value exists.
1711
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001712- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1713 when run from the command prompt).
1714
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001715- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1716 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1717
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001718- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1719 default sort).
1720
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001721- Added global runctx function to profile module
1722
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001723- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1724
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001725- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1726
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001727- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1728
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001729- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001730 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1731 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1732 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1733 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1734 accordingly.
1735
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001736- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1737 decoding standards.
1738
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001739- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1740 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1741 called for all requests.
1742
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001743- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1744 they are passed to the compiler.
1745
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001746- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1747 indent, width and depth.
1748
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001749- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1750 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1751
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001752- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1753 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1754
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001755- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1756
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001757- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1758
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001759- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1760
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001761- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1762 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1763
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001764- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001765 for better performance.
1766
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001767- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001768
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001769- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1770 a string).
1771
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001772- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1773
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001774- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1775
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001776- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1777
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001778- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1779
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001780- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1781 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1782 list of fieldnames.
1783
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001784- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1785 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1786
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001787- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1788
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001789- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1790 empty lists.
1791
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001792- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1793 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1794 and shelves.
1795
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001796- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1797 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1798
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001799- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001800 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1801 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001802
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001803- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1804 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001805 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001806
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001807- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001808 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1809 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1810
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001811- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1812 and removed in Py2.4.
1813
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001814- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1815
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001816- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1817
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001818Tools/Demos
1819-----------
1820
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001821- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1822 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1823
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001824- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1825
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001826- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1827 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1828 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1829 destination in situations where both files are given.
1830
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001831- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1832 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1833 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1834 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1835
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001836- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1837
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001838- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1839 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1840 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1841 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1842 now.
1843
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001844- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1845 in effect
1846
1847- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1848 C-c C-h
1849
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001850- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1851 -d option was given.
1852
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001853Build
1854-----
1855
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001856- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1857 build under OS X.
1858
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001859- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1860 --enable-profiling.
1861
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001862- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1863 is configured --with-tsc.
1864
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001865- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1866 on AMD64.
1867
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001868- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1869 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1870
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001871- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1872 removed.
1873
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001874- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1875 supported (see PEP 11).
1876
1877- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1878
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001879- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1880
1881- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1882 (see PEP 11).
1883
1884- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1885 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1886
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001887C API
1888-----
1889
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001890- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1891 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1892 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1893
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001894- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1895 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1896 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1897 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1898
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001899- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1900 generator objects.
1901
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001902- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1903 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001904 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1905 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001906
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001907- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1908 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1909
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001910- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1911 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1912 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1913 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1914 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1915
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001916- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1917 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1918 about 10% faster.
1919
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001920- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1921 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1922
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001923- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1924 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1925 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1926 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1927
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001928Windows
1929-------
1930
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001931- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1932 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1933 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1934 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1935
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001936- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1937 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1938 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1939
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001940
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001941What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1942===============================
1943
1944*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1945
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001946IDLE
1947----
1948
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001949- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1950 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1951 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1952 context-menu actions.
1953
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001954- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1955 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1956 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1957 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1958 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1959 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1960 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1961 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1962 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1963
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001964
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001965What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1966=============================================
1967
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001968*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001969
1970Core and builtins
1971-----------------
1972
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001973- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001974 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001975 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1976
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001977Extension modules
1978-----------------
1979
1980- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1981 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1982 than once. This has been fixed.
1983
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001984- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1985 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1986 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1987 call.
1988
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001989- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1990
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001991Library
1992-------
1993
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001994- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1995 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1996
1997- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1998 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1999 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2000 restored.
2001
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002002IDLE
2003----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002004
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002005- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002006
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002007Build
2008-----
2009
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002010- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2011 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2012
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002013C API
2014-----
2015
2016Windows
2017-------
2018
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002019- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2020 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2021
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002022- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2023
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002024Mac
2025---
2026
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002027- Various fixes to pimp.
2028
2029- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2030
2031- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2032 more problems than it solves.
2033
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002034
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002035What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2036=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002037
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002038*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2039
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002040Core and builtins
2041-----------------
2042
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002043- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2044 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2045
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002046- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2047 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002048 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002049
2050- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2051 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2052 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002053 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002054
2055- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2056 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002057
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002058- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2059 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2060 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2061
2062- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002063 770247.
2064
2065- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002066
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002067Extension modules
2068-----------------
2069
2070- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2071 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2072
2073- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2074
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002075- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2076
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002077- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2078 contained within the _strptime module.
2079
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002080- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2081 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2082
2083- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002084 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2085
2086- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2087 the find_class attribute, if present.
2088
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002089- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002090
2091 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2092 (SF bug 763298).
2093
2094 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002095 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2096 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2097 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002098
2099 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2100
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002101Library
2102-------
2103
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002104- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2105
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002106- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2107 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2108 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2109 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2110 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2111 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2112 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2113 or Tester().
2114
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002115- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2116 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2117 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2118 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2119 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2120 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2121 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2122 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2123 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002124
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002125 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002126
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002127- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2128 weren't before was an oversight.
2129
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002130- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2131 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2132
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002133- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2134 when there are no lines.
2135
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002136- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2137 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2138
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002139- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2140 to child processes.
2141
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002142- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2143
2144- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2145
2146- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2147 xmlrpclib.
2148
2149- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2150 responses.
2151
2152- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2153 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2154
2155- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2156 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2157 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2158
2159- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2160 used as patterns.
2161
2162- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2163 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2164 than Tk 8.3.
2165
2166- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2167
2168- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002169
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002170Tools/Demos
2171-----------
2172
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002173- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2174
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002175- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2176
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002177- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002178
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002179Build
2180-----
2181
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002182- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2183
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002184- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2185
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002186- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2187 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002188
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002189- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2190 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2191 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002192
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002193C API
2194-----
2195
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002196- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2197 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2198
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002199Windows
2200-------
2201
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002202- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2203 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2204 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2205 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2206 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2207 Python exception ::
2208
2209 thread.error: can't start new thread
2210
2211 is raised now.
2212
2213- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2214 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2215 instead of from DLL teardown.
2216
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002217Mac
2218---
2219
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002220- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002221 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002222 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2223 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2224 the executable in the bundle.
2225
2226- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002227
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002228- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2229
2230- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2231 on Panther.
2232
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002233What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2234================================
2235
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002236*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002237
2238Core and builtins
2239-----------------
2240
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002241- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2242 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2243 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2244 with the -i option.
2245
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002246- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2247 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2248
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002249- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2250 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2251
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002252- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2253 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2254 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2255 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2256 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2257 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2258 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2259 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2260 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2261 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2262 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2263 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2264 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002265
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002266- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2267 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2268 embedded in a lambda expression.
2269
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002270- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2271 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2272 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2273 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2274 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2275
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002276- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2277 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2278 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2279
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002280- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2281 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2282
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002283- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2284 It's writable again.
2285
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002286- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2287 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2288 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002289 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002290
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002291- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2292 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2293 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2294
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002295Extension modules
2296-----------------
2297
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002298- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2299 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2300
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002301- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2302 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2303 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2304 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2305
2306- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2307 collection.
2308
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002309- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2310 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2311 unique within a single program run.
2312
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002313- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2314 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2315
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002316- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2317 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2318
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002319- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2320 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002321
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002322- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2323
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002324- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2325 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2326
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002327- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2328 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2329 for many BSD-derived systems.
2330
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002331
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002332Library
2333-------
2334
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002335- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2336 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2337 primary ones:
2338
2339 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2340 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2341 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2342
2343 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2344 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2345 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2346 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2347 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2348 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2349
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002350- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2351 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2352 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2353 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2354 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2355 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2356 argument.
2357
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002358- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2359 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2360 in the archive.
2361
2362- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2363 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2364
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002365- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2366 569574).
2367
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002368- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2369 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2370 no more.
2371
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002372- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2373 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2374 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2375 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2376 code coverage.
2377
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002378- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2379 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2380 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002381 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2382 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002383
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002384- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2385 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2386 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002387 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002388
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002389- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2390
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002391- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2392 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2393 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2394 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2395
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002396- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2397 handling.
2398
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002399- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2400 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2401
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002402- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2403 in socket.py.
2404
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002405- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2406
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002407- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2408 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2409 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2410 opener with proxy support.
2411
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002412- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2413
2414- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2415
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002416Tools/Demos
2417-----------
2418
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002419- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2420
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002421- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2422
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002423- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2424 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002425
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002426- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2427 files.
2428
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002429Build
2430-----
2431
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002432- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002433 different root directory.
2434
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002435C API
2436-----
2437
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002438- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2439 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2440 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2441 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2442 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2443 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2444 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2445 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2446 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2447 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2448
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002449- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2450 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2451 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2452 from Python.
2453
2454
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002455New platforms
2456-------------
2457
2458None this time.
2459
2460Tests
2461-----
2462
2463- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2464 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2465
2466Windows
2467-------
2468
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002469- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2470
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002471- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2472 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2473 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2474 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2475 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2476 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2477 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2478 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2479 that's what it's for.
2480
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002481Mac
2482---
2483
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002484- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2485 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2486 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2487 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002488- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2489 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2490- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002491
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002492SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2493------------------------------------
2494
2495430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2496598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2497622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2498661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2499683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2500697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2501713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2502724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2503727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2504729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2505730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2506731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2507732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2508733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2509735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2510740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2511744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2512745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2513747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2514749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2515751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2516753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2517755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2518757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2519760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2520
2521
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002522What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2523================================
2524
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002525*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002526
2527Core and builtins
2528-----------------
2529
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002530- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2531 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2532
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002533- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2534 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2535 and cannot be strings).
2536
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002537- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2538 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2539 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2540 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2541
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002542- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2543 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2544 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2545 Python itself.
2546
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002547- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2548 the referenced object, if it has one.
2549
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002550- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2551 the thread started at
2552 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2553
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002554- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2555 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2556 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2557 placed on a list index.
2558
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002559- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2560 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2561 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2562 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2563
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002564- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2565 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2566 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2567 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2568 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2569 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2570 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2571
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002572- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2573 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2574 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2575 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2576 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2577
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002578- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2579 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002580
2581- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2582 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2583 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2584 #693195.)
2585
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002586- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2587 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002588
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002589- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002590 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002591 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2592 interpreter executions, would fail.
2593
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002594- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002595 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002596 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002597
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002598Extension modules
2599-----------------
2600
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002601- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2602 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2603 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2604 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2605
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002606- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2607 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2608
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002609- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2610 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2611 and Greg Chapman.)
2612
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002613- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2614 recursively.
2615
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002616- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002617 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2618 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2619 leaks.
2620
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002621- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2622
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002623- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2624 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2625 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2626 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2627 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2628 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2629 #705836.
2630
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002631- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002632 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2633
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002634- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2635 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2636 See SF bug #692416.
2637
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002638- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2639 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2640
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002641- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2642 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2643 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002644
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002645- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002646 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2647 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2648
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002649- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2650 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2651 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2652 timeouts to work properly.
2653
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002654Library
2655-------
2656
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002657- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2658 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2659 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2660 future release.
2661
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002662- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2663 for querying platform dependent features.
2664
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002665- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002666
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002667- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2668 pickle protocol versions.
2669
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002670- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2671 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2672 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2673
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002674- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2675
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002676- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2677 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2678 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2679 modules.
2680
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002681- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2682 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2683 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2684
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002685- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2686 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2687
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002688- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2689 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2690 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2691
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002692- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002693 MS Office extensions.
2694
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002695- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2696 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2697
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002698- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2699 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2700
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002701- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2702 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2703 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2704 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2705 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2706 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2707
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002708- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2709 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2710 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002711
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002712- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2713 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2714 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2715
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002716- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2717
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002718- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2719 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2720 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2721
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002722Tools/Demos
2723-----------
2724
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002725- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2726 See the module docstring for details.
2727
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002728Build
2729-----
2730
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002731- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2732 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002733
2734C API
2735-----
2736
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002737- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2738
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002739- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2740 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2741 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2742
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002743- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2744 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002745
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002746 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2747 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2748 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002749
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002750- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002751 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2752
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002753- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2754 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2755 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002756
2757New platforms
2758-------------
2759
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002760None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002761
2762Tests
2763-----
2764
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002765- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2766 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002767
2768Windows
2769-------
2770
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002771- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2772 function.
2773
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002774- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2775 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002776
2777Mac
2778---
2779
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002780- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2781 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002782
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002783- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2784 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002785
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002786- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2787 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2788 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002789
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002790- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002791 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2792 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002793
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002794- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2795 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002796
2797
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002798What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2799=================================
2800
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002801*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002802
2803Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002804-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002805
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002806- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2807 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2808 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2809
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002810- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2811 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2812 (SF patch #664376.)
2813
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002814- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2815 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2816 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2817 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2818 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2819 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002820 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002821
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002822- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2823 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2824 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2825 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002826 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002827
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002828- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2829 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2830 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2831 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2832 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2833 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2834 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2835 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2836 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2837 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2838 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2839
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002840- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2841 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2842 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2843 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2844 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2845 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2846
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002847- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2848 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2849
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002850- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2851 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2852 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2853 case.)
2854
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002855- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2856 passed as unicode strings.
2857
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002858- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2859 See SF bug #683467.
2860
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002861- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2862 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2863
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002864- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2865
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002866- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2867
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002868- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2869 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2870 arguments.
2871
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002872- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2873 See SF bug #667147.
2874
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002875- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002876 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002877 See SF bug #676155.
2878
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002879- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002880 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002881 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2882 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2883 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2884 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2885 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2886 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002887
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002888Extension modules
2889-----------------
2890
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002891- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2892 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2893 tp_as_number pointer.
2894
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002895- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2896 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2897 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2898 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2899 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2900
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002901- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2902
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002903- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2904
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002905- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002906 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002907 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2908 patch #678531.)
2909
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002910- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2911 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2912
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002913- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2914 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2915
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002916- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2917
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002918- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2919 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2920 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2921
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002922- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2923
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002924- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2925 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2926
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002927- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002928
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002929- datetime changes:
2930
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002931 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2932
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002933 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2934 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2935 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2936 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2937 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2938 now.
2939
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002940 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002941 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2942 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002943
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002944 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002945 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002946 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2947 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2948 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2949 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002950
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002951 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2952 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2953 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002954 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2955
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002956 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2957 by a later example coded by Guido.
2958
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002959 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002960 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2961 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2962 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002963 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2964 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2965
2966 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2967 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2968 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2969 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2970 tzinfo subclass instance.
2971
2972 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2973 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2974 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2975 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2976 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2977 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2978 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2979 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002980
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002981 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2982 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2983 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2984 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2985 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002986 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2987
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002988 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002989
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002990 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2991 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2992 as a naive datetime object.
2993
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002994 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2995 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2996 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2997
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002998 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2999 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3000 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3001 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3002 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3003 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3004 comparison.
3005
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003006 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3007 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3008 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3009 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003010 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003011
3012 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003013
3014 and ::
3015
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003016 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3017
3018 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3019 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3020 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3021 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3022
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003023 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3024 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3025 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3026 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3027 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3028
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003029 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3030 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003031 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3032 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003033
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003034Library
3035-------
3036
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003037- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3038 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3039
3040- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3041 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3042 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3043 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3044 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3045 See PEP 307 for details.
3046
3047- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3048 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3049
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003050- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3051 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003052 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003053 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3054 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003055 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003056
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003057- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3058 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3059
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003060- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3061 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3062 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3063
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003064- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3065
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003066- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3067 exception.
3068
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003069- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3070 class.
3071
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003072- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3073 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3074 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3075
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003076- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3077 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3078
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003079- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003080 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3081 See SF bug #659228.
3082
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003083- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3084 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3085 See SF patch #651082.
3086
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003087- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003088
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003089- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3090 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3091
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003092- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003093 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003094
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003095- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3096 DOS paths from other platforms.
3097
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003098Tools/Demos
3099-----------
3100
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003101- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3102 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3103 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3104 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3105 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3106 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3107 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3108 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3109 example:
3110
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003111 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3112 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003113
3114 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3115
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003116
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003117Build
3118-----
3119
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003120- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3121 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3122 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003123 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3124
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003125 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3126
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003127- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3128 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3129 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3130 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3131 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3132 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3133 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3134 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3135 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3136
3137- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3138 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3139 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3140 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3141
3142- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3143 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3144
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003145C API
3146-----
3147
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003148- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3149 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003150
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003151- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3152 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3153 tp_as_number pointer.
3154
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003155- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3156 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3157 (SF #681367)
3158
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003159- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3160 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3161 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3162 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003163
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003164Tests
3165-----
3166
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003167- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003168 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3169 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3170 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3171 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3172 pydoc.)
3173
3174- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3175
3176- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003177
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003178Windows
3179-------
3180
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003181- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3182 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3183 time).
3184
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003185- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3186 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3187
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003188- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3189 release without strong cryptography.
3190
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003191- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003192 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003193
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003194- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3195 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3196
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003197Mac
3198---
3199
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003200- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3201 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003202
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003203- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3204 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3205 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003206
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003207- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3208 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003209
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003210- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3211 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3212 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3213 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003214
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003215- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003216 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3217 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3218 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003219
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003220
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003221What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003222=================================
3223
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003224*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003225
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003226Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003227--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003228
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003229- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3230
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003231- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3232 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003233 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003234 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003235 a different meaning than before.
3236
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003237- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003238 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003239 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003240
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003241- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003242 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003243 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003244
3245- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3246 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3247 and deallocation.
3248
3249- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3250 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3251
3252- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3253 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3254 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3255 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3256 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3257
3258- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3259 now detected by the garbage collector.
3260
3261- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3262 [SF bug 519621]
3263
3264- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3265 identifier.
3266
3267- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3268 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3269 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3270 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3271 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3272 [SF bug 563060]
3273
3274- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3275 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3276 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3277 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3278 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3279
3280- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3281 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3282 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3283
3284- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3285
3286- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3287 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3288 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3289 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3290 state of the slots would be lost.)
3291
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003292Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003293-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003294
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003295- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003296 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3297 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3298 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3299 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003300 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3301 Jython 2.1.
3302
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003303- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003304 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003305 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3306 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3307 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3308 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3309 these, see PEP 302.
3310
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003311- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3312 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3313 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3314
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003315- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3316 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3317 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3318
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003319- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3320 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3321 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3322
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003323- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3324 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3325 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3326 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3327 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3328 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3329 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3330 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3331 releases or implementations.
3332
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003333- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003334 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3335 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003336
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003337- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3338 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3339
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003340- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3341 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3342 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3343
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003344- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3345 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3346
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003347- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3348 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003349 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3350 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003351
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003352- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3353 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3354 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3355 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3356 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3357
3358 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3359 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3360 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3361 pattern.
3362
3363 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3364 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3365 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3366 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3367
3368 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3369 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3370 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3371 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3372 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3373 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3374
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003375- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3376 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3377 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3378 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3379 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3380 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3381 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3382 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003383
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003384- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3385 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3386 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3387 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3388 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003389 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3390 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3391 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3392 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3393 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3394 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3395 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003396
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003397- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3398 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3399
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003400- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3401 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3402 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3403 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3404 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3405 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3406 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3407 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3408 to Zack Weinberg!
3409
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003410- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3411 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3412 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3413 type. This has been fixed now.
3414
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003415- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3416 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3417 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3418
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003419- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3420 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3421 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3422 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3423 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3424 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3425 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3426 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003427 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003428
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003429- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3430 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3431 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003432
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003433- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3434 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3435 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3436 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3437 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3438 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3439 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3440 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003441 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003442 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3443 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3444
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003445- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3446 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3447 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3448 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3449 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3450 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3451 this.)
3452
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003453- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3454 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003455 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003456 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003457 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3458 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003459 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3460 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003461
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003462- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3463 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3464 currently running.
3465
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003466- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3467 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3468 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3469 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3470
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003471- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3472 as directory names.
3473
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003474- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3475 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3476
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003477- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3478 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3479
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003480- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003481 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3482 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003483
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003484- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3485 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3486 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3487 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3488 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3489
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003490- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3491 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3492 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3493 removed.
3494
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003495- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3496 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3497 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3498
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003499- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3500 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3501 to __debug__.
3502
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003503- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3504 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3505 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3506
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003507- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3508 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3509 deprecated now.
3510
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003511- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3512 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3513 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003514
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003515- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3516 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3517 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3518 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3519 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003520
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003521- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3522 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3523
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003524- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3525 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3526 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003527 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003528 is backward compatible.
3529
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003530- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3531 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3532 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3533 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3534 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3535
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003536- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3537 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3538 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3539 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3540 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3541 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003542
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003543- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3544 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3545
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003546- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3547 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3548
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003549- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3550 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3551 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3552 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3553 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3554
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003555- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3556 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3557 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3558
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003559- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003560 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3561
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003562- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3563 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3564 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003565
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003566- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3567 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3568
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003569- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3570 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3571 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3572
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003573- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3574
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003575Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003576-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003577
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003578- Added three operators to the operator module:
3579 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3580 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3581 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3582
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003583- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3584
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003585- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3586 archives.
3587
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003588- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3589 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3590 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3591
3592 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3593
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003594- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3595 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3596 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003597 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003598
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003599- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3600 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3601 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3602 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003603 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3604 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3605 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3606 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003607
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003608- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3609 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003610
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003611- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3612
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003613- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3614 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3615
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003616- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3617 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3618 supported.
3619
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003620- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3621
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003622- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3623 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003624
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003625- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3626 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3627
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003628- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3629
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003630- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3631 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3632
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003633- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3634 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3635 functions but callable type objects.
3636
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003637- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003638 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003639 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003640
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003641- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3642 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003643
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003644- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3645 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003646
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003647- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3648 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3649 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3650 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3651
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003652- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3653 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003654
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003655- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3656 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3657 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3658 and __imul__.
3659
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003660- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003661 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3662 is called.
3663
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003664- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3665 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3666 interpreter was compiled.
3667
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003668- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3669 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3670 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003671 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003672 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3673 1, not 2.
3674
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003675- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3676 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3677 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3678 limit.
3679
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003680- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3681 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3682 bug #623464.
3683
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003684- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3685 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3686 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3687 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3688
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003689Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003690-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003691
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003692- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3693
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003694- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3695 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3696 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3697 with Python 2.3a2.
3698
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003699- os.path exposes getctime.
3700
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003701- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003702 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003703 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003704 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003705 unit tests of floating point results.
3706
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003707- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3708 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3709 has been increased.
3710
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003711- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3712 executed.
3713
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003714- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3715 postinstallation script.
3716
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003717- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3718 test the current module.
3719
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003720- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003721 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3722 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3723 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3724 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3725
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003726- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003727 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003728 Ward's Optik package.
3729
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003730- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3731 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3732 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3733 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3734
3735- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3736 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003737 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003738
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003739- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3740 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3741 shelf are binary pickles.
3742
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003743- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3744 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3745
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003746- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3747 modules are iterators now.
3748
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003749- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3750 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3751 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3752 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3753 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3754 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003755
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003756- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3757 with their entity value.
3758
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003759- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3760
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003761- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3762 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003763
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003764- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3765 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003766 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003767
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003768- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3769 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3770 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3771 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3772 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3773 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3774 main():
3775
3776 import locale
3777 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3778
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003779- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3780 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3781
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003782- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3783 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3784 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3785 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3786 to the new standard.
3787
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003788- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3789 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3790 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3791 an extension to the database.
3792
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003793- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3794 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3795 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3796 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003797 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003798
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003799- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003800 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003801
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003802- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3803 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3804 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3805 bounded integers.
3806
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003807- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3808 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3809 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3810 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3811 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3812 in existence.
3813
3814 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3815 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3816 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3817 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3818 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3819 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3820
3821 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3822 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3823 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3824 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3825
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003826- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3827 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3828 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3829
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003830- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3831
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003832- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3833 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3834 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3835 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3836
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003837- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3838 argument.
3839
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003840- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3841 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3842 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3843 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3844 [SF patch 560794].
3845
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003846- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3847 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3848 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003849 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3850 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3851 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003852
3853- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3854 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003855
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003856- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3857 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3858 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3859 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003860
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003861- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3862 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3863 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3864 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3865 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3866
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003867- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003868
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003869- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3870
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003871- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3872 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3873 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3874 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3875 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3876 identical to None.
3877
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003878- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3879 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3880 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3881 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3882 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3883 results now.
3884
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003885- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3886 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3887
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003888- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3889 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3890 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3891 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3892 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3893 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3894 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3895 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3896
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003897- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3898
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003899- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3900 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3901
3902- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3903 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3904 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3905 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3906 and other systems.
3907
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003908- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3909 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3910 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3911 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 +00003912 work well with these.
3913
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003914- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3915
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003916- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003917 connections.
3918
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003919- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3920 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3921 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3922
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003923- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3924 sets
3925
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003926- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3927 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3928 name.
3929
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003930- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3931 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3932 passed in.
3933
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003934- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003935 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003936 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3937 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003938
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003939- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3940
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003941- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3942
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003943- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3944 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3945 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3946
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003947- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3948 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3949 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3950 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003951 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003952
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003953- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003954 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003955 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003956
3957- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3958 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3959 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3960
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003961- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003962 the value of its expression argument.
3963
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003964- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3965 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3966 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3967
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003968- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3969 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3970 skipstone browser was included.
3971
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003972- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3973 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3974
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003975Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003976-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003977
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003978- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3979 names in addition to accepting file names.
3980
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003981- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3982 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3983 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3984 still used and useful.)
3985
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003986- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3987 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3988 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3989 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003990
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003991- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3992 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3993 the generated binary.
3994
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003995Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003996-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003997
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003998- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3999
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004000- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4001 except in the hands of experts.
4002
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004003- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004004 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4005 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4006 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004007
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004008- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4009 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4010 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4011 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4012 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4013 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4014 builds.
4015
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004016- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4017 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4018 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4019 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4020 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4021 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4022 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4023 new type.
4024
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004025- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004026
4027 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4028 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4029 positive infinities.
4030
4031 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4032 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4033 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4034 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4035 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4036 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4037 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4038
4039 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4040
4041 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4042
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004043- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4044 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4045 size of the executable.
4046
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004047- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4048 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4049 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4050 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004051
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004052- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4053
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004054- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4055 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4056 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004057
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004058- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4059 well as Unix.
4060
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004061- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4062 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4063 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4064 modules in the README file for details.
4065
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004066C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004067-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004068
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004069- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4070 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004071 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004072 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004073 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004074
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004075- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4076 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4077 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4078 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4079 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4080 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004081 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004082 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4083 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4084 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4085 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4086 aligned.)
4087
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004088- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4089 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4090 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4091
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004092- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4093 level.
4094
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004095- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4096 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4097 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4098 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4099 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4100
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004101- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4102 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4103 code.
4104
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004105- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4106 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4107 adjusting for negative indices.
4108
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004109- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4110 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4111 object.
4112
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004113- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4114 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4115 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4116
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004117- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4118 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004119
4120- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4121
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004122- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4123 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4124 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4125 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4126
4127- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4128
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004129- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004130
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004131- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004132 without going through the buffer API.
4133
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004134- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004135
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004136- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4137 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4138 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4139 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4140
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004141- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4142 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4143
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004144- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004145 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4146
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004147New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004148-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004149
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004150- OpenVMS is now supported.
4151
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004152- AtheOS is now supported.
4153
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004154- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4155
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004156- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4157
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004158Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004159-----
4160
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004161- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4162 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4163 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004164
4165Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004166-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004167
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004168- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4169 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4170 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4171 bugs.
4172 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004173 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004174 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4175 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004176 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004177
4178- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004179 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004180
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004181- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4182 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4183
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004184- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4185 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004186 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004187 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4188
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004189- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4190 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4191 use files" uninstall option).
4192
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004193- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4194
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004195- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4196 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4197
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004198- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4199 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4200 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4201
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004202- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4203 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4204 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4205 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4206 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004207 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4208 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4209 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004210
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004211- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004212 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004213 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4214 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4215 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4216 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4217 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4218 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4219 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4220 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4221 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4222 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4223 work around.
4224
4225- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4226 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4227 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4228 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4229 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4230 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4231 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4232 specified with O_CREAT too).
4233
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004234Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004235----
4236
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004237- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004238
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004239- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4240 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4241 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4242
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004243- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4244 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4245 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4246
4247- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4248 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4249 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4250 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4251 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4252 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4253 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4254 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004255
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004256- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4257 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4258 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004259
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004260- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4261 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4262 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4263 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4264 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004265
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004266- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4267 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4268 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004269
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004270- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4271 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004272
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004273- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4274 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4275 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4276 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4277 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004278
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004279- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4280 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4281 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4282
4283- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4284 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4285 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004286
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004287- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4288 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4289 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4290 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004291 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004292
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004293- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4294 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004295
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004296- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4297 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004298
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004299- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004300 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004301 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4302 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004303
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004304
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004305What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004306===============================
4307
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004308*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4309
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004310Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004311--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004312
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004313- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4314 with a custom metaclass.
4315
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004316Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004317-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004318
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004319- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4320 are proxies.
4321
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004322Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004323-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004324
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004325- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4326 very short strings.
4327
4328- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4329 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4330 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4331 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4332 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4333
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004334Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004335-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004336
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004337- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4338 close or delete time).
4339
4340- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4341 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4342
4343- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4344
4345- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004346 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004347
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004348Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004349-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004350
4351Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004352-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004353
4354C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004355-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004356
4357New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004358-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004359
4360Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004361-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004362
4363Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004364-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004365
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004366- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4367
4368- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4369 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4370
4371- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4372 deleted at process exit time.
4373
4374- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4375 in backslash.
4376
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004377Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004378----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004379
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004380- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4381 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4382 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4383
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004384
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004385What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004386===========================
4387
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004388*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4389
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004390Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004391--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004392
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004393- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4394 been extensively updated. See
4395
4396 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4397
4398 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4399
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004400- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4401 deleted!
4402
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004403- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4404 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4405 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4406 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4407 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4408
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004409- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4410
4411 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4412 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4413
4414 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4415 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4416 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4417 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4418 supported anyway.
4419
4420 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4421 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4422
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004423- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4424 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4425 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4426 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4427 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004428
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004429- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4430 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4431 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4432
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004433Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004434-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004435
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004436- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4437 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4438 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4439 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4440 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4441 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004442 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4443 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4444 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4445 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004446
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004447- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4448 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4449 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4450
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004451Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004452-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004453
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004454- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4455
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004456Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004457-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004458
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004459- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4460 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4461 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4462 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4463 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4464 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4465
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004466- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4467
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004468- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4469
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004470- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4471
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004472- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4473 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4474 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4475
4476- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4477
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004478Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004479-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004480
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004481- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4482 off a search on Google.
4483
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004484Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004485-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004486
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004487- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4488 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4489 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4490 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4491 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4492 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4493 other platforms should do likewise.
4494
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004495- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4496 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4497 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4498
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004499C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004500-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004501
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004502- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4503 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4504 producing key-value pairs.
4505
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004506- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004507 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004508 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4509 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4510 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4511 previously went unchallenged.
4512
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004513New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004514-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004515
4516Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004517-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004518
4519Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004520-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004521
4522Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004523----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004524
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004525- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4526 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004527
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004528- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4529 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4530 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4531 home.
4532
4533
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004534What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004535===========================
4536
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004537*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4538
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004539Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004540--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004541
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004542- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4543 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004544
4545 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004546 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004547
4548 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4549 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004550 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004551 This needs to be documented.
4552
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004553- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4554 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4555
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004556- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4557 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4558 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4559
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004560- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4561 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4562
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004563- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4564 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4565 class forbids it).
4566
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004567- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4568 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4569 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4570
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004571- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4572
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004573Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004574-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004575
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004576- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4577 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004578 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004579
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004580- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4581 (like 1 + '').
4582
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004583Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004584-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004585
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004586- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4587 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4588 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4589 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004590 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004591 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4592
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004593- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4594 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4595 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4596 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4597
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004598- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4599 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004600 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4601 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4602 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004603
4604- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4605 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004606
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004607- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4608 bytes on its input.
4609
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004610Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004611-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004612
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004613- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004614 convenience function.
4615
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004616- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4617 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4618 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004619 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4620 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4621 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4622 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4623 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4624 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004625
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004626- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4627 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4628 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4629 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4630
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004631- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4632 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4633 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4634
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004635- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4636 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4637 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4638 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4639
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004640- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4641 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004642 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004643 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4644 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4645 new -l and -e options.
4646
4647- statcache is now deprecated.
4648
4649- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4650 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004651 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004652 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4653 time properly taken into account.
4654
4655- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4656 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4657 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4658 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4659
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004660Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004661-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004662
4663Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004664-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004665
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004666- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4667 is built with libdb3 if available.
4668
4669- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4670
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004671C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004672-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004673
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004674- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4675 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4676 PySequence_Size().
4677
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004678- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4679
4680- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4681 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4682 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4683
4684- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4685 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4686
4687- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4688 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4689
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004690New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004691-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004692
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004693- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4694 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4695
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004696- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4697 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4698
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004699- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4700
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004701Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004702-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004703
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004704- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4705 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4706
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004707Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004708-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004709
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004710Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004711----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004712
4713- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4714 removed completely in the next release.
4715
4716- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4717 OSX.
4718
4719- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4720 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4721
4722- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4723
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004724
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004725What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004726===========================
4727
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004728*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4729
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004730Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004731--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004732
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004733- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004734 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004735 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004736 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4737 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004738 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4739 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004740 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4741 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004742
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004743- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4744 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4745
4746- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4747 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4748
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004749Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004750-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004751
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004752- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4753 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4754 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4755 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4756 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4757 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4758 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4759 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4760
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004761- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4762 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4763 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4764 example).
4765
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004766- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004767 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004768 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004769 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004770
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004771- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4772 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4773 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004774 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004775
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004776- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4777 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4778 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4779 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4780 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4781 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4782
4783 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4784
4785 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4786
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004787Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004788-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004789
4790- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4791
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004792- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4793
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004794- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4795 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004796
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004797- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4798 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4799 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4800 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4801 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4802 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004803 attributes.
4804
4805- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4806 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4807 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004808
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004809- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4810 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4811 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004812
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004813- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4814 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4815 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004816 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4817 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4818
4819- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4820 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004821
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004822Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004823-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004824
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004825- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4826 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4827
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004828- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4829 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4830 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4831 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4832
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004833- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4834 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4835 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4836 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4837
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004838 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4839 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4840 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4841 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4842 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4843 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4844 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4845 without losing information).
4846
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004847- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004848 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4849 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4850 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4851 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4852 module).
4853
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004854 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004855 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4856 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4857 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4858 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004859
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004860- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004861 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4862 encoding.
4863
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004864- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4865 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4866
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004867- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004868 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4869
4870- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4871 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4872 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4873 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4874
4875- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4876
4877- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4878 ON, and OFF.
4879
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004880- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4881 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4882
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004883Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004884-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004885
4886- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4887 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4888 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004889
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004890- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4891 been added: -X and -E.
4892
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004893Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004894-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004895
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004896- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4897 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4898
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004899C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004900-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004901
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004902- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4903 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4904 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4905 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4906 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4907
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004908- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4909 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4910 as long) arguments.
4911
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004912- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4913 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4914 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4915 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4916 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4917 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4918
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004919- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4920 input.
4921
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004922New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004923-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004924
4925Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004926-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004927
4928Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004929-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004930
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004931- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4932 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4933 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4934
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004935- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4936 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4937 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004938 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004939
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004940 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4941 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4942 import signal
4943 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004944
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004945 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004946 while 1:
4947 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004948 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004949 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4950 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4951 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4952 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004953
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004954
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004955What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4956===========================
4957
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004958*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4959
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004960Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004961--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004962
4963- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4964 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4965 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4966
4967- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4968 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4969 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4970 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4971 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4972 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4973 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004974
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004975- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004976 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004977 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4978 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4979 associate a docstring with a property.
4980
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004981- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4982 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4983 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4984 other built-in object types.
4985
4986- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4987 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4988 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4989 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4990 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4991
4992- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4993 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4994
4995- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4996 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004997 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004998 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4999 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5000 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5001 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5002 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5003
5004- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5005 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5006 class.
5007
5008- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5009 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5010 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5011 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5012
5013- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5014 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5015 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5016 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5017
5018- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5019 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5020
5021- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5022 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5023 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5024 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5025 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005026 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005027 with the same value as s.
5028
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005029- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5030
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005031Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005032----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005033
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005034- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5035
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005036- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5037 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5038 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5039 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5040 objects.
5041
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005042- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5043 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005044 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5045 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5046
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005047- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5048 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5049 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5050
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005051Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005052-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005053
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005054- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5055 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5056 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5057 by the instances.
5058
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005059- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5060 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5061 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5062
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005063- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5064 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5065 before the entire comparison is complete.
5066
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005067- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5068 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5069 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5070
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005071- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5072 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5073 getwriter().
5074
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005075- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5076 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5077
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005078- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005079 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5080 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5081
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005082- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5083 iterable object.
5084
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005085- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5086 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005087
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005088- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5089 authentication.
5090
5091- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5092 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005093
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005094- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005095 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5096 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5097 a sample driver.)
5098
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005099Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005100-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005101
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005102- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5103 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5104 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5105 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5106 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5107 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5108 kernel has large file support.
5109
5110- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5111 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5112 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5113 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5114 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5115
5116- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5117 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5118 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5119
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005120C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005121-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005122
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005123- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5124 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5125
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005126New platforms
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- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5130 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5131
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005132Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005133-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005134
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005135- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5136 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5137 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5138 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5139 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5140
5141- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5142 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5143 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5144 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5145
5146- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5147 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5148
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005149Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005150-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005151
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005152- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005153 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5154 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005155
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005156
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005157What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5158===========================
5159
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005160*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5161
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005162Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005163----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005164
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005165- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5166 big to represent as a C double.
5167
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005168- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5169 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5170 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5171 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5172 restriction).
5173
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005174- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5175 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5176 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5177 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5178 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5179
5180 >>> dir([])
5181 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5182 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5183 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5184 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5185 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5186 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5187 'reverse', 'sort']
5188
5189 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5190
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005191- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005192 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5193 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5194 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5195 OverflowError exception.
5196
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005197- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005198 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005199 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5200 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5201 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5202 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5203 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005204 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005205 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5206 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5207
5208 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5209 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5210 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5211 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005212
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005213- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005214 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5215 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5216 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5217 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5218 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5219 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5220 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5221 once it is created.
5222
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005223- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5224 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5225 (key, value) pairs.
5226
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005227- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005228 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5229 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5230
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005231- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5232 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5233 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5234 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5235 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005236
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005237- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005238 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5239 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5240
5241 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5242
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005243- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005244 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5245
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005246Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005247-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005248
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005249- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005250 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5251 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005252
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005253- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5254 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5255 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5256 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5257 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5258 in this area anymore).
5259
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005260- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5261 threading.Timer.
5262
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005263- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5264 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5265
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005266- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005267 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5268
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005269- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005270 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5271 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5272 converted to Python longs.
5273
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005274- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005275 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5276
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005277- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5278 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5279 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5280
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005281Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005282-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005283
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005284- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5285 division operators as per PEP 238.
5286
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005287Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005288-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005289
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005290- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5291 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5292 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5293 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5294
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005295C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005296-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005297
5298- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005299
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005300- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5301 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005302 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005303
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005304 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5305 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005306 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005307 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005308
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005309- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005310 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5311 module:
5312
5313 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005314
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005315 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5316 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005317
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005318 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5319 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005320
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005321 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5322
5323 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5324
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005325- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005326 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5327 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5328 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005329
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005330New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005331-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005332
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005333- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5334 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5335 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5336 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5337 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005338
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005339Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005340-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005341
5342Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005343-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005344
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005345- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5346 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5347 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5348 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005349 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5350 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5351 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5352 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5353 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005354
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005355- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005356 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5357
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005358
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005359What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5360===========================
5361
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005362*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5363
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005364Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005365-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005366
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005367- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5368 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5369
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005370- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5371 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5372 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005373
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005374- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5375 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5376 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5377 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005378
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005379- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5380
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005381- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005382
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005383Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005384-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005385
5386- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005387 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005388 the module docstring for details.
5389
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005390Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005391-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005392
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005393- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005394 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5395 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5396 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005397
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005398- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5399 Nick Mathewson.
5400
5401Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005402----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005403
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005404- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5405 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5406 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5407 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5408 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5409 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5410 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5411 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5412
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005413- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5414 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5415 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5416 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5417
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005418- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5419 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5420 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5421 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5422 come a long way).
5423
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005424- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5425 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5426 write filters for these warnings).
5427
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005428- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5429 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5430 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5431 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5432 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5433
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005434- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5435 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5436 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5437 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5438 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5439 older distribution.
5440
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005441Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005442-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005443
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005444- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5445 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005446 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005447
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005448- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5449 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5450 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5451
5452- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5453
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005454- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5455
5456- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5457
5458- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5459
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005460- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005461
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005462- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5463
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005464New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005465-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005466
5467C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005468-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005469
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005470- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5471 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5472 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5473 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5474 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5475 against buffer overruns.
5476
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005477- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005478 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5479 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005480 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5481 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5482 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5483
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005484- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5485 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5486 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5487 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5488 deprecated.
5489
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005490Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005491-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005492
5493- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5494 relevant is found.
5495
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005496
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005497What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005498===========================
5499
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005500*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5501
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005502Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005503----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005504
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005505- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5506 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5507 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5508 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5509 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5510 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5511 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5512 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005513 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005514 repaired.
5515
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005516- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005517 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005518 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5519 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5520 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5521 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5522 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5523 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5524 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5525 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5526
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005527- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5528 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5529 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5530 leading BMO character).
5531
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005532- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5533 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5534 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5535
5536 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5537 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5538 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005539
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005540 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5541 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5542 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5543 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5544 for various simple to use conversions.
5545
5546 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5547 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5548
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005549 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5550 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5551 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5552 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5553 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5554 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5555 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5556 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5557 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5558 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5559 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5560 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5561 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5562 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5563 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005564
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005565- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5566 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5567 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005568 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005569 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005570
5571 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005572 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5573 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5574 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5575 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5576 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005577 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5578 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005579
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005580 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5581 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5582 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005583 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005584
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005585- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5586 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5587 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5588 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5589 floating arithmetic,
5590
5591 x = 9007199254740992.0
5592 print long(x)
5593
5594 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5595 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5596 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5597 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5598 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5599 functions are of good quality).
5600
5601 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5602 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5603 algorithms to break.
5604
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005605- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5606 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5607 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5608 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5609 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5610 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5611 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5612 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5613 order.
5614
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005615- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5616 operation along the most common code paths.
5617
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005618- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5619 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5620
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005621- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5622 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5623 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5624 {}.update(UserDict())
5625
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005626- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5627 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5628 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5629 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5630 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5631 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5632 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5633 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5634
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005635- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005636 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005637
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005638 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005639 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5640 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005641 join() method of strings
5642 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005643 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5644 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005645 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005646 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005647
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005648- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5649 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5650
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005651- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5652 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5653
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005654- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5655 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5656 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5657 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5658
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005659- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5660 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005661 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005662 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5663 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005664
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005665- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5666
5667
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005668Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005669-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005670
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005671- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005672 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005673 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5674 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5675
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005676- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5677 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5678
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005679- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5680 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5681 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5682 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5683
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005684- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5685 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5686 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5687
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005688- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5689
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005690- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5691
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005692- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5693 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5694 that are still imported into string.py).
5695
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005696- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5697
5698- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5699 Now it does.
5700
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005701- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5702
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005703- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5704 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5705 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5706 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5707 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005708 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5709 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005710
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005711- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5712 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5713 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5714 'help(object)'.
5715
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005716Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005717-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005718
5719- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005720 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005721 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5722 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5723
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005724- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005725 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5726 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005727
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005728C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005729-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005730
5731- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5732 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005733
5734----
5735
5736**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**