blob: 8429b7be742df85d48fc34d4cd67e69dc56e9678 [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
Marc-André Lemburgfe4b34c2006-02-19 15:22:22 +000015- Fix the encodings package codec search function to only search
16 inside its own package. Fixes problem reported in patch #1433198.
17
18 Note: Codec packages should implement and register their own
19 codec search function. PEP 100 has the details.
20
Martin v. Löwis18e16552006-02-15 17:27:45 +000021- PEP 353: Using ssize_t as the index type.
22
Neal Norwitzfc76d632006-01-10 06:03:13 +000023- Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
24 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
25 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
26
Neal Norwitz671b9e32006-01-09 07:07:12 +000027- Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
28 configure would break checking curses.h.
29
Georg Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000030- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
31 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
32
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000033- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
34
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000035- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
36
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000037- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
38
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000039- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
40 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
41
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000042- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
43 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number
44 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
45
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000046- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
47 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000048 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000049
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000050- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
51 now encodes backslash correctly.
52
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000053- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
54
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000055- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
56 and long longs.
57
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000058- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
59 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
60 message in this case.
61
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000062- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
63 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
64 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
65 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
66 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
67
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000068- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000069
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000070- Speed up some Unicode operations.
71
72- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
73
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000074- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000075 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
76
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000077- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
78
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000079- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
80 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
81
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000082- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
83
84- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
85
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000086- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
87 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
88 was empty.
89
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000090- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
91 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
92
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000093- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000094 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000095
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000096- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
97 codes.
98
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000099- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
100 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
101 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
102
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +0000103- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
104 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
105
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +0000106- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +0000107 (fixes bug #1119418).
108
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +0000109- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
110
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +0000111- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
112 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
113
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +0000114- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
115 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
116 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
117
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000118- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
119
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000120- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
121 reference counts in some error exit cases.
122
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000123- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
124 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
125 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
126 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
127 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
128 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
129 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
130 realloc.
131
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000132- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
133 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
134
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000135- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
136 like their int counterparts.
137
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000138- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
139 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
140 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
141 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
142 for a longer write-up of the problem).
143
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000144- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
145 serializing floats.
146
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000147- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
148 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
149 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
150
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000151- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
152 278.
153
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000154- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
155 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
156 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
157 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000158 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000159 PyNumber_*().
160 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
161
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000162- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
163 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
164 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
165 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
166
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000167- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
168 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
169 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
170 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
171 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
172
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000173- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
174 disabled caused a crash.
175
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000176- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
177 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
178
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000179- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000180 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
181
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000182- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
183
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000184- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000185 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
186 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
187 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000188
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000189- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
190
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000191- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
192 returning None.
193
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000194- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000195 ('\') with a specific error message.
196
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000197- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
198
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000199- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
200 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
201
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000202- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000203 an ferror() call.
204
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000205- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
206 list.sort().
207
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000208- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
209 (2+3) --> (5).
210
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000211- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
212
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000213- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
214 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000215
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000216- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
217 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
218 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
219
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000220- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
221 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
222 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
223
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000224Extension Modules
225-----------------
226
Georg Brandldbd83392006-02-20 09:42:33 +0000227- Bug #854823: socketmodule now builds on Sun platforms even when
228 INET_ADDRSTRLEN is not defined.
229
Georg Brandlf4f44152006-02-18 22:29:33 +0000230- Patch #1393157: os.startfile() now has an optional argument to specify
231 a "command verb" to invoke on the file.
232
Neal Norwitz082b2df2006-02-07 07:04:46 +0000233- Bug #876637, prevent stack corruption when socket descriptor
234 is larger than FD_SETSIZE.
235
Neal Norwitz0e6bc8c2006-02-05 05:45:43 +0000236- Patch #1407135, bug #1424041: harmonize mmap behavior of anonymous memory.
237 mmap.mmap(-1, size) now returns anonymous memory in both Unix and Windows.
238 mmap.mmap(0, size) should not be used on Windows for anonymous memory.
239
Martin v. Löwis57a34e82006-02-04 19:12:37 +0000240- Patch #1422385: The nis module now supports access to domains other
241 than the system default domain.
242
Martin v. Löwis14694662006-02-03 12:54:16 +0000243- Use Win32 API to implement os.stat/fstat. As a result, subsecond timestamps
244 are reported, the limit on path name lengths is removed, and stat reports
245 WindowsError now (instead of OSError).
246
Gregory P. Smithcfc4a8d2006-01-29 19:46:23 +0000247- Add bsddb.db.DBEnv.set_tx_timestamp allowing time based database recovery.
248
Neal Norwitz62a21122006-01-25 05:21:55 +0000249- Bug #1413192, fix seg fault in bsddb if a transaction was deleted
250 before the env.
251
Martin v. Löwis11017b12006-01-14 18:12:57 +0000252- Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
253
Neal Norwitz3b4fff82006-01-11 08:54:45 +0000254- Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
255
Neal Norwitz88bbd732006-01-10 07:05:44 +0000256- Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
257 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
258 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
259
Neal Norwitz5e3d8622006-01-09 06:24:35 +0000260- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
261 without prior setting of the userptr.
262
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000263- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
264
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000265- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
266
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000267- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
268 problem on AIX.
269
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000270- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
271
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000272- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
273
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000274- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
275
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000276- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
277 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
278
Gregory P. Smithe101df92006-01-24 20:09:45 +0000279- Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using
280 BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1.
281
282- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4
283
284- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000285
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000286- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
287 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
288
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000289- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
290
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000291- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
292 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
293
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000294- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
295 returns in cStringIO.c.
296
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000297- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
298 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
299
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000300- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
301
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000302- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
303
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000304- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
305 the file system encoding.
306
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000307- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
308 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000309
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000310- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
311
312- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000313 line without newlines.
314
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000315- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
316 on Windows.
317
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000318- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000319 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
320
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000321- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
322 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
323 for large or negative values.
324
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000325- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000326 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000327
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000328- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
329
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000330- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
331 if available on the platform.
332
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000333- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
334 available on the platform.
335
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000336- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
337 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
338
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000339- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
340
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000341- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
342 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
343 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
344
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000345- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
346
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000347- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
348 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
349
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000350- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000351 file size.
352
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000353- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
354
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000355- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
356 {remove_history,replace_history}
357
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000358- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
359 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000360
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000361- stat_float_times is now True.
362
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000363- array.array objects are now picklable.
364
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000365- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
366 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
367
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000368- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
369 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
370 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
371
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000372- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
373 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000374
375Library
376-------
377
Georg Brandl8f7c54e2006-02-20 08:40:38 +0000378- Bug #1413790: zipfile now sanitizes absolute archive names that are
379 not allowed by the specs.
380
381- Bug #1413790: zipfile now sanitizes absolute archive names that are
382 not allowed by the specs.
383
Georg Brandlc98eeed2006-02-19 14:57:47 +0000384- Patch #1215184: FileInput now can be given an opening hook which can
385 be used to control how files are opened.
386
Georg Brandlc029f872006-02-19 14:12:34 +0000387- Patch #1212287: fileinput.input() now has a mode parameter for
388 specifying the file mode input files should be opened with.
389
Georg Brandl67e9fb92006-02-19 13:56:17 +0000390- Patch #1215184: fileinput now has a fileno() function for getting the
391 current file number.
392
Georg Brandl602b9ba2006-02-19 13:26:36 +0000393- Patch #1349274: gettext.install() now optionally installs additional
394 translation functions other than _() in the builtin namespace.
395
Georg Brandle4662172006-02-19 09:51:27 +0000396- Patch #1337756: fileinput now accepts Unicode filenames.
397
Georg Brandl7b4e7c22006-02-18 21:10:56 +0000398- Patch #1373643: The chunk module can now read chunks larger than
399 two gigabytes.
400
Georg Brandl21dd1af2006-02-17 13:35:13 +0000401- Patch #1417555: SimpleHTTPServer now returns Last-Modified headers.
402
Georg Brandlbd3bc4d2006-02-17 09:52:53 +0000403- Bug #1430298: It is now possible to send a mail with an empty
404 return address using smtplib.
405
Georg Brandl0e1abe22006-02-17 09:48:14 +0000406- Bug #1432260: The names of lambda functions are now properly displayed
407 in pydoc.
Georg Brandl501dd0d2006-02-17 09:45:40 +0000408
Martin v. Löwis00756902006-02-05 17:09:41 +0000409- Patch #1412872: zipfile now sets the creator system to 3 (Unix)
410 unless the system is Win32.
411
Martin v. Löwisc81e3a62006-01-30 15:04:31 +0000412- Patch #1349118: urllib now supports user:pass@ style proxy
Martin v. Löwis3e865952006-01-24 15:51:21 +0000413 specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols
414 are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections.
415
Georg Brandl531ceba2006-01-21 07:20:56 +0000416- Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications.
417
418- Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.
Georg Brandl89f35ac2006-01-20 17:24:23 +0000419
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000420- Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
421
Neal Norwitzf60cd472006-01-14 07:05:13 +0000422- Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
Georg Brandl45ab2332006-01-13 17:05:56 +0000423 any more.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000424
Georg Brandl4edd9892006-01-13 16:59:46 +0000425- Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
426 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000427
Martin v. Löwis412ed3b2006-01-08 10:45:39 +0000428- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
429
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000430- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
431
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000432- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
433 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
434 LoadError subclasses IOError.
435
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000436- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000437 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
438 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
439 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
440 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
441
442 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
443 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
444 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
445 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
446 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000447
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000448- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
449 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
450 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
451
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000452- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
453
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000454- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
455
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000456- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
457 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
458 illegal argument)
459
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000460- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
461 is an error in the format string.
462
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000463- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
464
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000465- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000466 "parent" argument.
467
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000468- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
469 for padding.
470
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000471- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
472 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
473
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000474- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
475 to get the correct encoding.
476
477- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
478 languages.
479
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000480- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
481
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000482- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
483
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000484- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
485
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000486- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
487 functionality.
488
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000489- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
490
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000491- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
492 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
493
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000494- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
495 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
496 match the Content-Length header.
497
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000498- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
499
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000500- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
501 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000502 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000503
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000504- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
505
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000506- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
507
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000508- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
509 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
510
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000511- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
512 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
513 Tkdnd.
514
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000515- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
516 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
517
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000518- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
519 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
520
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000521- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000522 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
523
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000524- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
525 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
526
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000527- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
528 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
529
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000530- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000531 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000532
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000533- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
534
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000535- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
536 error messages.
537
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000538- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
539
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000540- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
541 Bug #1224621.
542
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000543- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
544 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
545 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
546 terminates by raising StopIteration.
547
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000548- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
549
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000550- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
551 component of the path.
552
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000553- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
554 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
555 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
556 class at all.
557
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000558- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
559 files to PyPI.
560
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000561- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
562 them to PyPI.
563
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000564- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
565 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
566 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
567 work as expected.
568
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000569- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
570 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
571
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000572- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000573 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
574
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000575- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
576
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000577- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
578 to build.
579
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000580- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
581 symbolic links on Windows.
582
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000583- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000584 profile.py if available.
585
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000586- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
587
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000588- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
589 in LWPCookieJar.
590
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000591- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
592
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000593- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
594
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000595- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
596
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000597- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
598
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000599- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
600
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000601- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
602
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000603- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
604
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000605- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
606
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000607- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
608 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
609 be exploited in various ways.
610
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000611- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000612 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
613
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000614- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
615 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
616
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000617- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000618 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
619
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000620- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
621
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000622- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
623
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000624- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
625
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000626- Enhancements to the csv module:
627
628 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000629 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000630 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000631 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
632 reporting.
633 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
634 dictates.
635 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000636 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000637 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000638 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
639 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000640 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
641 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000642 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000643 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
644 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
645 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
646 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
647 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
648 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
649 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
650 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
651 without first creating a dialect class.
652 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
653 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
654 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000655 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000656 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
657 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000658 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
659 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
660 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
661 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000662 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
663 This has been fixed.
664
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000665- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
666 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
667 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
668 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
669
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000670- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
671
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000672- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
673 (Bug #951915).
674
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000675- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
676 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
677 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000678 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000679
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000680- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
681
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000682- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
683 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
684
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000685- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
686
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000687- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
688
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000689- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
690
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000691- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
692
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000693- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
694
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000695- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
696 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
697 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
698
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000699- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000700 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000701
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000702- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
703 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
704 tokenizer with very long source lines.
705
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000706- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
707 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
708 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000709
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000710- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
711 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000712
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000713- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
714 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
715
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000716- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
717 correctly.
718
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000719- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
720 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
721 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
722 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
723 between two lines.
724
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000725- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
726 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
727 handlers.
728
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000729- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000730 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
731 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000732
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000733- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
734 considering it exactly like a '*'.
735
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000736- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
737 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000738
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000739- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
740
Gustavo Niemeyer548148812006-01-31 18:34:13 +0000741- Patch #1413711: Certain patterns of differences were making difflib
742 touch the recursion limit.
743
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000744Build
745-----
746
Martin v. Löwis86d66262006-02-17 08:40:11 +0000747- Patch #1432345: Make python compile on DragonFly.
748
Martin v. Löwis856bf9a2006-02-14 20:42:55 +0000749- Build support for Win64-AMD64 was added.
750
Martin v. Löwisa55e55e2006-02-11 15:55:14 +0000751- Patch #1428494: Prefer linking against ncursesw over ncurses library.
752
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000753- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
754
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000755- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
756 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
757
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000758- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
759
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000760- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
761 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
762
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000763- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
764 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
765
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000766- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
767 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
768 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000769 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000770
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000771- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
772 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
773 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
774
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000775- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
776
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000777- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
778 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
779
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000780- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
781 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
782 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
783 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
784 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
785 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
786 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
787 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
788
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000789- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
790 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
791 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
792 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
793
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000794C API
795-----
796
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000797- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
798
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000799- Removed PyRange_New().
800
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000801- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
802 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
803 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
804 mappings.
805
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000806
807Tests
808-----
809
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000810- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000811
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000812- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
813 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
814
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000815
816Documentation
817-------------
818
Georg Brandl8cb30772006-01-20 09:34:29 +0000819- Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.
820
Georg Brandla3a93ae2006-01-20 09:14:36 +0000821- Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
822 values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
823
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000824- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
825
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000826- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
827
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000828- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
829
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000830- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
831
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000832- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
833
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000834- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
835
836- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
837
838- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
839
840- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
841
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000842- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
843 Closes bug #1166582.
844
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000845- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
846 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
847 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
848
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000849Mac
850---
851
852
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000853New platforms
854-------------
855
856- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
857
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000858
859Tools/Demos
860-----------
861
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000862- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
863 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
864 source files that need an encoding declaration.
865 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
866
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000867- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
868
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000869- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000870
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000871- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
872 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000873
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000874What's New in Python 2.4 final?
875===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000876
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000877*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000878
879Core and builtins
880-----------------
881
882- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
883 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
884 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
885
886
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000887What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
888==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000889
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000890*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000891
892Core and builtins
893-----------------
894
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000895- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
896 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
897 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
898
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000899
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000900Library
901-------
902
903- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
904 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
905 raised is re-raised.
906
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000907- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
908 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
909
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000910- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
911 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
912 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
913 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
914 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
915 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
916 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
917 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
918 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
919 by the slice are recomputed now.
920
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000921- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000922
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000923Build
924-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000925
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000926- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
927 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
928 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000929
930C API
931-----
932
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000933- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
934
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000935
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000936What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
937================================
938
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000939*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000940
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000941License
942-------
943
944The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
945is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
946changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
947Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
948intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
949durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
950the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
951License::
952
953 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
954
955says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
956to Python 2.1.1.
957
958The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
959License Version 2.
960
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000961Core and builtins
962-----------------
963
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000964- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
965 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
966 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
967 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
968 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
969 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
970 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000971 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000972 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
973 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
974
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000975- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000976
977Extension Modules
978-----------------
979
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000980- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
981 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
982 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
983 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000984
985Library
986-------
987
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000988- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
989 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
990 returned.
991
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000992- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
993
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000994- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
995 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
996
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000997- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
998
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000999- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
1000 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001001
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +00001002- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
1003
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +00001004- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
1005
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +00001006- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +00001007 the source code is updated and reloaded.
1008
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001009Build
1010-----
1011
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +00001012- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001013
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001014What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
1015================================
1016
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +00001017*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001018
1019Core and builtins
1020-----------------
1021
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001022- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +00001023 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
1024
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +00001025- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
1026 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
1027 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
1028 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
1029
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001030- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
1031 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
1032
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +00001033- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
1034 constant.
1035
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001036- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
1037 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
1038 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
1039 large), and to anomalies such as
1040 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
1041 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
1042 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
1043 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001044
1045Extension modules
1046-----------------
1047
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +00001048- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
1049 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001050 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
1051 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
1052 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001053
1054Library
1055-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001056
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001057- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001058 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001059 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
1060 --swig-cpp.
1061
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +00001062- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
1063 it is set.
1064
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +00001065- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +00001066
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +00001067- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
1068 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
1069 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
1070 Closes bug #1039270.
1071
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001072- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +00001073
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +00001074 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001075 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
1076 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
1077 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
1078 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
1079 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
1080 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
1081 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
1082 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
1083 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
1084 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
1085 + Updates to documentation.
1086
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +00001087- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
1088 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
1089 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
1090 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
1091
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001092- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001093
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +00001094- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
1095 applications should use the getmember function.
1096
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +00001097- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
1098
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +00001099- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
1100 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
1101 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
1102 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
1103 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
1104 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
1105 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
1106 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
1107 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
1108
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001109- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
1110 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +00001111 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001112
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001113- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
1114 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
1115 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
1116 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
1117 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
1118 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
1119 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
1120 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001121
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001122- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1123 the new public features (of which there are many).
1124
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001125- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001126 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1127 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1128 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1129 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001130 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001131
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001132- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1133
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001134- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1135 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1136 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1137 options.
1138
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001139- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1140 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1141 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1142 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1143 conditions under which non-string values work.
1144
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001145Build
1146-----
1147
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001148- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1149 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1150 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1151
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001152- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1153 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1154 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1155 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1156 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001157
1158C API
1159-----
1160
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001161- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1162 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1163
1164- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1165
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001166- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1167 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1168 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1169 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1170 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1171 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1172 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1173 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1174 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1175
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001176- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1177
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001178- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1179 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1180 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001181
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001182Tests
1183-----
1184
1185- test__locale ported to unittest
1186
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001187Mac
1188---
1189
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001190- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1191 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1192 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001193
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001194Tools/Demos
1195-----------
1196
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001197- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1198 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1199 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1200 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1201 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001202
1203
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001204What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1205=================================
1206
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001207*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001208
1209Core and builtins
1210-----------------
1211
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001212- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001213 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1214
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001215- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1216 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1217 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1218 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1219 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1220 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1221 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1222 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001223 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1224 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1225 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1226 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1227 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001228
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001229- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1230 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1231 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1232 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1233 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1234
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001235- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1236
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001237- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1238 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1239
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001240- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1241 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1242 modified the list.
1243
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001244- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1245 functions is now writable.
1246
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001247- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1248 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1249 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1250 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1251
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001252- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1253 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1254 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1255 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1256 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001257
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001258- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1259 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1260
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001261Extension modules
1262-----------------
1263
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001264- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1265
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001266- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1267 data.
1268
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001269- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1270 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1271 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1272 supposed to have been truncated away.
1273
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001274- Added socket.socketpair().
1275
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001276- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1277 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1278
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001279- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001280 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1281
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001282Library
1283-------
1284
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001285- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001286 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001287
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001288- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1289 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1290
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001291- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1292 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1293
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001294- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1295
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001296- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1297 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001298
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001299- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1300 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1301
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001302- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1303
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001304- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1305
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001306- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1307
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001308- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1309 Percivall.
1310
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001311- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1312 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1313
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001314- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1315 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1316 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001317 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001318
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001319- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1320 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1321 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1322 and exponent.
1323
1324- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1325
1326- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001327 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001328 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1329
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001330- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1331 to the readline module.
1332
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001333- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001334 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1335 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001336
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001337- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1338 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1339 contains symlinks.
1340
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001341- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1342 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1343
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001344- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1345 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1346 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1347
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001348- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1349 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1350 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1351 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1352 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1353 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1354 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1355 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1356 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1357 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1358 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1359 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1360 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1361
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001362- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1363
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001364Tools/Demos
1365-----------
1366
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001367- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1368 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1369
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001370- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1371
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001372Build
1373-----
1374
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001375- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1376 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1377 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1378 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1379 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1380 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1381 plans to do so.
1382
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001383- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1384 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1385
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001386- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1387 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1388
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001389- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1390 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1391
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001392- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1393 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1394
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001395- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1396 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1397
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001398C API
1399-----
1400
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001401..
1402
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001403Documentation
1404-------------
1405
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001406- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1407 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1408
1409- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1410 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1411 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001412
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001413New platforms
1414-------------
1415
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001416- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1417
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001418Tests
1419-----
1420
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001421..
1422
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001423Windows
1424-------
1425
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001426- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1427 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1428 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1429 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1430 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1431 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1432 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1433 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1434 the problem.
1435
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001436Mac
1437---
1438
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001439..
1440
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001441
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001442What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1443=================================
1444
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001445*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001446
1447Core and builtins
1448-----------------
1449
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001450- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1451 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1452 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1453 sensitive code.
1454
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001455- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001456 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001457
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001458 @staticmethod
1459 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001460
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001461 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001462
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001463- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1464 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1465 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1466 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1467 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1468 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1469 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1470 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1471 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1472 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1473 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1474
1475 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1476 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1477 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1478 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1479 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1480 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1481 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1482
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001483- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1484 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1485
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001486- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001487 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001488
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001489- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001490 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001491 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1492
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001493- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001494 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1495 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1496
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001497- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1498 types that support garbage collection.
1499
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001500- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1501
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001502- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1503 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1504 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1505 Jython.
1506
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001507- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1508
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001509- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1510 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1511
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001512- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1513 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1514 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001515
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001516- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1517 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1518 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1519
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001520Extension modules
1521-----------------
1522
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001523- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1524
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001525Library
1526-------
1527
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001528- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1529 TIS-620
1530
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001531- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1532 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1533 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1534 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1535 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1536 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1537 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1538 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1539 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1540 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1541
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001542- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1543
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001544- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1545 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1546 same as when the argument is omitted).
1547 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1548
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001549- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1550
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001551- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1552 schemes are offered.
1553
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001554- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1555
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001556- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1557 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1558 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1559
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001560- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1561
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001562- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1563 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1564
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001565- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1566 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1567 when dummy_threading is being used.
1568
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001569- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1570 from a tarfile.
1571
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001572- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001573 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001574
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001575- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1576 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1577 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1578 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1579
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001580- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1581 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1582
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001583- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1584 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1585 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1586 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1587 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1588 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1589 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1590 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1591 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1592 by some other method in progress).
1593
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001594- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1595 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1596 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001597
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001598- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1599
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001600- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1601 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1602 AM Kuchling.
1603
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001604- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1605 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1606 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1607
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001608- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1609 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1610 instead of unsigned.
1611
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001612- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001613 no longer part of the public API.
1614
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001615- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1616 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1617 string methods of the same name).
1618
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001619- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001620 SF patch 945642.
1621
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001622- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1623
1624 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1625
1626 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1627 DocTestSuites.
1628
1629- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1630 that provide thread-local data.
1631
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001632- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1633 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1634
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001635- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1636
1637- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1638 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1639 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1640
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001641- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1642
1643 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1644 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1645 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001646
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001647 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1648 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1649 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1650 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1651
1652 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1653 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1654
1655 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1656 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1657 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1658 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1659
1660 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1661 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1662 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1663 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1664 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1665
1666 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1667 wrapping help output.
1668
1669 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1670 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1671 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001672
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001673C API
1674-----
1675
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001676- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1677 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1678 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1679 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1680 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1681 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1682 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1683 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1684 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1685 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1686 its visible semantics have not changed.
1687
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001688- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1689 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1690
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001691Documentation
1692-------------
1693
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001694- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001695
1696 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001697 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001698
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001699 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001700
1701 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1702
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001703- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001704
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001705Tests
1706-----
1707
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001708- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001709 platforms that use the Makefile.
1710
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001711- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1712 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1713 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1714
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001715
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001716What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1717=================================
1718
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001719*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001720
1721Core and builtins
1722-----------------
1723
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001724- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1725 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1726 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1727 objects now (one object instead of three).
1728
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001729- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1730 Windows DLLs.
1731
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001732- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1733 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001734
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001735- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1736 a new .pyc magic.
1737
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001738- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1739 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1740 be there.
1741
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001742- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1743 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1744 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1745
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001746- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1747 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1748 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1749
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001750- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1751
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001752- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1753 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1754 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001755
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001756- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1757 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1758
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001759- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1760
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001761- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001762 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001763
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001764- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1765
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001766- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1767
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001768- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1769 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1770
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001771- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1772 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1773 Fixes bug #858016 .
1774
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001775- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1776 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1777 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1778
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001779- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1780 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1781 improves their performance (about 35%).
1782
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001783- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1784 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1785 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1786
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001787- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1788 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1789 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1790 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1791
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001792- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1793 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001794 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001795 length is not known).
1796
1797- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1798 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001799 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1800 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001801 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1802
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001803- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1804 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1805
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001806- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1807 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1808 keyword arguments.
1809
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001810- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1811 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1812 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1813
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001814- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1815 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1816 cases.
1817
1818- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1819 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1820 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1821 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1822 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1823 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1824 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1825 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1826 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1827 a release build.
1828
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001829- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1830 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1831
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001832- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001833 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001834
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001835- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1836 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1837 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1838 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1839 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1840 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1841 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1842 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1843 destroyed.
1844
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001845- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1846 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1847 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1848 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1849 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1850 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1851 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1852 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1853
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001854- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1855 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1856 character other than a space.
1857
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001858- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1859 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1860 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1861 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1862 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1863 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1864 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1865 attributes with the same name.
1866
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001867- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1868 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1869 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1870 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1871 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1872 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1873 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1874 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1875 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1876 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1877 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1878 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1879 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1880 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001881
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001882- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1883 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1884 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1885 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1886 This has been repaired.
1887
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001888- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1889
1890- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1891
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001892- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1893 over a sequence.
1894
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001895- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001896 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001897
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001898- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1899
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001900- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1901 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1902 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1903 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1904 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1905 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1906 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1907 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1908
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001909- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1910 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1911 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1912
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001913- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1914 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1915 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1916 freelist.
1917
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001918- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1919 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1920
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001921- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1922 number.
1923
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001924- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1925 a TypeError exception.
1926
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001927- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1928 820195.
1929
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001930- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1931 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1932 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1933
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001934- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001935 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1936 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001937
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001938- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1939 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1940 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1941
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001942- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1943 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001944 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001945
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001946- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001947 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1948 the first call.
1949
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001950
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001951Extension modules
1952-----------------
1953
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001954- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1955 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1956
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001957- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1958 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1959 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1960 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1961 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1962 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1963 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001964
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001965- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1966
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001967- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1968
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001969- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1970 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1971
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001972- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1973 fewer false positives.
1974
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001975- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1976 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1977
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001978- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001979 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1980
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001981- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001982 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001983 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001984 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1985 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001986
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001987- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1988 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1989 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1990 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1991
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001992- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1993 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1994 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1995 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1996 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1997 #897625.
1998
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001999- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
2000 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
2001
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00002002- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
2003 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
2004 and pops on either side of the deque.
2005
2006- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
2007 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
2008
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00002009- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
2010 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
2011 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
2012 other functions that expect a function argument.
2013
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00002014- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
2015
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002016- os.getsid was added.
2017
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00002018- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
2019 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
2020 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
2021
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00002022- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
2023
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00002024- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
2025
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00002026- readline.clear_history was added.
2027
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00002028- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
2029
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00002030- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
2031
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00002032- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
2033
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00002034- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
2035
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00002036- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
2037
2038- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
2039
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00002040- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
2041
2042- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
2043
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002044- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
2045 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
2046 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
2047
2048- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
2049 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
2050 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
2051 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
2052 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
2053 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
2054 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
2055
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00002056- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
2057 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
2058 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
2059 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002060
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002061- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002062 iterators from a single iterable.
2063
2064- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
2065 of raising a TypeError exception.
2066
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00002067- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
2068 as parameter.
2069
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002070Library
2071-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00002072
Armin Rigoa871ef22006-02-08 12:53:56 +00002073- Added a new module: cProfile, a C profiler with the same interface as the
2074 profile module. cProfile avoids some of the drawbacks of the hotshot
2075 profiler and provides a bit more information than the other two profilers.
2076 Based on "lsprof" (patch #1212837).
2077
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00002078- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
2079
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00002080- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
2081 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
2082 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002083
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00002084- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
2085 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
2086 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00002087
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00002088- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00002089
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00002090- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
2091 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00002092
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00002093- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
2094 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
2095
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002096- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
2097
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002098- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002099 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002100
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002101- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00002102 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002103
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00002104- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
2105
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00002106- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
2107 on cygwin and mingw32.
2108
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00002109- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
2110
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00002111- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
2112 module.
2113
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00002114- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
2115 installation scheme for all platforms.
2116
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002117- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00002118 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002119
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002120- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
2121 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
2122 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
2123
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00002124- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
2125 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2126 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2127
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002128- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2129
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002130- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2131
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002132- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2133 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2134
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002135- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2136 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2137 type pattern with the same value exists.
2138
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002139- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2140 when run from the command prompt).
2141
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002142- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2143 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2144
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002145- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2146 default sort).
2147
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002148- Added global runctx function to profile module
2149
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002150- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2151
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002152- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2153
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002154- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2155
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002156- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002157 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2158 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2159 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2160 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2161 accordingly.
2162
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002163- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2164 decoding standards.
2165
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002166- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2167 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2168 called for all requests.
2169
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002170- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2171 they are passed to the compiler.
2172
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002173- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2174 indent, width and depth.
2175
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002176- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2177 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2178
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002179- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2180 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2181
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002182- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2183
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002184- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2185
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002186- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2187
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002188- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2189 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2190
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002191- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002192 for better performance.
2193
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002194- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002195
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002196- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2197 a string).
2198
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002199- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2200
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002201- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2202
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002203- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2204
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002205- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2206
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002207- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2208 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2209 list of fieldnames.
2210
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002211- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2212 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2213
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002214- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2215
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002216- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2217 empty lists.
2218
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002219- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2220 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2221 and shelves.
2222
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002223- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2224 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2225
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002226- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002227 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2228 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002229
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002230- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2231 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002232 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002233
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002234- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002235 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2236 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2237
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002238- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2239 and removed in Py2.4.
2240
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002241- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2242
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002243- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2244
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002245Tools/Demos
2246-----------
2247
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002248- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2249 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2250
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002251- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2252
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002253- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2254 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2255 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2256 destination in situations where both files are given.
2257
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002258- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2259 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2260 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2261 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2262
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002263- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2264
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002265- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2266 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2267 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2268 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2269 now.
2270
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002271- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2272 in effect
2273
2274- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2275 C-c C-h
2276
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002277- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2278 -d option was given.
2279
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002280Build
2281-----
2282
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002283- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2284 build under OS X.
2285
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002286- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2287 --enable-profiling.
2288
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002289- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2290 is configured --with-tsc.
2291
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002292- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2293 on AMD64.
2294
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002295- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2296 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2297
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002298- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2299 removed.
2300
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002301- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2302 supported (see PEP 11).
2303
2304- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2305
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002306- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2307
2308- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2309 (see PEP 11).
2310
2311- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2312 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2313
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002314C API
2315-----
2316
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002317- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2318 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2319 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2320
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002321- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2322 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2323 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2324 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2325
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002326- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2327 generator objects.
2328
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002329- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2330 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002331 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2332 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002333
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002334- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2335 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2336
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002337- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2338 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2339 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2340 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2341 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2342
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002343- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2344 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2345 about 10% faster.
2346
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002347- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2348 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2349
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002350- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2351 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2352 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2353 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2354
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002355Windows
2356-------
2357
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002358- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2359 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2360 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2361 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2362
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002363- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2364 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2365 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2366
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002367
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002368What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2369===============================
2370
2371*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2372
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002373IDLE
2374----
2375
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002376- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2377 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2378 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2379 context-menu actions.
2380
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002381- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2382 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2383 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2384 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2385 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2386 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2387 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2388 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2389 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2390
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002391
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002392What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2393=============================================
2394
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002395*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002396
2397Core and builtins
2398-----------------
2399
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002400- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002401 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002402 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2403
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002404Extension modules
2405-----------------
2406
2407- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2408 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2409 than once. This has been fixed.
2410
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002411- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2412 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2413 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2414 call.
2415
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002416- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2417
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002418Library
2419-------
2420
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002421- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2422 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2423
2424- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2425 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2426 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2427 restored.
2428
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002429IDLE
2430----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002431
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002432- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002433
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002434Build
2435-----
2436
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002437- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2438 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2439
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002440C API
2441-----
2442
2443Windows
2444-------
2445
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002446- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2447 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2448
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002449- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2450
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002451Mac
2452---
2453
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002454- Various fixes to pimp.
2455
2456- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2457
2458- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2459 more problems than it solves.
2460
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002461
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002462What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2463=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002464
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002465*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2466
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002467Core and builtins
2468-----------------
2469
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002470- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2471 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2472
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002473- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2474 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002475 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002476
2477- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2478 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2479 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002480 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002481
2482- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2483 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002484
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002485- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2486 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2487 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2488
2489- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002490 770247.
2491
2492- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002493
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002494Extension modules
2495-----------------
2496
2497- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2498 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2499
2500- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2501
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002502- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2503
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002504- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2505 contained within the _strptime module.
2506
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002507- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2508 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2509
2510- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002511 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2512
2513- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2514 the find_class attribute, if present.
2515
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002516- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002517
2518 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2519 (SF bug 763298).
2520
2521 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002522 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2523 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2524 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002525
2526 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2527
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002528Library
2529-------
2530
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002531- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2532
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002533- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2534 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2535 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2536 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2537 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2538 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2539 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2540 or Tester().
2541
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002542- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2543 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2544 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2545 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2546 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2547 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2548 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2549 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2550 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002551
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002552 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002553
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002554- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2555 weren't before was an oversight.
2556
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002557- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2558 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2559
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002560- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2561 when there are no lines.
2562
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002563- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2564 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2565
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002566- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2567 to child processes.
2568
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002569- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2570
2571- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2572
2573- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2574 xmlrpclib.
2575
2576- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2577 responses.
2578
2579- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2580 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2581
2582- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2583 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2584 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2585
2586- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2587 used as patterns.
2588
2589- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2590 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2591 than Tk 8.3.
2592
2593- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2594
2595- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002596
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002597Tools/Demos
2598-----------
2599
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002600- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2601
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002602- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2603
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002604- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002605
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002606Build
2607-----
2608
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002609- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2610
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002611- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2612
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002613- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2614 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002615
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002616- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2617 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2618 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002619
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002620C API
2621-----
2622
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002623- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2624 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2625
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002626Windows
2627-------
2628
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002629- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2630 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2631 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2632 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2633 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2634 Python exception ::
2635
2636 thread.error: can't start new thread
2637
2638 is raised now.
2639
2640- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2641 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2642 instead of from DLL teardown.
2643
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002644Mac
2645---
2646
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002647- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002648 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002649 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2650 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2651 the executable in the bundle.
2652
2653- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002654
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002655- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2656
2657- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2658 on Panther.
2659
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002660What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2661================================
2662
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002663*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002664
2665Core and builtins
2666-----------------
2667
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002668- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2669 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2670 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2671 with the -i option.
2672
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002673- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2674 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2675
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002676- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2677 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2678
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002679- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2680 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2681 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2682 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2683 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2684 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2685 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2686 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2687 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2688 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2689 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2690 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2691 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002692
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002693- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2694 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2695 embedded in a lambda expression.
2696
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002697- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2698 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2699 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2700 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2701 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2702
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002703- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2704 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2705 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2706
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002707- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2708 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2709
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002710- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2711 It's writable again.
2712
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002713- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2714 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2715 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002716 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002717
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002718- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2719 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2720 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2721
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002722Extension modules
2723-----------------
2724
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002725- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2726 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2727
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002728- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2729 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2730 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2731 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2732
2733- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2734 collection.
2735
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002736- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2737 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2738 unique within a single program run.
2739
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002740- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2741 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2742
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002743- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2744 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2745
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002746- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2747 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002748
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002749- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2750
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002751- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2752 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2753
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002754- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2755 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2756 for many BSD-derived systems.
2757
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002758
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002759Library
2760-------
2761
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002762- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2763 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2764 primary ones:
2765
2766 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2767 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2768 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2769
2770 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2771 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2772 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2773 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2774 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2775 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2776
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002777- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2778 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2779 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2780 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2781 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2782 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2783 argument.
2784
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002785- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2786 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2787 in the archive.
2788
2789- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2790 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2791
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002792- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2793 569574).
2794
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002795- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2796 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2797 no more.
2798
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002799- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2800 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2801 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2802 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2803 code coverage.
2804
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002805- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2806 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2807 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002808 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2809 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002810
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002811- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2812 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2813 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002814 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002815
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002816- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2817
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002818- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2819 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2820 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2821 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2822
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002823- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2824 handling.
2825
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002826- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2827 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2828
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002829- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2830 in socket.py.
2831
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002832- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2833
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002834- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2835 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2836 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2837 opener with proxy support.
2838
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002839- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2840
2841- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2842
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002843Tools/Demos
2844-----------
2845
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002846- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2847
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002848- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2849
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002850- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2851 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002852
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002853- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2854 files.
2855
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002856Build
2857-----
2858
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002859- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002860 different root directory.
2861
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002862C API
2863-----
2864
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002865- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2866 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2867 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2868 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2869 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2870 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2871 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2872 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2873 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2874 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2875
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002876- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2877 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2878 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2879 from Python.
2880
2881
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002882New platforms
2883-------------
2884
2885None this time.
2886
2887Tests
2888-----
2889
2890- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2891 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2892
2893Windows
2894-------
2895
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002896- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2897
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002898- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2899 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2900 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2901 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2902 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2903 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2904 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2905 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2906 that's what it's for.
2907
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002908Mac
2909---
2910
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002911- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2912 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2913 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2914 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002915- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2916 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2917- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002918
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002919SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2920------------------------------------
2921
2922430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2923598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2924622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2925661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2926683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2927697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2928713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2929724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2930727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2931729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2932730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2933731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2934732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2935733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2936735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2937740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2938744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2939745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2940747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2941749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2942751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2943753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2944755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2945757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2946760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2947
2948
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002949What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2950================================
2951
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002952*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002953
2954Core and builtins
2955-----------------
2956
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002957- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2958 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2959
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002960- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2961 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2962 and cannot be strings).
2963
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002964- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2965 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2966 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2967 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2968
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002969- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2970 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2971 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2972 Python itself.
2973
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002974- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2975 the referenced object, if it has one.
2976
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002977- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2978 the thread started at
2979 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2980
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002981- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2982 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2983 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2984 placed on a list index.
2985
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002986- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2987 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2988 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2989 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2990
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002991- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2992 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2993 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2994 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2995 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2996 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2997 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2998
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002999- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
3000 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
3001 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
3002 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
3003 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
3004
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00003005- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
3006 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00003007
3008- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
3009 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
3010 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
3011 #693195.)
3012
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00003013- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
3014 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003015
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00003016- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00003017 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00003018 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
3019 interpreter executions, would fail.
3020
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003021- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00003022 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00003023 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003024
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003025Extension modules
3026-----------------
3027
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00003028- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
3029 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
3030 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
3031 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
3032
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00003033- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
3034 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
3035
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00003036- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
3037 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
3038 and Greg Chapman.)
3039
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003040- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
3041 recursively.
3042
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00003043- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00003044 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
3045 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
3046 leaks.
3047
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00003048- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
3049
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00003050- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
3051 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
3052 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
3053 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
3054 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
3055 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
3056 #705836.
3057
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00003058- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00003059 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
3060
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00003061- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
3062 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
3063 See SF bug #692416.
3064
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00003065- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
3066 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
3067
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00003068- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
3069 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
3070 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003071
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003072- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00003073 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
3074 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
3075
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00003076- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
3077 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
3078 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
3079 timeouts to work properly.
3080
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003081Library
3082-------
3083
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003084- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
3085 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
3086 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
3087 future release.
3088
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00003089- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
3090 for querying platform dependent features.
3091
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00003092- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00003093
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00003094- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
3095 pickle protocol versions.
3096
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00003097- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
3098 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
3099 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
3100
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00003101- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
3102
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00003103- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
3104 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
3105 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
3106 modules.
3107
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00003108- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
3109 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
3110 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
3111
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003112- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
3113 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
3114
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00003115- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
3116 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
3117 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
3118
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003119- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00003120 MS Office extensions.
3121
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00003122- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
3123 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
3124
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00003125- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3126 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3127
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003128- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3129 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3130 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3131 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3132 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3133 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3134
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003135- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3136 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3137 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003138
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003139- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3140 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3141 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3142
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003143- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3144
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003145- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3146 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3147 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3148
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003149Tools/Demos
3150-----------
3151
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003152- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3153 See the module docstring for details.
3154
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003155Build
3156-----
3157
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003158- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3159 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003160
3161C API
3162-----
3163
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003164- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3165
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003166- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3167 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3168 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3169
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003170- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3171 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003172
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003173 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3174 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3175 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003176
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003177- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003178 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3179
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003180- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3181 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3182 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003183
3184New platforms
3185-------------
3186
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003187None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003188
3189Tests
3190-----
3191
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003192- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3193 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003194
3195Windows
3196-------
3197
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003198- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3199 function.
3200
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003201- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3202 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003203
3204Mac
3205---
3206
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003207- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3208 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003209
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003210- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3211 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003212
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003213- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3214 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3215 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003216
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003217- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003218 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3219 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003220
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003221- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3222 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003223
3224
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003225What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3226=================================
3227
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003228*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003229
3230Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003231-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003232
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003233- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3234 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3235 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3236
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003237- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3238 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3239 (SF patch #664376.)
3240
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003241- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3242 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3243 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3244 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3245 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3246 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003247 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003248
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003249- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3250 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3251 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3252 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003253 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003254
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003255- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3256 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3257 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3258 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3259 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3260 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3261 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3262 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3263 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3264 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3265 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3266
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003267- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3268 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3269 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3270 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3271 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3272 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3273
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003274- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3275 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3276
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003277- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3278 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3279 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3280 case.)
3281
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003282- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3283 passed as unicode strings.
3284
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003285- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3286 See SF bug #683467.
3287
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003288- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3289 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3290
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003291- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3292
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003293- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3294
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003295- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3296 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3297 arguments.
3298
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003299- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3300 See SF bug #667147.
3301
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003302- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003303 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003304 See SF bug #676155.
3305
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003306- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003307 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003308 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3309 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3310 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3311 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3312 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3313 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003314
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003315Extension modules
3316-----------------
3317
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003318- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3319 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3320 tp_as_number pointer.
3321
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003322- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3323 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3324 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3325 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3326 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3327
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003328- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3329
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003330- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3331
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003332- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003333 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003334 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3335 patch #678531.)
3336
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003337- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3338 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3339
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003340- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3341 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3342
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003343- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3344
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003345- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3346 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3347 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3348
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003349- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3350
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003351- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3352 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3353
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003354- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003355
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003356- datetime changes:
3357
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003358 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3359
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003360 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3361 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3362 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3363 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3364 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3365 now.
3366
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003367 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003368 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3369 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003370
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003371 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003372 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003373 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3374 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3375 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3376 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003377
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003378 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3379 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3380 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003381 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3382
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003383 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3384 by a later example coded by Guido.
3385
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003386 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003387 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3388 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3389 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003390 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3391 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3392
3393 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3394 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3395 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3396 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3397 tzinfo subclass instance.
3398
3399 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3400 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3401 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3402 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3403 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3404 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3405 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3406 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003407
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003408 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3409 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3410 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3411 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3412 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003413 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3414
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003415 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003416
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003417 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3418 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3419 as a naive datetime object.
3420
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003421 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3422 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3423 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3424
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003425 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3426 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3427 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3428 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3429 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3430 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3431 comparison.
3432
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003433 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3434 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3435 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3436 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003437 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003438
3439 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003440
3441 and ::
3442
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003443 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3444
3445 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3446 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3447 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3448 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3449
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003450 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3451 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3452 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3453 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3454 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3455
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003456 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3457 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003458 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3459 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003460
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003461Library
3462-------
3463
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003464- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3465 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3466
3467- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3468 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3469 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3470 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3471 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3472 See PEP 307 for details.
3473
3474- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3475 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3476
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003477- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3478 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003479 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003480 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3481 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003482 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003483
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003484- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3485 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3486
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003487- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3488 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3489 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3490
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003491- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3492
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003493- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3494 exception.
3495
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003496- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3497 class.
3498
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003499- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3500 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3501 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3502
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003503- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3504 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3505
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003506- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003507 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3508 See SF bug #659228.
3509
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003510- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3511 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3512 See SF patch #651082.
3513
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003514- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003515
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003516- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3517 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3518
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003519- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003520 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003521
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003522- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3523 DOS paths from other platforms.
3524
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003525Tools/Demos
3526-----------
3527
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003528- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3529 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3530 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3531 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3532 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3533 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3534 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3535 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3536 example:
3537
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003538 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3539 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003540
3541 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3542
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003543
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003544Build
3545-----
3546
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003547- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3548 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3549 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003550 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3551
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003552 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3553
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003554- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3555 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3556 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3557 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3558 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3559 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3560 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3561 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3562 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3563
3564- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3565 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3566 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3567 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3568
3569- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3570 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3571
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003572C API
3573-----
3574
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003575- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3576 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003577
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003578- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3579 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3580 tp_as_number pointer.
3581
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003582- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3583 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3584 (SF #681367)
3585
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003586- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3587 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3588 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3589 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003590
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003591Tests
3592-----
3593
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003594- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003595 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3596 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3597 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3598 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3599 pydoc.)
3600
3601- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3602
3603- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003604
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003605Windows
3606-------
3607
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003608- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3609 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3610 time).
3611
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003612- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3613 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3614
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003615- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3616 release without strong cryptography.
3617
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003618- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003619 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003620
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003621- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3622 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3623
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003624Mac
3625---
3626
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003627- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3628 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003629
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003630- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3631 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3632 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003633
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003634- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3635 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003636
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003637- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3638 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3639 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3640 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003641
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003642- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003643 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3644 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3645 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003646
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003647
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003648What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003649=================================
3650
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003651*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003652
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003653Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003654--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003655
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003656- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3657
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003658- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3659 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003660 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003661 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003662 a different meaning than before.
3663
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003664- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003665 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003666 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003667
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003668- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003669 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003670 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003671
3672- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3673 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3674 and deallocation.
3675
3676- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3677 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3678
3679- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3680 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3681 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3682 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3683 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3684
3685- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3686 now detected by the garbage collector.
3687
3688- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3689 [SF bug 519621]
3690
3691- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3692 identifier.
3693
3694- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3695 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3696 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3697 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3698 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3699 [SF bug 563060]
3700
3701- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3702 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3703 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3704 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3705 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3706
3707- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3708 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3709 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3710
3711- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3712
3713- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3714 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3715 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3716 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3717 state of the slots would be lost.)
3718
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003719Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003720-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003721
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003722- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003723 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3724 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3725 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3726 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003727 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3728 Jython 2.1.
3729
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003730- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003731 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003732 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3733 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3734 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3735 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3736 these, see PEP 302.
3737
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003738- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3739 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3740 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3741
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003742- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3743 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3744 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3745
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003746- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3747 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3748 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3749
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003750- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3751 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3752 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3753 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3754 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3755 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3756 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3757 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3758 releases or implementations.
3759
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003760- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003761 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3762 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003763
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003764- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3765 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3766
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003767- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3768 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3769 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3770
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003771- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3772 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3773
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003774- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3775 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003776 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3777 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003778
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003779- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3780 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3781 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3782 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3783 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3784
3785 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3786 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3787 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3788 pattern.
3789
3790 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3791 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3792 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3793 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3794
3795 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3796 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3797 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3798 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3799 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3800 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3801
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003802- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3803 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3804 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3805 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3806 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3807 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3808 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3809 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003810
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003811- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3812 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3813 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3814 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3815 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003816 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3817 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3818 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3819 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3820 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3821 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3822 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003823
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003824- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3825 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3826
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003827- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3828 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3829 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3830 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3831 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3832 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3833 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3834 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3835 to Zack Weinberg!
3836
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003837- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3838 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3839 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3840 type. This has been fixed now.
3841
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003842- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3843 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3844 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3845
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003846- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3847 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3848 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3849 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3850 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3851 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3852 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3853 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003854 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003855
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003856- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3857 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3858 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003859
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003860- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3861 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3862 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3863 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3864 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3865 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3866 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3867 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003868 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003869 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3870 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3871
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003872- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3873 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3874 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3875 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3876 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3877 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3878 this.)
3879
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003880- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3881 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003882 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003883 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003884 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3885 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003886 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3887 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003888
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003889- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3890 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3891 currently running.
3892
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003893- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3894 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3895 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3896 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3897
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003898- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3899 as directory names.
3900
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003901- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3902 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3903
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003904- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3905 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3906
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003907- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003908 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3909 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003910
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003911- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3912 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3913 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3914 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3915 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3916
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003917- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3918 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3919 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3920 removed.
3921
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003922- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3923 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3924 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3925
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003926- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3927 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3928 to __debug__.
3929
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003930- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3931 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3932 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3933
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003934- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3935 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3936 deprecated now.
3937
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003938- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3939 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3940 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003941
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003942- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3943 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3944 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3945 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3946 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003947
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003948- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3949 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3950
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003951- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3952 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3953 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003954 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003955 is backward compatible.
3956
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003957- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3958 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3959 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3960 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3961 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3962
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003963- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3964 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3965 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3966 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3967 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3968 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003969
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003970- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3971 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3972
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003973- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3974 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3975
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003976- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3977 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3978 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3979 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3980 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3981
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003982- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3983 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3984 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3985
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003986- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003987 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3988
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003989- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3990 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3991 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003992
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003993- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3994 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3995
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003996- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3997 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3998 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3999
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00004000- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
4001
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004002Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004003-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004004
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00004005- Added three operators to the operator module:
4006 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
4007 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
4008 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
4009
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00004010- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
4011
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00004012- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
4013 archives.
4014
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004015- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
4016 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
4017 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
4018
4019 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
4020
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004021- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
4022 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
4023 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00004024 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004025
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00004026- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
4027 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
4028 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
4029 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00004030 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
4031 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
4032 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
4033 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00004034
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00004035- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
4036 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00004037
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00004038- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
4039
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00004040- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
4041 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
4042
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00004043- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
4044 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
4045 supported.
4046
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00004047- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
4048
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00004049- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
4050 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00004051
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00004052- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
4053 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
4054
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00004055- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
4056
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004057- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
4058 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
4059
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00004060- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
4061 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
4062 functions but callable type objects.
4063
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004064- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004065 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004066 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004067
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00004068- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
4069 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00004070
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00004071- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
4072 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00004073
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00004074- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
4075 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
4076 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
4077 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
4078
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00004079- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
4080 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00004081
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00004082- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
4083 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
4084 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
4085 and __imul__.
4086
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00004087- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00004088 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
4089 is called.
4090
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00004091- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
4092 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
4093 interpreter was compiled.
4094
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004095- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
4096 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
4097 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004098 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004099 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
4100 1, not 2.
4101
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00004102- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
4103 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
4104 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
4105 limit.
4106
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00004107- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
4108 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
4109 bug #623464.
4110
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00004111- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
4112 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
4113 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
4114 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
4115
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004116Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004117-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004118
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00004119- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
4120
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00004121- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
4122 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
4123 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
4124 with Python 2.3a2.
4125
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004126- os.path exposes getctime.
4127
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004128- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004129 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004130 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004131 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004132 unit tests of floating point results.
4133
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004134- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4135 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4136 has been increased.
4137
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004138- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4139 executed.
4140
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004141- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4142 postinstallation script.
4143
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004144- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4145 test the current module.
4146
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004147- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004148 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4149 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4150 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4151 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4152
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004153- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004154 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004155 Ward's Optik package.
4156
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004157- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4158 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4159 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4160 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4161
4162- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4163 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004164 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004165
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004166- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4167 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4168 shelf are binary pickles.
4169
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004170- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4171 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4172
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004173- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4174 modules are iterators now.
4175
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004176- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4177 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4178 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4179 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4180 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4181 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004182
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004183- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4184 with their entity value.
4185
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004186- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4187
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004188- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4189 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004190
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004191- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4192 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004193 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004194
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004195- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4196 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4197 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4198 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4199 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4200 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4201 main():
4202
4203 import locale
4204 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4205
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004206- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4207 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4208
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004209- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4210 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4211 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4212 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4213 to the new standard.
4214
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004215- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4216 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4217 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4218 an extension to the database.
4219
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004220- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4221 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4222 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4223 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004224 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004225
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004226- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004227 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004228
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004229- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4230 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4231 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4232 bounded integers.
4233
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004234- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4235 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4236 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4237 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4238 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4239 in existence.
4240
4241 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4242 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4243 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4244 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4245 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4246 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4247
4248 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4249 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4250 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4251 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4252
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004253- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4254 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4255 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4256
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004257- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4258
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004259- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4260 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4261 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4262 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4263
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004264- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4265 argument.
4266
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004267- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4268 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4269 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4270 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4271 [SF patch 560794].
4272
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004273- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4274 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4275 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004276 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4277 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4278 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004279
4280- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4281 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004282
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004283- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4284 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4285 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4286 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004287
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004288- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4289 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4290 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4291 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4292 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4293
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004294- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004295
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004296- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4297
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004298- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4299 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4300 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4301 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4302 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4303 identical to None.
4304
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004305- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4306 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4307 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4308 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4309 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4310 results now.
4311
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004312- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4313 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4314
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004315- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4316 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4317 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4318 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4319 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4320 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4321 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4322 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4323
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004324- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4325
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004326- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4327 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4328
4329- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4330 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4331 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4332 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4333 and other systems.
4334
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004335- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4336 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4337 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4338 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 +00004339 work well with these.
4340
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004341- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4342
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004343- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004344 connections.
4345
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004346- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4347 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4348 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4349
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004350- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4351 sets
4352
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004353- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4354 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4355 name.
4356
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004357- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4358 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4359 passed in.
4360
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004361- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004362 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004363 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4364 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004365
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004366- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4367
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004368- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4369
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004370- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4371 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4372 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4373
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004374- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4375 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4376 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4377 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004378 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004379
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004380- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004381 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004382 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004383
4384- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4385 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4386 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4387
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004388- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004389 the value of its expression argument.
4390
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004391- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4392 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4393 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4394
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004395- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4396 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4397 skipstone browser was included.
4398
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004399- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4400 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4401
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004402Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004403-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004404
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004405- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4406 names in addition to accepting file names.
4407
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004408- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4409 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4410 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4411 still used and useful.)
4412
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004413- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4414 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4415 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4416 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004417
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004418- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4419 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4420 the generated binary.
4421
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004422Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004423-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004424
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004425- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4426
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004427- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4428 except in the hands of experts.
4429
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004430- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004431 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4432 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4433 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004434
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004435- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4436 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4437 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4438 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4439 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4440 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4441 builds.
4442
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004443- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4444 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4445 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4446 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4447 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4448 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4449 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4450 new type.
4451
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004452- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004453
4454 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4455 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4456 positive infinities.
4457
4458 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4459 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4460 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4461 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4462 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4463 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4464 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4465
4466 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4467
4468 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4469
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004470- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4471 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4472 size of the executable.
4473
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004474- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4475 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4476 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4477 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004478
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004479- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4480
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004481- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4482 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4483 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004484
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004485- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4486 well as Unix.
4487
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004488- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4489 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4490 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4491 modules in the README file for details.
4492
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004493C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004494-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004495
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004496- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4497 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004498 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004499 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004500 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004501
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004502- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4503 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4504 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4505 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4506 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4507 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004508 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004509 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4510 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4511 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4512 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4513 aligned.)
4514
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004515- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4516 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4517 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4518
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004519- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4520 level.
4521
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004522- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4523 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4524 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4525 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4526 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4527
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004528- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4529 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4530 code.
4531
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004532- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4533 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4534 adjusting for negative indices.
4535
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004536- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4537 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4538 object.
4539
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004540- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4541 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4542 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4543
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004544- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4545 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004546
4547- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4548
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004549- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4550 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4551 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4552 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4553
4554- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4555
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004556- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004557
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004558- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004559 without going through the buffer API.
4560
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004561- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004562
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004563- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4564 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4565 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4566 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4567
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004568- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4569 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4570
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004571- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004572 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4573
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004574New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004575-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004576
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004577- OpenVMS is now supported.
4578
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004579- AtheOS is now supported.
4580
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004581- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4582
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004583- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4584
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004585Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004586-----
4587
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004588- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4589 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4590 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004591
4592Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004593-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004594
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004595- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4596 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4597 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4598 bugs.
4599 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004600 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004601 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4602 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004603 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004604
4605- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004606 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004607
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004608- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4609 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4610
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004611- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4612 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004613 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004614 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4615
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004616- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4617 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4618 use files" uninstall option).
4619
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004620- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4621
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004622- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4623 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4624
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004625- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4626 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4627 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4628
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004629- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4630 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4631 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4632 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4633 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004634 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4635 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4636 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004637
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004638- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004639 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004640 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4641 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4642 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4643 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4644 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4645 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4646 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4647 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4648 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4649 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4650 work around.
4651
4652- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4653 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4654 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4655 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4656 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4657 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4658 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4659 specified with O_CREAT too).
4660
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004661Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004662----
4663
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004664- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004665
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004666- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4667 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4668 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4669
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004670- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4671 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4672 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4673
4674- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4675 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4676 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4677 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4678 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4679 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4680 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4681 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004682
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004683- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4684 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4685 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004686
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004687- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4688 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4689 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4690 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4691 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004692
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004693- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4694 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4695 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004696
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004697- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4698 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004699
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004700- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4701 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4702 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4703 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4704 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004705
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004706- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4707 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4708 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4709
4710- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4711 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4712 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004713
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004714- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4715 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4716 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4717 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004718 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004719
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004720- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4721 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004722
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004723- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4724 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004725
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004726- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004727 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004728 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4729 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004730
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004731
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004732What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004733===============================
4734
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004735*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4736
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004737Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004738--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004739
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004740- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4741 with a custom metaclass.
4742
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004743Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004744-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004745
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004746- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4747 are proxies.
4748
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004749Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004750-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004751
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004752- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4753 very short strings.
4754
4755- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4756 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4757 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4758 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4759 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4760
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004761Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004762-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004763
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004764- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4765 close or delete time).
4766
4767- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4768 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4769
4770- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4771
4772- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004773 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004774
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004775Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004776-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004777
4778Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004779-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004780
4781C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004782-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004783
4784New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004785-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004786
4787Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004788-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004789
4790Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004791-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004792
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004793- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4794
4795- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4796 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4797
4798- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4799 deleted at process exit time.
4800
4801- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4802 in backslash.
4803
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004804Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004805----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004806
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004807- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4808 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4809 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4810
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004811
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004812What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004813===========================
4814
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004815*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4816
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004817Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004818--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004819
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004820- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4821 been extensively updated. See
4822
4823 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4824
4825 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4826
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004827- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4828 deleted!
4829
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004830- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4831 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4832 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4833 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4834 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4835
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004836- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4837
4838 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4839 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4840
4841 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4842 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4843 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4844 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4845 supported anyway.
4846
4847 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4848 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4849
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004850- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4851 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4852 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4853 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4854 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004855
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004856- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4857 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4858 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4859
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004860Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004861-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004862
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004863- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4864 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4865 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4866 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4867 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4868 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004869 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4870 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4871 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4872 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004873
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004874- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4875 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4876 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4877
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004878Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004879-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004880
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004881- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4882
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004883Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004884-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004885
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004886- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4887 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4888 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4889 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4890 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4891 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4892
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004893- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4894
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004895- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4896
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004897- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4898
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004899- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4900 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4901 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4902
4903- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4904
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004905Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004906-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004907
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004908- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4909 off a search on Google.
4910
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004911Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004912-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004913
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004914- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4915 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4916 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4917 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4918 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4919 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4920 other platforms should do likewise.
4921
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004922- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4923 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4924 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4925
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004926C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004927-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004928
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004929- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4930 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4931 producing key-value pairs.
4932
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004933- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004934 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004935 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4936 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4937 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4938 previously went unchallenged.
4939
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004940New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004941-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004942
4943Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004944-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004945
4946Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004947-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004948
4949Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004950----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004951
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004952- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4953 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004954
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004955- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4956 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4957 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4958 home.
4959
4960
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004961What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004962===========================
4963
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004964*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4965
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004966Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004967--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004968
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004969- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4970 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004971
4972 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004973 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004974
4975 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4976 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004977 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004978 This needs to be documented.
4979
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004980- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4981 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4982
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004983- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4984 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4985 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4986
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004987- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4988 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4989
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004990- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4991 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4992 class forbids it).
4993
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004994- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4995 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4996 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4997
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004998- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4999
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005000Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005001-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005002
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00005003- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
5004 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005005 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00005006
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005007- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
5008 (like 1 + '').
5009
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005010Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005011-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005012
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005013- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
5014 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
5015 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
5016 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005017 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005018 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
5019
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00005020- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
5021 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
5022 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
5023 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
5024
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005025- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
5026 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005027 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
5028 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
5029 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005030
5031- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
5032 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005033
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00005034- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
5035 bytes on its input.
5036
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005037Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005038-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005039
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005040- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00005041 convenience function.
5042
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005043- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
5044 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
5045 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005046 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
5047 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
5048 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
5049 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
5050 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
5051 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005052
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00005053- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
5054 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
5055 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
5056 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
5057
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00005058- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
5059 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
5060 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
5061
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005062- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
5063 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
5064 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
5065 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
5066
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005067- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
5068 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005069 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005070 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
5071 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
5072 new -l and -e options.
5073
5074- statcache is now deprecated.
5075
5076- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
5077 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005078 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005079 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
5080 time properly taken into account.
5081
5082- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
5083 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
5084 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
5085 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
5086
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005087Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005088-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005089
5090Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005091-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005092
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005093- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
5094 is built with libdb3 if available.
5095
5096- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
5097
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005098C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005099-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005100
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00005101- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
5102 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
5103 PySequence_Size().
5104
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005105- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
5106
5107- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
5108 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
5109 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
5110
5111- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
5112 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
5113
5114- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
5115 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
5116
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005117New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005118-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005119
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005120- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
5121 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
5122
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00005123- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
5124 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
5125
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005126- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5127
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005128Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005129-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005130
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005131- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5132 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5133
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005134Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005135-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005136
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005137Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005138----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005139
5140- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5141 removed completely in the next release.
5142
5143- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5144 OSX.
5145
5146- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5147 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5148
5149- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5150
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005151
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005152What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005153===========================
5154
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005155*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5156
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005157Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005158--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005159
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005160- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005161 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005162 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005163 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5164 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005165 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5166 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005167 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5168 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005169
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005170- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5171 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5172
5173- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5174 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5175
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005176Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005177-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005178
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005179- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5180 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5181 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5182 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5183 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5184 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5185 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5186 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5187
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005188- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5189 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5190 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5191 example).
5192
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005193- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005194 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005195 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005196 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005197
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005198- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5199 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5200 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005201 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005202
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005203- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5204 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5205 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5206 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5207 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5208 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5209
5210 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5211
5212 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5213
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005214Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005215-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005216
5217- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5218
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005219- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5220
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005221- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5222 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005223
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005224- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5225 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5226 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5227 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5228 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5229 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005230 attributes.
5231
5232- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5233 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5234 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005235
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005236- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5237 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5238 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005239
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005240- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5241 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5242 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005243 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5244 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5245
5246- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5247 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005248
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005249Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005250-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005251
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005252- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5253 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5254
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005255- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5256 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5257 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5258 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5259
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005260- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5261 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5262 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5263 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5264
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005265 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5266 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5267 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5268 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5269 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5270 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5271 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5272 without losing information).
5273
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005274- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005275 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5276 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5277 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5278 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5279 module).
5280
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005281 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005282 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5283 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5284 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5285 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005286
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005287- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005288 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5289 encoding.
5290
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005291- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5292 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5293
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005294- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005295 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5296
5297- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5298 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5299 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5300 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5301
5302- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5303
5304- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5305 ON, and OFF.
5306
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005307- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5308 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5309
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005310Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005311-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005312
5313- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5314 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5315 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005316
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005317- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5318 been added: -X and -E.
5319
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005320Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005321-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005322
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005323- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5324 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5325
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005326C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005327-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005328
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005329- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5330 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5331 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5332 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5333 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5334
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005335- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5336 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5337 as long) arguments.
5338
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005339- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5340 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5341 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5342 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5343 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5344 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5345
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005346- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5347 input.
5348
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005349New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005350-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005351
5352Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005353-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005354
5355Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005356-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005357
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005358- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5359 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5360 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5361
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005362- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5363 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5364 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005365 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005366
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005367 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5368 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5369 import signal
5370 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005371
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005372 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005373 while 1:
5374 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005375 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005376 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5377 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5378 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5379 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005380
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005381
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005382What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5383===========================
5384
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005385*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5386
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005387Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005388--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005389
5390- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5391 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5392 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5393
5394- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5395 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5396 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5397 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5398 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5399 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5400 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005401
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005402- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005403 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005404 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5405 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5406 associate a docstring with a property.
5407
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005408- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5409 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5410 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5411 other built-in object types.
5412
5413- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5414 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5415 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5416 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5417 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5418
5419- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5420 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5421
5422- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5423 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005424 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005425 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5426 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5427 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5428 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5429 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5430
5431- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5432 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5433 class.
5434
5435- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5436 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5437 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5438 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5439
5440- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5441 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5442 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5443 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5444
5445- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5446 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5447
5448- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5449 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5450 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5451 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5452 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005453 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005454 with the same value as s.
5455
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005456- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5457
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005458Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005459----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005460
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005461- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5462
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005463- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5464 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5465 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5466 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5467 objects.
5468
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005469- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5470 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005471 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5472 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5473
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005474- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5475 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5476 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5477
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005478Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005479-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005480
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005481- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5482 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5483 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5484 by the instances.
5485
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005486- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5487 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5488 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5489
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005490- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5491 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5492 before the entire comparison is complete.
5493
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005494- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5495 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5496 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5497
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005498- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5499 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5500 getwriter().
5501
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005502- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5503 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5504
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005505- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005506 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5507 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5508
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005509- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5510 iterable object.
5511
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005512- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5513 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005514
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005515- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5516 authentication.
5517
5518- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5519 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005520
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005521- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005522 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5523 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5524 a sample driver.)
5525
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005526Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005527-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005528
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005529- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5530 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5531 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5532 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5533 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5534 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5535 kernel has large file support.
5536
5537- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5538 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5539 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5540 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5541 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5542
5543- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5544 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5545 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5546
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005547C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005548-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005549
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005550- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5551 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5552
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005553New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005554-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005555
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005556- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5557 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5558
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005559Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005560-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005561
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005562- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5563 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5564 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5565 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5566 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5567
5568- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5569 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5570 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5571 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5572
5573- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5574 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5575
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005576Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005577-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005578
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005579- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005580 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5581 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005582
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005583
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005584What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5585===========================
5586
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005587*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5588
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005589Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005590----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005591
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005592- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5593 big to represent as a C double.
5594
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005595- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5596 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5597 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5598 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5599 restriction).
5600
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005601- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5602 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5603 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5604 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5605 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5606
5607 >>> dir([])
5608 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5609 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5610 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5611 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5612 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5613 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5614 'reverse', 'sort']
5615
5616 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5617
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005618- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005619 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5620 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5621 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5622 OverflowError exception.
5623
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005624- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005625 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005626 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5627 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5628 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5629 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5630 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005631 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005632 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5633 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5634
5635 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5636 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5637 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5638 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005639
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005640- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005641 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5642 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5643 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5644 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5645 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5646 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5647 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5648 once it is created.
5649
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005650- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5651 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5652 (key, value) pairs.
5653
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005654- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005655 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5656 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5657
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005658- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5659 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5660 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5661 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5662 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005663
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005664- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005665 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5666 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5667
5668 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5669
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005670- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005671 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5672
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005673Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005674-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005675
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005676- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005677 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5678 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005679
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005680- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5681 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5682 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5683 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5684 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5685 in this area anymore).
5686
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005687- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5688 threading.Timer.
5689
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005690- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5691 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5692
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005693- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005694 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5695
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005696- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005697 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5698 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5699 converted to Python longs.
5700
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005701- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005702 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5703
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005704- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5705 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5706 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5707
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005708Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005709-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005710
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005711- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5712 division operators as per PEP 238.
5713
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005714Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005715-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005716
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005717- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5718 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5719 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5720 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5721
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005722C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005723-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005724
5725- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005726
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005727- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5728 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005729 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005730
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005731 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5732 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005733 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005734 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005735
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005736- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005737 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5738 module:
5739
5740 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005741
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005742 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5743 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005744
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005745 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5746 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005747
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005748 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5749
5750 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5751
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005752- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005753 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5754 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5755 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005756
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005757New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005758-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005759
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005760- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5761 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5762 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5763 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5764 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005765
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005766Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005767-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005768
5769Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005770-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005771
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005772- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5773 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5774 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5775 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005776 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5777 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5778 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5779 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5780 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005781
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005782- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005783 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5784
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005785
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005786What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5787===========================
5788
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005789*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5790
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005791Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005792-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005793
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005794- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5795 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5796
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005797- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5798 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5799 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005800
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005801- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5802 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5803 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5804 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005805
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005806- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5807
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005808- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005809
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005810Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005811-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005812
5813- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005814 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005815 the module docstring for details.
5816
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005817Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005818-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005819
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005820- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005821 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5822 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5823 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005824
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005825- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5826 Nick Mathewson.
5827
5828Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005829----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005830
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005831- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5832 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5833 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5834 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5835 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5836 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5837 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5838 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5839
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005840- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5841 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5842 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5843 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5844
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005845- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5846 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5847 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5848 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5849 come a long way).
5850
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005851- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5852 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5853 write filters for these warnings).
5854
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005855- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5856 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5857 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5858 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5859 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5860
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005861- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5862 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5863 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5864 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5865 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5866 older distribution.
5867
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005868Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005869-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005870
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005871- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5872 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005873 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005874
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005875- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5876 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5877 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5878
5879- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5880
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005881- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5882
5883- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5884
5885- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5886
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005887- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005888
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005889- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5890
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005891New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005892-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005893
5894C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005895-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005896
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005897- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5898 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5899 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5900 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5901 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5902 against buffer overruns.
5903
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005904- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005905 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5906 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005907 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5908 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5909 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5910
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005911- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5912 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5913 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5914 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5915 deprecated.
5916
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005917Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005918-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005919
5920- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5921 relevant is found.
5922
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005923
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005924What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005925===========================
5926
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005927*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5928
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005929Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005930----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005931
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005932- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5933 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5934 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5935 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5936 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5937 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5938 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5939 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005940 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005941 repaired.
5942
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005943- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005944 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005945 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5946 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5947 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5948 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5949 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5950 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5951 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5952 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5953
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005954- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5955 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5956 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5957 leading BMO character).
5958
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005959- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5960 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5961 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5962
5963 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5964 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5965 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005966
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005967 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5968 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5969 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5970 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5971 for various simple to use conversions.
5972
5973 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5974 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5975
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005976 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5977 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5978 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5979 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5980 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5981 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5982 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5983 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5984 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5985 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5986 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5987 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5988 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5989 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5990 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005991
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005992- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5993 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5994 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005995 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005996 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005997
5998 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005999 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
6000 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
6001 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
6002 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
6003 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006004 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
6005 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006006
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006007 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
6008 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
6009 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006010 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006011
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00006012- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
6013 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
6014 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
6015 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
6016 floating arithmetic,
6017
6018 x = 9007199254740992.0
6019 print long(x)
6020
6021 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
6022 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
6023 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
6024 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
6025 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
6026 functions are of good quality).
6027
6028 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
6029 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
6030 algorithms to break.
6031
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00006032- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
6033 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
6034 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
6035 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
6036 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
6037 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
6038 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
6039 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
6040 order.
6041
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006042- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
6043 operation along the most common code paths.
6044
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006045- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
6046 the same as dict.has_key(x).
6047
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00006048- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
6049 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
6050 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
6051 {}.update(UserDict())
6052
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006053- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
6054 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
6055 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
6056 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
6057 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
6058 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
6059 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
6060 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
6061
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006062- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00006063 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006064
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006065 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00006066 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
6067 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00006068 join() method of strings
6069 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006070 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
6071 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006072 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00006073 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006074
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00006075- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
6076 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
6077
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006078- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
6079 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
6080
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00006081- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
6082 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
6083 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
6084 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
6085
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006086- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
6087 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006088 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006089 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
6090 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00006091
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00006092- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
6093
6094
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006095Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006096-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006097
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006098- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006099 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006100 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
6101 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
6102
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00006103- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
6104 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
6105
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00006106- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
6107 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
6108 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
6109 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
6110
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00006111- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
6112 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
6113 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
6114
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00006115- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
6116
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00006117- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
6118
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00006119- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
6120 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
6121 that are still imported into string.py).
6122
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006123- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
6124
6125- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6126 Now it does.
6127
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006128- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6129
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006130- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6131 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6132 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6133 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6134 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006135 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6136 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006137
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006138- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6139 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6140 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6141 'help(object)'.
6142
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006143Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006144-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006145
6146- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006147 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006148 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6149 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6150
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006151- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006152 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6153 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006154
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006155C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006156-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006157
6158- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6159 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006160
6161----
6162
6163**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**