blob: f583ac93ca431baaf0bf912aa49bf90780ee897f [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XXXX-XX-XX*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
15...
16
17Extension modules
18-----------------
19
20...
21
22Library
23-------
24
Martin v. Löwis641d6482004-09-10 06:25:01 +000025- bdist_rpm now supports command line options {pre,post}-install,
26 {pre,post}-uninstall, and {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +000027- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
28 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
29 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
30 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
31 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
32 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
33 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
34 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000035
36Build
37-----
38
39...
40
41C API
42-----
43
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +000044- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
45 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
46 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000047
48Documentation
49-------------
50
51...
52
53Tests
54-----
55
56- test__locale ported to unittest
57
58Windows
59-------
60
61...
62
63Mac
64---
65
66...
67
68New platforms
69-------------
70
71...
72
73Tools/Demos
74-----------
75
76...
77
78
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000079What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
80=================================
81
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +000082*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000083
84Core and builtins
85-----------------
86
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +000087- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
88 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
89
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +000090- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
91 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
92 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
93 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
94 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
95 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
96 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
97 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +000098 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
99 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
100 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
101 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
102 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000103
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000104- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
105 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
106 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
107 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
108 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
109
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000110- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
111
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000112- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
113 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
114
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000115- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
116 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
117 modified the list.
118
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000119- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
120 functions is now writable.
121
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000122- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
123 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
124 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
125 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
126
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000127- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
128 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
129 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
130 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
131 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000132
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000133- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
134 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
135
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000136Extension modules
137-----------------
138
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000139- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
140
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000141- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
142 data.
143
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000144- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
145 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
146 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
147 supposed to have been truncated away.
148
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000149- Added socket.socketpair().
150
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000151- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
152 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
153
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000154- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
155 versions of Python, have now been removed.
156
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000157Library
158-------
159
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000160- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
161 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
162
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000163- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
164 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
165
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000166- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
167 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
168
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000169- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
170
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000171- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
172 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000173
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000174- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
175 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
176
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000177- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
178
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000179- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
180
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000181- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
182
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000183- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
184 Percivall.
185
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000186- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
187 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
188
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000189- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
190 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
191 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000192 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000193
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000194- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
195 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
196 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
197 and exponent.
198
199- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
200
201- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
202 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
203 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
204
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000205- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
206 to the readline module.
207
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000208- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000209 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
210 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000211
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000212- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
213 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
214 contains symlinks.
215
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000216- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
217 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
218
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000219- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
220 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
221 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
222
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000223- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
224 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
225 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
226 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
227 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
228 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
229 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
230 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
231 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
232 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
233 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
234 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
235 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
236
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000237- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
238
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000239Tools/Demos
240-----------
241
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000242- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
243 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
244
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000245- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
246
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000247Build
248-----
249
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000250- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
251 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
252 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
253 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
254 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
255 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
256 plans to do so.
257
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000258- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
259 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
260
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000261- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
262 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
263
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000264- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
265 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
266
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000267- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
268 GNU/k*BSD systems.
269
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000270- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
271 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
272
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000273C API
274-----
275
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000276..
277
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000278Documentation
279-------------
280
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000281- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
282 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
283
284- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
285 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
286 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000287
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000288New platforms
289-------------
290
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000291- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
292
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000293Tests
294-----
295
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000296..
297
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000298Windows
299-------
300
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000301- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
302 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
303 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
304 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
305 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
306 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
307 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
308 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
309 the problem.
310
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000311Mac
312---
313
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000314..
315
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000316
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000317What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
318=================================
319
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000320*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000321
322Core and builtins
323-----------------
324
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000325- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
326 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
327 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
328 sensitive code.
329
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000330- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000331 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
332
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000333 @staticmethod
334 def foo(bar):
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000335
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000336 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000337
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000338- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
339 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
340 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
341 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
342 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
343 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
344 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
345 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
346 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
347 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
348 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
349
350 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
351 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
352 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
353 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
354 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
355 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
356 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
357
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000358- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
359 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
360
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000361- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000362 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000363
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000364- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000365 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000366 which was missing for no apparent reason.
367
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000368- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000369 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
370 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
371
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000372- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
373 types that support garbage collection.
374
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000375- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
376
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000377- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
378 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
379 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
380 Jython.
381
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000382- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
383
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000384- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
385 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
386
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000387- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
388 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
389 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000390
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000391- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
392 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
393 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
394
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000395Extension modules
396-----------------
397
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000398- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
399
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000400Library
401-------
402
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000403- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
404 TIS-620
405
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000406- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
407 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
408 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
409 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
410 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
411 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
412 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
413 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
414 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
415 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
416
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000417- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
418
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000419- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
420 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
421 same as when the argument is omitted).
422 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
423
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000424- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
425
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000426- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
427 schemes are offered.
428
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000429- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
430
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000431- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
432 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
433 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
434
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000435- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
436
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000437- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
438 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
439
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000440- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
441 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
442 when dummy_threading is being used.
443
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000444- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
445 from a tarfile.
446
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000447- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000448 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000449
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000450- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
451 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
452 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
453 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
454
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000455- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
456 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
457
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000458- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
459 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
460 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
461 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
462 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
463 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
464 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
465 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
466 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
467 by some other method in progress).
468
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000469- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
470 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
471 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000472
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000473- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
474
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000475- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
476 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
477 AM Kuchling.
478
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000479- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
480 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
481 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
482
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000483- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
484 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
485 instead of unsigned.
486
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000487- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000488 no longer part of the public API.
489
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000490- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
491 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
492 string methods of the same name).
493
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000494- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000495 SF patch 945642.
496
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000497- doctest unittest integration improvements:
498
499 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
500
501 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
502 DocTestSuites.
503
504- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
505 that provide thread-local data.
506
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000507- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
508 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
509
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000510- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
511
512- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
513 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
514 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
515
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000516- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
517
518 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
519 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
520 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000521
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000522 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
523 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
524 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
525 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
526
527 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
528 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
529
530 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
531 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
532 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
533 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
534
535 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
536 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
537 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
538 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
539 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
540
541 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
542 wrapping help output.
543
544 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
545 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
546 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000547
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000548C API
549-----
550
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000551- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
552 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
553 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
554 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
555 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
556 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
557 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
558 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
559 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
560 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
561 its visible semantics have not changed.
562
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000563- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
564 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
565
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000566Documentation
567-------------
568
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000569- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000570
571 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000572 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000573
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000574 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000575
576 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
577
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000578- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000579
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000580Tests
581-----
582
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000583- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000584 platforms that use the Makefile.
585
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000586- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
587 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
588 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
589
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000590
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000591What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
592=================================
593
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000594*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000595
596Core and builtins
597-----------------
598
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000599- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
600 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
601 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
602 objects now (one object instead of three).
603
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000604- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
605 Windows DLLs.
606
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000607- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
608 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000609
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000610- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
611 a new .pyc magic.
612
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000613- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
614 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
615 be there.
616
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000617- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
618 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
619 the LC_NUMERIC category.
620
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000621- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
622 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
623 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
624
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000625- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
626
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000627- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
628 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
629 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000630
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000631- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
632 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
633
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000634- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
635
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000636- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000637 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000638
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000639- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
640
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000641- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
642
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000643- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
644 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
645
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000646- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
647 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
648 Fixes bug #858016 .
649
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000650- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
651 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
652 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
653
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000654- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
655 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
656 improves their performance (about 35%).
657
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000658- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
659 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
660 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
661
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000662- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
663 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
664 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
665 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
666
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000667- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
668 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
669 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
670 length is not known).
671
672- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
673 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000674 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
675 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000676 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
677
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000678- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
679 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
680
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000681- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
682 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
683 keyword arguments.
684
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000685- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
686 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
687 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
688
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000689- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
690 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
691 cases.
692
693- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
694 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
695 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
696 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
697 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
698 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
699 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
700 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
701 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
702 a release build.
703
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000704- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
705 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
706
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000707- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000708 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000709
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000710- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
711 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
712 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
713 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
714 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
715 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
716 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
717 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
718 destroyed.
719
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000720- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
721 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
722 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
723 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
724 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
725 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
726 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
727 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
728
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000729- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
730 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
731 character other than a space.
732
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000733- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
734 by the function object or by the method object, the function
735 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
736 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
737 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
738 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
739 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
740 attributes with the same name.
741
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000742- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
743 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
744 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
745 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
746 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
747 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
748 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
749 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
750 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
751 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
752 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
753 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
754 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
755 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000756
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000757- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
758 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
759 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
760 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
761 This has been repaired.
762
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000763- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
764
765- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
766
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000767- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
768 over a sequence.
769
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000770- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000771 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000772
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000773- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
774
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000775- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
776 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
777 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
778 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
779 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
780 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
781 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
782 records with equal keys is unchanged).
783
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000784- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
785 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
786 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
787
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000788- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
789 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
790 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
791 freelist.
792
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000793- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
794 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
795
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000796- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
797 number.
798
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000799- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
800 a TypeError exception.
801
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000802- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
803 820195.
804
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000805- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
806 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
807 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
808
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000809- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000810 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
811 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000812
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000813- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
814 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
815 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
816
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000817- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
818 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000819 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000820
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000821- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000822 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
823 the first call.
824
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000825
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000826Extension modules
827-----------------
828
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000829- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
830 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
831
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000832- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
833 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
834 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
835 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
836 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
837 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
838 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000839
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000840- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
841
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000842- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
843
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000844- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
845 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
846
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000847- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
848 fewer false positives.
849
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000850- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
851 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
852
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000853- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000854 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
855
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000856- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000857 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000858 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +0000859 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
860 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000861
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000862- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
863 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
864 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
865 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
866
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000867- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
868 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
869 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
870 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
871 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
872 #897625.
873
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000874- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
875 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
876
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000877- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
878 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
879 and pops on either side of the deque.
880
881- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
882 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
883
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000884- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
885 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
886 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
887 other functions that expect a function argument.
888
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000889- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
890
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000891- os.getsid was added.
892
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000893- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
894 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
895 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
896
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000897- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
898
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000899- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
900
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000901- readline.clear_history was added.
902
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000903- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
904
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000905- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
906
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000907- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
908
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000909- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
910
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000911- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
912
913- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
914
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000915- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
916
917- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
918
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000919- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
920 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
921 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
922
923- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
924 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
925 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
926 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
927 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
928 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
929 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
930
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000931- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
932 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
933 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
934 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000935
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000936- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000937 iterators from a single iterable.
938
939- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
940 of raising a TypeError exception.
941
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000942- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
943 as parameter.
944
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000945Library
946-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000947
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000948- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
949 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
950 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000951
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000952- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
953 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
954 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000955
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000956- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000957
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000958- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
959 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000960
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000961- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
962 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
963
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000964- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
965
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000966- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000967 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000968
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000969- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000970 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000971
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000972- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
973
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000974- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
975 on cygwin and mingw32.
976
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000977- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
978
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000979- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
980 module.
981
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000982- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
983 installation scheme for all platforms.
984
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000985- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000986 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000987
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000988- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
989 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
990 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
991
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000992- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
993 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
994 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
995
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000996- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
997
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000998- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
999
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001000- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1001 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1002
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001003- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1004 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1005 type pattern with the same value exists.
1006
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001007- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1008 when run from the command prompt).
1009
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001010- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1011 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1012
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001013- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1014 default sort).
1015
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001016- Added global runctx function to profile module
1017
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001018- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1019
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001020- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1021
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001022- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1023
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001024- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001025 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1026 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1027 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1028 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1029 accordingly.
1030
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001031- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1032 decoding standards.
1033
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001034- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1035 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1036 called for all requests.
1037
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001038- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1039 they are passed to the compiler.
1040
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001041- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1042 indent, width and depth.
1043
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001044- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1045 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1046
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001047- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1048 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1049
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001050- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1051
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001052- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1053
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001054- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1055
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001056- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1057 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1058
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001059- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001060 for better performance.
1061
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001062- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001063
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001064- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1065 a string).
1066
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001067- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1068
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001069- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1070
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001071- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1072
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001073- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1074
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001075- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1076 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1077 list of fieldnames.
1078
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001079- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1080 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1081
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001082- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1083
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001084- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1085 empty lists.
1086
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001087- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1088 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1089 and shelves.
1090
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001091- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1092 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1093
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001094- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001095 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1096 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001097
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001098- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1099 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001100 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001101
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001102- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001103 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1104 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1105
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001106- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1107 and removed in Py2.4.
1108
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001109- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1110
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001111- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1112
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001113Tools/Demos
1114-----------
1115
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001116- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1117 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1118
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001119- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1120
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001121- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1122 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1123 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1124 destination in situations where both files are given.
1125
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001126- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1127 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1128 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1129 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1130
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001131- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1132
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001133- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1134 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1135 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1136 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1137 now.
1138
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001139- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1140 in effect
1141
1142- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1143 C-c C-h
1144
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001145- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1146 -d option was given.
1147
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001148Build
1149-----
1150
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001151- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1152 build under OS X.
1153
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001154- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1155 --enable-profiling.
1156
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001157- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1158 is configured --with-tsc.
1159
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001160- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1161 on AMD64.
1162
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001163- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1164 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1165
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001166- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1167 removed.
1168
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001169- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1170 supported (see PEP 11).
1171
1172- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1173
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001174- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1175
1176- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1177 (see PEP 11).
1178
1179- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1180 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1181
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001182C API
1183-----
1184
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001185- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1186 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1187 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1188
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001189- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1190 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1191 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1192 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1193
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001194- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1195 generator objects.
1196
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001197- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1198 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001199 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1200 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001201
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001202- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1203 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1204
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001205- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1206 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1207 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1208 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1209 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1210
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001211- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1212 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1213 about 10% faster.
1214
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001215- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1216 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1217
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001218- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1219 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1220 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1221 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1222
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001223Windows
1224-------
1225
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001226- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1227 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1228 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1229 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1230
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001231- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1232 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1233 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1234
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001235
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001236What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1237===============================
1238
1239*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1240
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001241IDLE
1242----
1243
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001244- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1245 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1246 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1247 context-menu actions.
1248
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001249- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1250 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1251 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1252 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1253 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1254 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1255 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1256 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1257 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1258
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001259
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001260What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1261=============================================
1262
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001263*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001264
1265Core and builtins
1266-----------------
1267
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001268- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001269 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001270 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1271
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001272Extension modules
1273-----------------
1274
1275- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1276 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1277 than once. This has been fixed.
1278
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001279- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1280 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1281 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1282 call.
1283
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001284- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1285
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001286Library
1287-------
1288
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001289- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1290 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1291
1292- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1293 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1294 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1295 restored.
1296
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001297IDLE
1298----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001299
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001300- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001301
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001302Build
1303-----
1304
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001305- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1306 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1307
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001308C API
1309-----
1310
1311Windows
1312-------
1313
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001314- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1315 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1316
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001317- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1318
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001319Mac
1320---
1321
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001322- Various fixes to pimp.
1323
1324- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1325
1326- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1327 more problems than it solves.
1328
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001329
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001330What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1331=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001332
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001333*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1334
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001335Core and builtins
1336-----------------
1337
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001338- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1339 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1340
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001341- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1342 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001343 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001344
1345- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1346 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1347 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001348 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001349
1350- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1351 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001352
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001353- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1354 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1355 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1356
1357- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001358 770247.
1359
1360- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001361
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001362Extension modules
1363-----------------
1364
1365- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1366 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1367
1368- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1369
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001370- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1371
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001372- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1373 contained within the _strptime module.
1374
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001375- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1376 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1377
1378- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001379 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1380
1381- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1382 the find_class attribute, if present.
1383
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001384- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001385
1386 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1387 (SF bug 763298).
1388
1389 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001390 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1391 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1392 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001393
1394 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1395
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001396Library
1397-------
1398
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001399- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1400
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001401- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1402 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1403 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1404 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1405 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1406 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1407 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1408 or Tester().
1409
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001410- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1411 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1412 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1413 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1414 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1415 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1416 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1417 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1418 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001419
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001420 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001421
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001422- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1423 weren't before was an oversight.
1424
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001425- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1426 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1427
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001428- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1429 when there are no lines.
1430
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001431- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1432 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1433
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001434- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1435 to child processes.
1436
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001437- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1438
1439- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1440
1441- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1442 xmlrpclib.
1443
1444- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1445 responses.
1446
1447- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1448 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1449
1450- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1451 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1452 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1453
1454- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1455 used as patterns.
1456
1457- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1458 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1459 than Tk 8.3.
1460
1461- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1462
1463- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001464
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001465Tools/Demos
1466-----------
1467
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001468- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1469
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001470- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1471
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001472- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001473
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001474Build
1475-----
1476
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001477- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1478
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001479- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1480
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001481- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1482 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001483
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001484- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1485 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1486 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001487
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001488C API
1489-----
1490
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001491- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1492 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1493
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001494Windows
1495-------
1496
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001497- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1498 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1499 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1500 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1501 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1502 Python exception ::
1503
1504 thread.error: can't start new thread
1505
1506 is raised now.
1507
1508- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1509 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1510 instead of from DLL teardown.
1511
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001512Mac
1513---
1514
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001515- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001516 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001517 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1518 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1519 the executable in the bundle.
1520
1521- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001522
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001523- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1524
1525- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1526 on Panther.
1527
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001528What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1529================================
1530
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001531*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001532
1533Core and builtins
1534-----------------
1535
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001536- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1537 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1538 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1539 with the -i option.
1540
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001541- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1542 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1543
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001544- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1545 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1546
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001547- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1548 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1549 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1550 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1551 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1552 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1553 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1554 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1555 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1556 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1557 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1558 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1559 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001560
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001561- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1562 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1563 embedded in a lambda expression.
1564
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001565- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1566 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1567 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1568 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1569 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1570
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001571- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1572 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1573 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1574
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001575- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1576 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1577
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001578- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1579 It's writable again.
1580
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001581- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1582 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1583 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001584 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001585
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001586- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1587 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1588 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1589
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001590Extension modules
1591-----------------
1592
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001593- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1594 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1595
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001596- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1597 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1598 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1599 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1600
1601- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1602 collection.
1603
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001604- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1605 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1606 unique within a single program run.
1607
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001608- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1609 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1610
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001611- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1612 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1613
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001614- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1615 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001616
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001617- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1618
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001619- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1620 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1621
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001622- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1623 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1624 for many BSD-derived systems.
1625
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001626
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001627Library
1628-------
1629
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001630- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1631 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1632 primary ones:
1633
1634 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1635 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1636 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1637
1638 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1639 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1640 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1641 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1642 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1643 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1644
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001645- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1646 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1647 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1648 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1649 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1650 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1651 argument.
1652
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001653- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1654 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1655 in the archive.
1656
1657- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1658 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1659
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001660- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1661 569574).
1662
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001663- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1664 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1665 no more.
1666
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001667- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1668 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1669 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1670 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1671 code coverage.
1672
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001673- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1674 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1675 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001676 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1677 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001678
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001679- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1680 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1681 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001682 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001683
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001684- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1685
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001686- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1687 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1688 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1689 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1690
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001691- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1692 handling.
1693
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001694- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1695 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1696
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001697- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1698 in socket.py.
1699
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001700- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1701
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001702- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1703 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1704 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1705 opener with proxy support.
1706
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001707- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1708
1709- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1710
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001711Tools/Demos
1712-----------
1713
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001714- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1715
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001716- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1717
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001718- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1719 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001720
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001721- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1722 files.
1723
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001724Build
1725-----
1726
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001727- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001728 different root directory.
1729
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001730C API
1731-----
1732
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001733- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1734 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1735 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1736 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1737 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1738 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1739 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1740 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1741 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1742 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1743
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001744- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1745 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1746 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1747 from Python.
1748
1749
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001750New platforms
1751-------------
1752
1753None this time.
1754
1755Tests
1756-----
1757
1758- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1759 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1760
1761Windows
1762-------
1763
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001764- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1765
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001766- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1767 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1768 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1769 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1770 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1771 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1772 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1773 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1774 that's what it's for.
1775
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001776Mac
1777---
1778
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001779- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1780 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1781 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1782 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001783- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1784 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1785- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001786
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001787SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1788------------------------------------
1789
1790430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1791598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1792622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1793661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1794683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1795697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1796713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1797724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1798727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1799729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1800730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1801731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1802732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1803733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1804735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1805740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1806744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1807745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1808747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1809749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1810751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1811753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1812755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1813757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1814760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1815
1816
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001817What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1818================================
1819
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001820*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001821
1822Core and builtins
1823-----------------
1824
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001825- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1826 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1827
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001828- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1829 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1830 and cannot be strings).
1831
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001832- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1833 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1834 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1835 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1836
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001837- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1838 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1839 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1840 Python itself.
1841
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001842- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1843 the referenced object, if it has one.
1844
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001845- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1846 the thread started at
1847 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1848
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001849- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1850 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1851 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1852 placed on a list index.
1853
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001854- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1855 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1856 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1857 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1858
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001859- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1860 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1861 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1862 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1863 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1864 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1865 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1866
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001867- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1868 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1869 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1870 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1871 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1872
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001873- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1874 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001875
1876- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1877 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1878 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1879 #693195.)
1880
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001881- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1882 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001883
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001884- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001885 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001886 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1887 interpreter executions, would fail.
1888
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001889- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001890 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001891 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001892
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001893Extension modules
1894-----------------
1895
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001896- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1897 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1898 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1899 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1900
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001901- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1902 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1903
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001904- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1905 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1906 and Greg Chapman.)
1907
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001908- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1909 recursively.
1910
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001911- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001912 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1913 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1914 leaks.
1915
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001916- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1917
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001918- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1919 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1920 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1921 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1922 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1923 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1924 #705836.
1925
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001926- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001927 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1928
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001929- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1930 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1931 See SF bug #692416.
1932
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001933- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1934 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1935
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001936- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1937 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1938 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001939
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001940- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001941 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1942 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1943
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001944- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1945 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1946 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1947 timeouts to work properly.
1948
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001949Library
1950-------
1951
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001952- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1953 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1954 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1955 future release.
1956
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001957- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1958 for querying platform dependent features.
1959
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001960- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001961
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001962- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1963 pickle protocol versions.
1964
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001965- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1966 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1967 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1968
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001969- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1970
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001971- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1972 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1973 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1974 modules.
1975
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001976- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1977 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1978 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1979
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001980- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1981 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1982
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001983- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1984 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1985 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1986
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001987- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001988 MS Office extensions.
1989
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001990- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1991 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1992
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001993- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1994 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1995
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001996- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1997 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1998 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1999 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2000 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2001 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2002
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002003- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2004 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2005 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002006
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002007- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2008 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2009 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2010
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002011- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2012
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002013- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2014 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2015 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2016
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002017Tools/Demos
2018-----------
2019
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002020- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2021 See the module docstring for details.
2022
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002023Build
2024-----
2025
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002026- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2027 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002028
2029C API
2030-----
2031
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002032- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2033
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002034- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2035 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2036 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2037
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002038- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2039 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002040
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002041 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2042 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2043 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002044
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002045- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002046 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2047
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002048- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2049 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2050 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002051
2052New platforms
2053-------------
2054
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002055None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002056
2057Tests
2058-----
2059
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002060- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2061 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002062
2063Windows
2064-------
2065
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002066- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2067 function.
2068
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002069- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2070 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002071
2072Mac
2073---
2074
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002075- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2076 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002077
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002078- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2079 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002080
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002081- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2082 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2083 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002084
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002085- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002086 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2087 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002088
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002089- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2090 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002091
2092
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002093What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2094=================================
2095
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002096*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002097
2098Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002099-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002100
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002101- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2102 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2103 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2104
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002105- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2106 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2107 (SF patch #664376.)
2108
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002109- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2110 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2111 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2112 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2113 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2114 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002115 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002116
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002117- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2118 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2119 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2120 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002121 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002122
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002123- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2124 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2125 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2126 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2127 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2128 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2129 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2130 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2131 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2132 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2133 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2134
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002135- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2136 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2137 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2138 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2139 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2140 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2141
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002142- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2143 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2144
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002145- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2146 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2147 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2148 case.)
2149
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002150- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2151 passed as unicode strings.
2152
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002153- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2154 See SF bug #683467.
2155
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002156- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2157 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2158
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002159- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2160
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002161- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2162
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002163- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2164 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2165 arguments.
2166
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002167- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2168 See SF bug #667147.
2169
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002170- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002171 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002172 See SF bug #676155.
2173
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002174- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002175 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002176 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2177 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2178 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2179 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2180 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2181 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002182
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002183Extension modules
2184-----------------
2185
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002186- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2187 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2188 tp_as_number pointer.
2189
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002190- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2191 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2192 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2193 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2194 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2195
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002196- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2197
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002198- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2199
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002200- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002201 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002202 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2203 patch #678531.)
2204
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002205- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2206 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2207
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002208- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2209 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2210
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002211- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2212
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002213- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2214 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2215 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2216
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002217- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2218
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002219- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2220 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2221
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002222- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002223
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002224- datetime changes:
2225
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002226 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2227
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002228 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2229 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2230 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2231 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2232 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2233 now.
2234
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002235 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002236 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2237 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002238
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002239 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002240 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002241 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2242 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2243 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2244 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002245
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002246 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2247 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2248 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002249 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2250
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002251 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2252 by a later example coded by Guido.
2253
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002254 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002255 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2256 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2257 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002258 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2259 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2260
2261 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2262 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2263 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2264 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2265 tzinfo subclass instance.
2266
2267 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2268 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2269 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2270 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2271 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2272 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2273 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2274 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002275
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002276 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2277 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2278 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2279 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2280 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002281 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2282
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002283 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002284
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002285 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2286 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2287 as a naive datetime object.
2288
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002289 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2290 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2291 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2292
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002293 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2294 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2295 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2296 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2297 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2298 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2299 comparison.
2300
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002301 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2302 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2303 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2304 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002305 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002306
2307 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002308
2309 and ::
2310
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002311 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2312
2313 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2314 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2315 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2316 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2317
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002318 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2319 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2320 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2321 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2322 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2323
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002324 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2325 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002326 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2327 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002328
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002329Library
2330-------
2331
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002332- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2333 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2334
2335- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2336 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2337 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2338 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2339 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2340 See PEP 307 for details.
2341
2342- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2343 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2344
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002345- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2346 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002347 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002348 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2349 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002350 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002351
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002352- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2353 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2354
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002355- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2356 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2357 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2358
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002359- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2360
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002361- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2362 exception.
2363
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002364- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2365 class.
2366
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002367- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2368 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2369 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2370
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002371- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2372 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2373
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002374- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002375 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2376 See SF bug #659228.
2377
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002378- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2379 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2380 See SF patch #651082.
2381
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002382- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002383
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002384- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2385 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2386
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002387- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002388 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002389
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002390- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2391 DOS paths from other platforms.
2392
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002393Tools/Demos
2394-----------
2395
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002396- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2397 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2398 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2399 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2400 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2401 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2402 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2403 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2404 example:
2405
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002406 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2407 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002408
2409 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2410
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002411
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002412Build
2413-----
2414
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002415- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2416 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2417 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002418 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2419
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002420 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2421
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002422- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2423 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2424 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2425 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2426 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2427 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2428 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2429 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2430 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2431
2432- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2433 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2434 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2435 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2436
2437- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2438 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2439
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002440C API
2441-----
2442
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002443- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2444 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002445
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002446- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2447 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2448 tp_as_number pointer.
2449
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002450- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2451 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2452 (SF #681367)
2453
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002454- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2455 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2456 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2457 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002458
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002459Tests
2460-----
2461
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002462- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002463 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2464 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2465 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2466 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2467 pydoc.)
2468
2469- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2470
2471- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002472
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002473Windows
2474-------
2475
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002476- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2477 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2478 time).
2479
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002480- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2481 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2482
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002483- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2484 release without strong cryptography.
2485
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002486- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002487 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002488
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002489- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2490 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2491
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002492Mac
2493---
2494
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002495- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2496 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002497
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002498- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2499 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2500 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002501
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002502- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2503 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002504
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002505- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2506 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2507 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2508 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002509
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002510- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002511 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2512 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2513 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002514
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002515
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002516What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002517=================================
2518
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002519*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002520
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002521Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002522--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002523
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002524- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2525
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002526- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2527 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002528 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002529 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002530 a different meaning than before.
2531
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002532- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002533 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002534 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002535
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002536- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002537 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002538 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002539
2540- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2541 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2542 and deallocation.
2543
2544- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2545 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2546
2547- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2548 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2549 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2550 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2551 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2552
2553- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2554 now detected by the garbage collector.
2555
2556- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2557 [SF bug 519621]
2558
2559- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2560 identifier.
2561
2562- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2563 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2564 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2565 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2566 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2567 [SF bug 563060]
2568
2569- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2570 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2571 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2572 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2573 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2574
2575- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2576 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2577 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2578
2579- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2580
2581- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2582 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2583 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2584 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2585 state of the slots would be lost.)
2586
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002587Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002588-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002589
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002590- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002591 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2592 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2593 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2594 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002595 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2596 Jython 2.1.
2597
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002598- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002599 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002600 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2601 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2602 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2603 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2604 these, see PEP 302.
2605
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002606- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2607 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2608 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2609
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002610- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2611 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2612 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2613
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002614- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2615 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2616 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2617
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002618- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2619 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2620 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2621 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2622 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2623 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2624 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2625 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2626 releases or implementations.
2627
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002628- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002629 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2630 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002631
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002632- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2633 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2634
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002635- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2636 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2637 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2638
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002639- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2640 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2641
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002642- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2643 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002644 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2645 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002646
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002647- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2648 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2649 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2650 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2651 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2652
2653 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2654 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2655 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2656 pattern.
2657
2658 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2659 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2660 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2661 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2662
2663 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2664 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2665 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2666 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2667 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2668 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2669
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002670- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2671 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2672 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2673 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2674 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2675 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2676 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2677 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002678
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002679- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2680 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2681 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2682 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2683 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002684 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2685 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2686 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2687 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2688 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2689 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2690 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002691
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002692- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2693 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2694
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002695- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2696 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2697 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2698 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2699 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2700 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2701 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2702 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2703 to Zack Weinberg!
2704
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002705- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2706 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2707 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2708 type. This has been fixed now.
2709
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002710- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2711 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2712 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2713
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002714- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2715 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2716 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2717 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2718 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2719 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2720 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2721 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002722 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002723
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002724- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2725 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2726 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002727
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002728- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2729 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2730 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2731 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2732 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2733 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2734 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2735 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002736 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002737 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2738 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2739
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002740- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2741 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2742 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2743 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2744 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2745 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2746 this.)
2747
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002748- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2749 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002750 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002751 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002752 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2753 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002754 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2755 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002756
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002757- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2758 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2759 currently running.
2760
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002761- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2762 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2763 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2764 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2765
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002766- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2767 as directory names.
2768
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002769- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2770 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2771
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002772- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2773 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2774
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002775- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002776 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2777 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002778
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002779- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2780 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2781 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2782 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2783 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2784
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002785- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2786 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2787 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2788 removed.
2789
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002790- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2791 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2792 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2793
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002794- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2795 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2796 to __debug__.
2797
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002798- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2799 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2800 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2801
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002802- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2803 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2804 deprecated now.
2805
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002806- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2807 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2808 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002809
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002810- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2811 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2812 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2813 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2814 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002815
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002816- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2817 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2818
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002819- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2820 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2821 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002822 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002823 is backward compatible.
2824
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002825- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2826 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2827 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2828 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2829 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2830
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002831- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2832 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2833 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2834 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2835 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2836 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002837
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002838- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2839 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2840
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002841- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2842 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2843
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002844- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2845 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2846 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2847 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2848 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2849
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002850- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2851 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2852 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2853
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002854- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002855 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2856
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002857- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2858 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2859 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002860
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002861- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2862 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2863
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002864- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2865 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2866 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2867
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002868- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2869
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002870Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002871-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002872
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002873- Added three operators to the operator module:
2874 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2875 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2876 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2877
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002878- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2879
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002880- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2881 archives.
2882
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002883- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2884 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2885 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2886
2887 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2888
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002889- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2890 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2891 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002892 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002893
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002894- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2895 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2896 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2897 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002898 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2899 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2900 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2901 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002902
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002903- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2904 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002905
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002906- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2907
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002908- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2909 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2910
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002911- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2912 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2913 supported.
2914
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002915- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2916
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002917- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2918 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002919
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002920- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2921 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2922
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002923- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2924
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002925- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2926 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2927
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002928- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2929 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2930 functions but callable type objects.
2931
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002932- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002933 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002934 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002935
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002936- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2937 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002938
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002939- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2940 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002941
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002942- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2943 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2944 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2945 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2946
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002947- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2948 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002949
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002950- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2951 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2952 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2953 and __imul__.
2954
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002955- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002956 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2957 is called.
2958
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002959- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2960 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2961 interpreter was compiled.
2962
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002963- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2964 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2965 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002966 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002967 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2968 1, not 2.
2969
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002970- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2971 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2972 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2973 limit.
2974
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002975- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2976 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2977 bug #623464.
2978
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002979- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2980 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2981 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2982 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2983
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002984Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002985-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002986
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002987- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2988
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002989- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2990 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2991 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2992 with Python 2.3a2.
2993
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002994- os.path exposes getctime.
2995
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002996- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002997 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002998 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002999 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003000 unit tests of floating point results.
3001
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003002- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3003 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3004 has been increased.
3005
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003006- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3007 executed.
3008
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003009- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3010 postinstallation script.
3011
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003012- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3013 test the current module.
3014
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003015- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003016 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3017 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3018 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3019 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3020
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003021- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003022 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003023 Ward's Optik package.
3024
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003025- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3026 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3027 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3028 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3029
3030- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3031 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003032 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003033
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003034- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3035 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3036 shelf are binary pickles.
3037
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003038- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3039 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3040
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003041- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3042 modules are iterators now.
3043
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003044- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3045 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3046 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3047 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3048 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3049 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003050
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003051- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3052 with their entity value.
3053
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003054- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3055
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003056- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3057 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003058
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003059- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3060 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003061 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003062
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003063- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3064 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3065 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3066 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3067 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3068 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3069 main():
3070
3071 import locale
3072 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3073
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003074- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3075 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3076
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003077- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3078 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3079 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3080 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3081 to the new standard.
3082
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003083- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3084 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3085 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3086 an extension to the database.
3087
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003088- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3089 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3090 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3091 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003092 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003093
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003094- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003095 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003096
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003097- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3098 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3099 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3100 bounded integers.
3101
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003102- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3103 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3104 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3105 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3106 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3107 in existence.
3108
3109 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3110 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3111 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3112 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3113 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3114 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3115
3116 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3117 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3118 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3119 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3120
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003121- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3122 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3123 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3124
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003125- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3126
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003127- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3128 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3129 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3130 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3131
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003132- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3133 argument.
3134
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003135- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3136 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3137 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3138 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3139 [SF patch 560794].
3140
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003141- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3142 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3143 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003144 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3145 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3146 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003147
3148- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3149 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003150
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003151- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3152 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3153 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3154 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003155
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003156- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3157 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3158 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3159 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3160 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3161
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003162- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003163
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003164- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3165
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003166- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3167 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3168 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3169 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3170 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3171 identical to None.
3172
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003173- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3174 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3175 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3176 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3177 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3178 results now.
3179
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003180- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3181 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3182
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003183- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3184 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3185 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3186 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3187 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3188 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3189 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3190 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3191
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003192- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3193
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003194- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3195 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3196
3197- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3198 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3199 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3200 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3201 and other systems.
3202
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003203- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3204 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3205 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3206 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 +00003207 work well with these.
3208
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003209- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3210
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003211- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003212 connections.
3213
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003214- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3215 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3216 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3217
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003218- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3219 sets
3220
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003221- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3222 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3223 name.
3224
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003225- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3226 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3227 passed in.
3228
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003229- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003230 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003231 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3232 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003233
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003234- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3235
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003236- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3237
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003238- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3239 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3240 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3241
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003242- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3243 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3244 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3245 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003246 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003247
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003248- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003249 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003250 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003251
3252- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3253 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3254 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3255
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003256- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003257 the value of its expression argument.
3258
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003259- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3260 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3261 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3262
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003263- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3264 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3265 skipstone browser was included.
3266
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003267- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3268 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3269
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003270Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003271-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003272
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003273- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3274 names in addition to accepting file names.
3275
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003276- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3277 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3278 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3279 still used and useful.)
3280
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003281- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3282 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3283 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3284 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003285
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003286- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3287 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3288 the generated binary.
3289
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003290Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003291-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003292
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003293- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3294
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003295- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3296 except in the hands of experts.
3297
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003298- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003299 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3300 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3301 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003302
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003303- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3304 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3305 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3306 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3307 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3308 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3309 builds.
3310
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003311- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3312 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3313 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3314 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3315 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3316 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3317 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3318 new type.
3319
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003320- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003321
3322 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3323 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3324 positive infinities.
3325
3326 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3327 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3328 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3329 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3330 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3331 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3332 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3333
3334 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3335
3336 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3337
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003338- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3339 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3340 size of the executable.
3341
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003342- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3343 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3344 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3345 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003346
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003347- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3348
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003349- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3350 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3351 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003352
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003353- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3354 well as Unix.
3355
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003356- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3357 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3358 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3359 modules in the README file for details.
3360
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003361C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003362-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003363
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003364- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3365 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003366 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003367 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003368 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003369
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003370- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3371 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3372 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3373 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3374 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3375 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003376 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003377 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3378 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3379 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3380 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3381 aligned.)
3382
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003383- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3384 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3385 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3386
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003387- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3388 level.
3389
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003390- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3391 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3392 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3393 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3394 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3395
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003396- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3397 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3398 code.
3399
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003400- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3401 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3402 adjusting for negative indices.
3403
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003404- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3405 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3406 object.
3407
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003408- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3409 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3410 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3411
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003412- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3413 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003414
3415- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3416
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003417- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3418 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3419 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3420 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3421
3422- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3423
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003424- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003425
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003426- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003427 without going through the buffer API.
3428
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003429- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003430
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003431- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3432 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3433 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3434 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3435
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003436- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3437 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3438
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003439- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003440 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3441
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003442New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003443-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003444
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003445- OpenVMS is now supported.
3446
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003447- AtheOS is now supported.
3448
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003449- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3450
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003451- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3452
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003453Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003454-----
3455
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003456- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3457 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3458 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003459
3460Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003461-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003462
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003463- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3464 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3465 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3466 bugs.
3467 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003468 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003469 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3470 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003471 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003472
3473- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003474 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003475
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003476- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3477 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3478
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003479- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3480 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003481 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003482 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3483
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003484- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3485 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3486 use files" uninstall option).
3487
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003488- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3489
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003490- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3491 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3492
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003493- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3494 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3495 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3496
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003497- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3498 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3499 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3500 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3501 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003502 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3503 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3504 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003505
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003506- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003507 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003508 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3509 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3510 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3511 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3512 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3513 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3514 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3515 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3516 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3517 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3518 work around.
3519
3520- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3521 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3522 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3523 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3524 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3525 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3526 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3527 specified with O_CREAT too).
3528
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003529Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003530----
3531
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003532- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003533
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003534- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3535 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3536 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3537
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003538- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3539 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3540 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3541
3542- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3543 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3544 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3545 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3546 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3547 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3548 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3549 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003550
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003551- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3552 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3553 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003554
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003555- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3556 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3557 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3558 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3559 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003560
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003561- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3562 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3563 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003564
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003565- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3566 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003567
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003568- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3569 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3570 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3571 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3572 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003573
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003574- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3575 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3576 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3577
3578- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3579 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3580 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003581
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003582- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3583 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3584 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3585 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003586 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003587
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003588- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3589 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003590
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003591- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3592 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003593
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003594- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003595 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003596 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3597 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003598
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003599
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003600What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003601===============================
3602
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003603*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3604
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003605Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003606--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003607
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003608- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3609 with a custom metaclass.
3610
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003611Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003612-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003613
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003614- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3615 are proxies.
3616
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003617Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003618-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003619
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003620- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3621 very short strings.
3622
3623- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3624 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3625 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3626 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3627 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3628
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003629Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003630-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003631
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003632- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3633 close or delete time).
3634
3635- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3636 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3637
3638- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3639
3640- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003641 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003642
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003643Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003644-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003645
3646Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003647-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003648
3649C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003650-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003651
3652New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003653-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003654
3655Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003656-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003657
3658Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003659-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003660
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003661- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3662
3663- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3664 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3665
3666- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3667 deleted at process exit time.
3668
3669- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3670 in backslash.
3671
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003672Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003673----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003674
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003675- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3676 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3677 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3678
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003679
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003680What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003681===========================
3682
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003683*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3684
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003685Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003686--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003687
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003688- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3689 been extensively updated. See
3690
3691 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3692
3693 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3694
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003695- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3696 deleted!
3697
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003698- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3699 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3700 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3701 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3702 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3703
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003704- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3705
3706 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3707 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3708
3709 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3710 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3711 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3712 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3713 supported anyway.
3714
3715 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3716 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3717
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003718- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3719 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3720 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3721 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3722 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003723
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003724- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3725 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3726 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3727
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003728Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003729-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003730
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003731- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3732 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3733 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3734 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3735 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3736 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003737 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3738 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3739 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3740 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003741
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003742- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3743 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3744 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3745
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003746Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003747-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003748
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003749- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3750
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003751Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003752-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003753
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003754- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3755 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3756 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3757 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3758 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3759 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3760
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003761- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3762
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003763- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3764
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003765- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3766
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003767- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3768 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3769 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3770
3771- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3772
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003773Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003774-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003775
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003776- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3777 off a search on Google.
3778
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003779Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003780-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003781
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003782- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3783 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3784 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3785 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3786 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3787 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3788 other platforms should do likewise.
3789
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003790- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3791 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3792 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3793
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003794C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003795-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003796
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003797- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3798 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3799 producing key-value pairs.
3800
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003801- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003802 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003803 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3804 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3805 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3806 previously went unchallenged.
3807
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003808New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003809-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003810
3811Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003812-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003813
3814Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003815-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003816
3817Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003818----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003819
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003820- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3821 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003822
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003823- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3824 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3825 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3826 home.
3827
3828
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003829What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003830===========================
3831
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003832*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3833
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003834Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003835--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003836
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003837- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3838 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003839
3840 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003841 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003842
3843 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3844 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003845 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003846 This needs to be documented.
3847
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003848- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3849 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3850
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003851- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3852 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3853 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3854
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003855- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3856 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3857
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003858- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3859 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3860 class forbids it).
3861
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003862- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3863 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3864 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3865
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003866- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3867
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003868Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003869-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003870
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003871- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3872 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003873 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003874
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003875- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3876 (like 1 + '').
3877
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003878Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003879-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003880
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003881- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3882 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3883 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3884 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003885 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003886 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3887
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003888- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3889 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3890 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3891 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3892
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003893- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3894 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003895 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3896 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3897 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003898
3899- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3900 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003901
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003902- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3903 bytes on its input.
3904
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003905Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003906-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003907
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003908- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003909 convenience function.
3910
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003911- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3912 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3913 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003914 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3915 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3916 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3917 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3918 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3919 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003920
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003921- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3922 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3923 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3924 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3925
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003926- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3927 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3928 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3929
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003930- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3931 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3932 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3933 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3934
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003935- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3936 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003937 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003938 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3939 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3940 new -l and -e options.
3941
3942- statcache is now deprecated.
3943
3944- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3945 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003946 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003947 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3948 time properly taken into account.
3949
3950- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3951 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3952 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3953 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3954
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003955Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003956-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003957
3958Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003959-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003960
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003961- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3962 is built with libdb3 if available.
3963
3964- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3965
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003966C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003967-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003968
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003969- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3970 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3971 PySequence_Size().
3972
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003973- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3974
3975- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3976 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3977 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3978
3979- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3980 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3981
3982- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3983 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3984
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003985New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003986-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003987
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003988- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3989 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3990
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003991- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3992 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3993
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003994- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3995
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003996Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003997-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003998
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003999- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4000 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4001
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004002Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004003-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004004
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004005Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004006----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004007
4008- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4009 removed completely in the next release.
4010
4011- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4012 OSX.
4013
4014- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4015 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4016
4017- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4018
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004019
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004020What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004021===========================
4022
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004023*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4024
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004025Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004026--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004027
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004028- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004029 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004030 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004031 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4032 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004033 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4034 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004035 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4036 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004037
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004038- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4039 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4040
4041- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4042 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4043
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004044Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004045-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004046
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004047- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4048 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4049 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4050 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4051 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4052 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4053 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4054 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4055
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004056- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4057 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4058 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4059 example).
4060
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004061- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004062 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004063 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004064 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004065
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004066- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4067 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4068 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004069 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004070
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004071- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4072 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4073 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4074 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4075 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4076 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4077
4078 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4079
4080 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4081
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004082Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004083-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004084
4085- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4086
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004087- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4088
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004089- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4090 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004091
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004092- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4093 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4094 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4095 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4096 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4097 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004098 attributes.
4099
4100- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4101 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4102 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004103
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004104- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4105 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4106 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004107
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004108- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4109 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4110 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004111 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4112 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4113
4114- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4115 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004116
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004117Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004118-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004119
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004120- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4121 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4122
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004123- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4124 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4125 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4126 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4127
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004128- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4129 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4130 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4131 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4132
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004133 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4134 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4135 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4136 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4137 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4138 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4139 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4140 without losing information).
4141
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004142- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004143 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4144 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4145 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4146 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4147 module).
4148
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004149 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004150 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4151 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4152 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4153 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004154
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004155- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004156 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4157 encoding.
4158
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004159- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4160 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4161
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004162- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004163 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4164
4165- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4166 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4167 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4168 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4169
4170- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4171
4172- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4173 ON, and OFF.
4174
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004175- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4176 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4177
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004178Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004179-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004180
4181- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4182 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4183 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004184
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004185- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4186 been added: -X and -E.
4187
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004188Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004189-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004190
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004191- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4192 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4193
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004194C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004195-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004196
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004197- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4198 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4199 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4200 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4201 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4202
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004203- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4204 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4205 as long) arguments.
4206
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004207- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4208 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4209 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4210 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4211 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4212 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4213
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004214- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4215 input.
4216
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004217New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004218-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004219
4220Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004221-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004222
4223Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004224-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004225
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004226- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4227 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4228 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4229
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004230- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4231 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4232 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004233 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004234
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004235 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4236 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4237 import signal
4238 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004239
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004240 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004241 while 1:
4242 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004243 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004244 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4245 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4246 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4247 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004248
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004249
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004250What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4251===========================
4252
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004253*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4254
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004255Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004256--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004257
4258- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4259 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4260 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4261
4262- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4263 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4264 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4265 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4266 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4267 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4268 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004269
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004270- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004271 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004272 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4273 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4274 associate a docstring with a property.
4275
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004276- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4277 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4278 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4279 other built-in object types.
4280
4281- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4282 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4283 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4284 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4285 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4286
4287- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4288 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4289
4290- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4291 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004292 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004293 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4294 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4295 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4296 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4297 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4298
4299- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4300 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4301 class.
4302
4303- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4304 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4305 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4306 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4307
4308- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4309 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4310 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4311 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4312
4313- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4314 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4315
4316- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4317 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4318 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4319 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4320 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004321 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004322 with the same value as s.
4323
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004324- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4325
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004326Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004327----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004328
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004329- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4330
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004331- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4332 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4333 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4334 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4335 objects.
4336
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004337- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4338 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004339 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4340 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4341
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004342- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4343 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4344 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4345
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004346Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004347-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004348
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004349- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4350 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4351 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4352 by the instances.
4353
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004354- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4355 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4356 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4357
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004358- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4359 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4360 before the entire comparison is complete.
4361
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004362- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4363 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4364 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4365
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004366- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4367 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4368 getwriter().
4369
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004370- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4371 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4372
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004373- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004374 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4375 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4376
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004377- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4378 iterable object.
4379
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004380- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4381 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004382
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004383- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4384 authentication.
4385
4386- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4387 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004388
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004389- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004390 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4391 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4392 a sample driver.)
4393
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004394Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004395-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004396
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004397- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4398 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4399 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4400 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4401 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4402 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4403 kernel has large file support.
4404
4405- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4406 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4407 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4408 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4409 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4410
4411- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4412 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4413 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4414
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004415C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004416-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004417
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004418- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4419 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4420
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004421New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004422-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004423
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004424- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4425 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4426
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004427Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004428-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004429
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004430- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4431 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4432 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4433 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4434 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4435
4436- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4437 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4438 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4439 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4440
4441- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4442 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4443
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004444Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004445-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004446
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004447- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004448 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4449 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004450
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004451
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004452What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4453===========================
4454
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004455*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4456
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004457Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004458----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004459
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004460- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4461 big to represent as a C double.
4462
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004463- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4464 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4465 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4466 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4467 restriction).
4468
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004469- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4470 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4471 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4472 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4473 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4474
4475 >>> dir([])
4476 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4477 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4478 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4479 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4480 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4481 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4482 'reverse', 'sort']
4483
4484 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4485
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004486- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004487 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4488 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4489 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4490 OverflowError exception.
4491
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004492- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004493 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004494 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4495 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4496 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4497 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4498 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004499 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004500 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4501 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4502
4503 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4504 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4505 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4506 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004507
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004508- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004509 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4510 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4511 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4512 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4513 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4514 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4515 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4516 once it is created.
4517
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004518- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4519 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4520 (key, value) pairs.
4521
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004522- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004523 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4524 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4525
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004526- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4527 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4528 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4529 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4530 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004531
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004532- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004533 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4534 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4535
4536 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4537
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004538- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004539 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4540
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004541Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004542-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004543
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004544- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004545 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4546 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004547
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004548- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4549 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4550 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4551 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4552 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4553 in this area anymore).
4554
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004555- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4556 threading.Timer.
4557
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004558- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4559 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4560
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004561- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004562 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4563
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004564- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004565 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4566 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4567 converted to Python longs.
4568
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004569- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004570 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4571
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004572- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4573 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4574 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4575
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004576Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004577-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004578
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004579- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4580 division operators as per PEP 238.
4581
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004582Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004583-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004584
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004585- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4586 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4587 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4588 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4589
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004590C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004591-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004592
4593- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004594
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004595- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4596 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004597 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004598
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004599 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4600 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004601 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004602 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004603
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004604- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004605 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4606 module:
4607
4608 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004609
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004610 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4611 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004612
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004613 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4614 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004615
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004616 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4617
4618 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4619
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004620- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004621 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4622 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4623 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004624
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004625New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004626-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004627
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004628- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4629 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4630 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4631 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4632 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004633
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004634Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004635-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004636
4637Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004638-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004639
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004640- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4641 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4642 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4643 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004644 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4645 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4646 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4647 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4648 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004649
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004650- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004651 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4652
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004653
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004654What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4655===========================
4656
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004657*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4658
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004659Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004660-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004661
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004662- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4663 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4664
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004665- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4666 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4667 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004668
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004669- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4670 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4671 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4672 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004673
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004674- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4675
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004676- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004677
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004678Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004679-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004680
4681- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004682 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004683 the module docstring for details.
4684
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004685Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004686-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004687
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004688- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004689 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4690 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4691 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004692
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004693- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4694 Nick Mathewson.
4695
4696Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004697----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004698
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004699- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4700 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4701 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4702 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4703 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4704 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4705 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4706 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4707
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004708- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4709 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4710 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4711 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4712
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004713- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4714 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4715 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4716 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4717 come a long way).
4718
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004719- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4720 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4721 write filters for these warnings).
4722
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004723- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4724 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4725 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4726 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4727 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4728
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004729- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4730 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4731 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4732 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4733 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4734 older distribution.
4735
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004736Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004737-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004738
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004739- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4740 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004741 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004742
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004743- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4744 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4745 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4746
4747- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4748
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004749- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4750
4751- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4752
4753- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4754
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004755- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004756
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004757- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4758
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004759New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004760-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004761
4762C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004763-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004764
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004765- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4766 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4767 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4768 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4769 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4770 against buffer overruns.
4771
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004772- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004773 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4774 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004775 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4776 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4777 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4778
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004779- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4780 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4781 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4782 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4783 deprecated.
4784
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004785Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004786-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004787
4788- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4789 relevant is found.
4790
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004791
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004792What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004793===========================
4794
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004795*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4796
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004797Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004798----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004799
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004800- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4801 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4802 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4803 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4804 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4805 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4806 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4807 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004808 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004809 repaired.
4810
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004811- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004812 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004813 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4814 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4815 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4816 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4817 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4818 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4819 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4820 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4821
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004822- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4823 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4824 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4825 leading BMO character).
4826
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004827- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4828 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4829 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4830
4831 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4832 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4833 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004834
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004835 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4836 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4837 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4838 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4839 for various simple to use conversions.
4840
4841 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4842 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4843
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004844 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4845 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4846 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4847 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4848 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4849 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4850 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4851 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4852 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4853 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4854 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4855 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4856 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4857 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4858 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004859
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004860- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4861 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4862 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004863 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004864 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004865
4866 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004867 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4868 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4869 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4870 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4871 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004872 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4873 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004874
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004875 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4876 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4877 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004878 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004879
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004880- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4881 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4882 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4883 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4884 floating arithmetic,
4885
4886 x = 9007199254740992.0
4887 print long(x)
4888
4889 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4890 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4891 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4892 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4893 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4894 functions are of good quality).
4895
4896 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4897 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4898 algorithms to break.
4899
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004900- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4901 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4902 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4903 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4904 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4905 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4906 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4907 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4908 order.
4909
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004910- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4911 operation along the most common code paths.
4912
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004913- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4914 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4915
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004916- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4917 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4918 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4919 {}.update(UserDict())
4920
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004921- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4922 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4923 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4924 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4925 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4926 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4927 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4928 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4929
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004930- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004931 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004932
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004933 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004934 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4935 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004936 join() method of strings
4937 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004938 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4939 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004940 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004941 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004942
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004943- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4944 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4945
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004946- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4947 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4948
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004949- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4950 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4951 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4952 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4953
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004954- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4955 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004956 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004957 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4958 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004959
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004960- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4961
4962
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004963Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004964-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004965
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004966- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004967 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004968 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4969 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4970
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004971- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4972 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4973
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004974- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4975 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4976 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4977 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4978
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004979- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4980 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4981 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4982
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004983- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4984
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004985- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4986
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004987- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4988 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4989 that are still imported into string.py).
4990
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004991- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4992
4993- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4994 Now it does.
4995
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004996- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4997
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004998- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4999 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5000 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5001 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5002 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005003 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5004 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005005
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005006- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5007 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5008 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5009 'help(object)'.
5010
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005011Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005012-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005013
5014- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005015 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005016 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5017 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5018
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005019- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005020 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5021 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005022
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005023C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005024-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005025
5026- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5027 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005028
5029----
5030
5031**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**