blob: f1a0c883c2bbf866e75b9bf3dadc60d5c5091115 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000015- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
16 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
17 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
18 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
19 for a longer write-up of the problem).
20
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000021- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
22 serializing floats.
23
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000024- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
25 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
26 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
27
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000028- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
29 278.
30
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000031- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
32 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
33 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
34 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
35 to the base class has been moved the prroper nb_* magic slot and out of
36 PyNumber_*().
37 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
38
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000039- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
40 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
41 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
42 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
43
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000044- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
45 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
46 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
47 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
48 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
49
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000050- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
51 disabled caused a crash.
52
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000053- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
54 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
55
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000056- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
57 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
58
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000059- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
60
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000061- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000062 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
63 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
64 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000065
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000066- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
67
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000068- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
69 returning None.
70
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000071- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
72 ('\') with a specific error message.
73
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000074- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
75
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000076- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
77 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
78
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000079- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000080 an ferror() call.
81
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000082- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
83 list.sort().
84
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000085- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
86 (2+3) --> (5).
87
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000088- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
89
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000090- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
91 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000092
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000093- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
94 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
95 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
96
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000097Extension Modules
98-----------------
99
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000100- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
101
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000102- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
103 if available on the platform.
104
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000105- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
106 available on the platform.
107
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000108- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
109 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
110
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000111- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
112
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000113- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
114 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
115 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
116
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000117- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
118
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000119- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
120 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
121
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000122- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
123 file size.
124
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000125- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
126
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000127- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
128 {remove_history,replace_history}
129
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000130- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
131 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000132
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000133- stat_float_times is now True.
134
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000135- array.array objects are now picklable.
136
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000137- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
138 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
139
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000140- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
141 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
142 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
143
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000144- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
145 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000146
147Library
148-------
149
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000150- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
151 though this can be missing in embedded interpreters
152
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000153- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
154
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000155- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
156 error messages.
157
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000158- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
159
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000160- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
161 Bug #1224621.
162
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000163- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
164 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
165 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
166 terminates by raising StopIteration.
167
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000168- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
169
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000170- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
171 component of the path.
172
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000173- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
174 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
175 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
176 class at all.
177
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000178- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
179 files to PyPI.
180
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000181- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
182 them to PyPI.
183
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000184- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
185 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
186 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
187 work as expected.
188
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000189- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
190 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
191
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000192- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
193 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
194
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000195- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
196
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000197- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
198 to build.
199
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000200- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
201 symbolic links on Windows.
202
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000203- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
204 profile.py if available.
205
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000206- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
207
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000208- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
209 in LWPCookieJar.
210
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000211- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
212
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000213- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
214
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000215- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
216
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000217- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
218
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000219- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
220
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000221- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
222
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000223- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
224
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000225- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
226
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000227- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
228 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
229 be exploited in various ways.
230
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000231- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
232
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000233- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
234
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000235- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
236
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000237- Enhancements to the csv module:
238
239 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
240 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
241 PEP 305.
242 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
243 reporting.
244 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
245 dictates.
246 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000247 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000248 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000249 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
250 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000251 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
252 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000253 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000254 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
255 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
256 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
257 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
258 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
259 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
260 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
261 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
262 without first creating a dialect class.
263 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
264 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
265 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000266 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000267 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
268 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000269 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
270 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
271 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
272 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000273 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
274 This has been fixed.
275
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000276- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
277 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
278 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
279 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
280
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000281- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
282
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000283- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
284 (Bug #951915).
285
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000286- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
287 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
288 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
289 encoding alias table
290
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000291- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
292
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000293- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
294 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
295
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000296- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
297
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000298- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
299
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000300- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
301
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000302- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
303
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000304- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
305
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000306- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
307 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
308 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
309
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000310- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000311 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000312
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000313- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
314 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
315 tokenizer with very long source lines.
316
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000317- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
318 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
319
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000320- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
321 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000322
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000323- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
324 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
325
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000326- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
327 correctly.
328
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000329- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
330 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
331 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
332 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
333 between two lines.
334
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000335
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000336Build
337-----
338
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000339- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
340 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
341 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000342 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000343
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000344- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
345 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
346 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
347
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000348- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
349
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000350- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
351 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
352
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000353- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
354 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
355 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
356 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
357 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
358 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
359 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
360 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
361
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000362- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
363 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
364 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
365 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
366
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000367
368C API
369-----
370
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000371- Removed PyRange_New().
372
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000373
374Tests
375-----
376
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000377- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000378
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000379
380Documentation
381-------------
382
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000383- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
384
385- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
386
387- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
388
389- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
390
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000391- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
392 Closes bug #1166582.
393
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000394- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
395 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
396 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
397
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000398Mac
399---
400
401
402
403Tools/Demos
404-----------
405
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000406- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
407
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000408- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000409
410
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000411What's New in Python 2.4 final?
412===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000413
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000414*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000415
416Core and builtins
417-----------------
418
419- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
420 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
421 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
422
423
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000424What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
425==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000426
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000427*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000428
429Core and builtins
430-----------------
431
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000432- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
433 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
434 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
435
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000436
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000437Library
438-------
439
440- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
441 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
442 raised is re-raised.
443
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000444- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
445 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
446
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000447- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
448 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
449 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
450 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
451 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
452 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
453 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
454 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
455 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
456 by the slice are recomputed now.
457
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000458- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000459
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000460Build
461-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000462
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000463- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
464 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
465 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000466
467C API
468-----
469
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000470- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
471
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000472
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000473What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
474================================
475
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000476*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000477
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000478License
479-------
480
481The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
482is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
483changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
484Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
485intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
486durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
487the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
488License::
489
490 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
491
492says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
493to Python 2.1.1.
494
495The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
496License Version 2.
497
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000498Core and builtins
499-----------------
500
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000501- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
502 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
503 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
504 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
505 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
506 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
507 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
508 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
509 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
510 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
511
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000512- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000513
514Extension Modules
515-----------------
516
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000517- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
518 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
519 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
520 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000521
522Library
523-------
524
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000525- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
526 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
527 returned.
528
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000529- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
530
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000531- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
532 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
533
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000534- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
535
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000536- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
537 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000538
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000539- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
540
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000541- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
542
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000543- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000544 the source code is updated and reloaded.
545
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000546Build
547-----
548
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000549- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000550
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000551What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
552================================
553
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000554*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000555
556Core and builtins
557-----------------
558
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000559- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000560 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
561
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000562- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
563 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
564 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
565 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
566
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000567- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
568 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
569
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000570- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
571 constant.
572
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000573- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
574 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
575 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
576 large), and to anomalies such as
577 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
578 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
579 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
580 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000581
582Extension modules
583-----------------
584
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000585- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
586 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000587 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
588 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
589 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000590
591Library
592-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000593
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000594- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000595 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000596 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
597 --swig-cpp.
598
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000599- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
600 it is set.
601
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000602- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000603
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000604- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
605 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
606 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
607 Closes bug #1039270.
608
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000609- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000610
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000611 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000612 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
613 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
614 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
615 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
616 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
617 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
618 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
619 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
620 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
621 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
622 + Updates to documentation.
623
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000624- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
625 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
626 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
627 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
628
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000629- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000630
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000631- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
632 applications should use the getmember function.
633
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000634- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
635
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000636- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
637 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
638 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
639 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
640 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
641 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
642 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
643 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
644 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
645
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000646- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
647 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000648 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000649
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000650- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
651 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
652 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
653 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
654 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
655 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
656 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
657 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000658
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000659- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
660 the new public features (of which there are many).
661
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000662- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000663 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
664 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
665 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
666 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000667 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000668
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000669- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
670
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000671- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
672 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
673 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
674 options.
675
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000676- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
677 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
678 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
679 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
680 conditions under which non-string values work.
681
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000682Build
683-----
684
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000685- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
686 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
687 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
688
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000689- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
690 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
691 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
692 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
693 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000694
695C API
696-----
697
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000698- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
699 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
700
701- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
702
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000703- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
704 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
705 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
706 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
707 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
708 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
709 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
710 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
711 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
712
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000713- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
714
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000715- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
716 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
717 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000718
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000719Tests
720-----
721
722- test__locale ported to unittest
723
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000724Mac
725---
726
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000727- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
728 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
729 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000730
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000731Tools/Demos
732-----------
733
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000734- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
735 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
736 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
737 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
738 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000739
740
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000741What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
742=================================
743
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000744*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000745
746Core and builtins
747-----------------
748
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000749- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000750 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
751
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000752- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
753 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
754 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
755 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
756 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
757 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
758 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
759 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000760 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
761 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
762 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
763 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
764 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000765
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000766- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
767 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
768 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
769 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
770 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
771
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000772- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
773
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000774- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
775 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
776
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000777- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
778 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
779 modified the list.
780
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000781- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
782 functions is now writable.
783
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000784- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
785 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
786 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
787 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
788
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000789- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
790 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
791 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
792 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
793 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000794
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000795- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
796 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
797
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000798Extension modules
799-----------------
800
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000801- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
802
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000803- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
804 data.
805
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000806- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
807 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
808 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
809 supposed to have been truncated away.
810
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000811- Added socket.socketpair().
812
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000813- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
814 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
815
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000816- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000817 versions of Python, have now been removed.
818
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000819Library
820-------
821
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000822- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000823 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000824
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000825- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
826 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
827
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000828- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
829 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
830
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000831- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
832
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000833- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
834 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000835
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000836- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
837 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
838
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000839- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
840
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000841- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
842
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000843- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
844
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000845- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
846 Percivall.
847
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000848- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
849 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
850
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000851- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
852 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
853 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000854 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000855
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000856- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
857 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
858 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
859 and exponent.
860
861- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
862
863- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
864 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
865 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
866
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000867- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
868 to the readline module.
869
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000870- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000871 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
872 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000873
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000874- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
875 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
876 contains symlinks.
877
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000878- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
879 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
880
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000881- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
882 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
883 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
884
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000885- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
886 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
887 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
888 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
889 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
890 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
891 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
892 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
893 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
894 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
895 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
896 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
897 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
898
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000899- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
900
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000901Tools/Demos
902-----------
903
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000904- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
905 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
906
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000907- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
908
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000909Build
910-----
911
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000912- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
913 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
914 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
915 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
916 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
917 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
918 plans to do so.
919
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000920- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
921 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
922
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000923- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
924 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
925
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000926- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
927 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
928
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000929- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
930 GNU/k*BSD systems.
931
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000932- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
933 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
934
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000935C API
936-----
937
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000938..
939
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000940Documentation
941-------------
942
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000943- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
944 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
945
946- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
947 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
948 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000949
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000950New platforms
951-------------
952
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000953- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
954
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000955Tests
956-----
957
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000958..
959
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000960Windows
961-------
962
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000963- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
964 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
965 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
966 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
967 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
968 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
969 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
970 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
971 the problem.
972
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000973Mac
974---
975
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000976..
977
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000978
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000979What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
980=================================
981
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000982*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000983
984Core and builtins
985-----------------
986
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000987- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
988 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
989 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
990 sensitive code.
991
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000992- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000993 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000994
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000995 @staticmethod
996 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000997
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000998 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000999
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001000- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1001 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1002 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1003 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1004 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1005 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1006 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1007 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1008 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1009 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1010 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1011
1012 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1013 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1014 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1015 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1016 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1017 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1018 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1019
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001020- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1021 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1022
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001023- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001024 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001025
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001026- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001027 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001028 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1029
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001030- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001031 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1032 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1033
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001034- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1035 types that support garbage collection.
1036
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001037- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1038
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001039- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1040 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1041 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1042 Jython.
1043
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001044- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1045
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001046- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1047 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1048
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001049- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1050 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1051 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001052
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001053- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1054 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1055 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1056
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001057Extension modules
1058-----------------
1059
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001060- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1061
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001062Library
1063-------
1064
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001065- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1066 TIS-620
1067
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001068- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1069 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1070 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1071 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1072 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1073 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1074 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1075 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1076 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1077 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1078
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001079- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1080
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001081- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1082 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1083 same as when the argument is omitted).
1084 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1085
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001086- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1087
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001088- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1089 schemes are offered.
1090
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001091- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1092
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001093- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1094 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1095 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1096
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001097- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1098
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001099- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1100 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1101
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001102- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1103 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1104 when dummy_threading is being used.
1105
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001106- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1107 from a tarfile.
1108
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001109- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001110 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001111
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001112- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1113 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1114 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1115 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1116
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001117- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1118 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1119
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001120- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1121 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1122 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1123 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1124 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1125 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1126 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1127 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1128 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1129 by some other method in progress).
1130
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001131- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1132 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1133 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001134
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001135- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1136
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001137- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1138 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1139 AM Kuchling.
1140
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001141- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1142 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1143 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1144
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001145- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1146 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1147 instead of unsigned.
1148
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001149- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001150 no longer part of the public API.
1151
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001152- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1153 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1154 string methods of the same name).
1155
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001156- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001157 SF patch 945642.
1158
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001159- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1160
1161 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1162
1163 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1164 DocTestSuites.
1165
1166- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1167 that provide thread-local data.
1168
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001169- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1170 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1171
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001172- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1173
1174- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1175 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1176 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1177
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001178- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1179
1180 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1181 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1182 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001183
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001184 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1185 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1186 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1187 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1188
1189 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1190 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1191
1192 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1193 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1194 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1195 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1196
1197 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1198 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1199 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1200 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1201 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1202
1203 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1204 wrapping help output.
1205
1206 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1207 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1208 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001209
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001210C API
1211-----
1212
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001213- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1214 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1215 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1216 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1217 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1218 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1219 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1220 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1221 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1222 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1223 its visible semantics have not changed.
1224
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001225- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1226 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1227
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001228Documentation
1229-------------
1230
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001231- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001232
1233 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001234 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001235
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001236 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001237
1238 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1239
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001240- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001241
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001242Tests
1243-----
1244
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001245- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001246 platforms that use the Makefile.
1247
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001248- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1249 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1250 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1251
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001252
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001253What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1254=================================
1255
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001256*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001257
1258Core and builtins
1259-----------------
1260
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001261- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1262 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1263 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1264 objects now (one object instead of three).
1265
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001266- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1267 Windows DLLs.
1268
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001269- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1270 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001271
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001272- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1273 a new .pyc magic.
1274
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001275- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1276 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1277 be there.
1278
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001279- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1280 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1281 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1282
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001283- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1284 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1285 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1286
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001287- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1288
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001289- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1290 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1291 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001292
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001293- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1294 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1295
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001296- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1297
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001298- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001299 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001300
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001301- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1302
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001303- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1304
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001305- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1306 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1307
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001308- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1309 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1310 Fixes bug #858016 .
1311
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001312- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1313 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1314 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1315
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001316- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1317 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1318 improves their performance (about 35%).
1319
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001320- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1321 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1322 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1323
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001324- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1325 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1326 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1327 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1328
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001329- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1330 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001331 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001332 length is not known).
1333
1334- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1335 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001336 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1337 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001338 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1339
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001340- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1341 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1342
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001343- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1344 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1345 keyword arguments.
1346
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001347- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1348 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1349 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1350
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001351- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1352 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1353 cases.
1354
1355- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1356 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1357 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1358 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1359 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1360 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1361 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1362 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1363 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1364 a release build.
1365
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001366- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1367 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1368
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001369- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001370 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001371
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001372- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1373 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1374 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1375 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1376 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1377 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1378 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1379 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1380 destroyed.
1381
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001382- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1383 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1384 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1385 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1386 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1387 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1388 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1389 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1390
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001391- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1392 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1393 character other than a space.
1394
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001395- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1396 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1397 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1398 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1399 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1400 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1401 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1402 attributes with the same name.
1403
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001404- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1405 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1406 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1407 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1408 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1409 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1410 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1411 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1412 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1413 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1414 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1415 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1416 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1417 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001418
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001419- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1420 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1421 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1422 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1423 This has been repaired.
1424
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001425- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1426
1427- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1428
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001429- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1430 over a sequence.
1431
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001432- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001433 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001434
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001435- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1436
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001437- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1438 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1439 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1440 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1441 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1442 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1443 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1444 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1445
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001446- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1447 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1448 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1449
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001450- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1451 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1452 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1453 freelist.
1454
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001455- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1456 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1457
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001458- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1459 number.
1460
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001461- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1462 a TypeError exception.
1463
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001464- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1465 820195.
1466
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001467- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1468 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1469 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1470
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001471- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001472 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1473 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001474
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001475- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1476 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1477 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1478
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001479- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1480 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001481 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001482
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001483- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001484 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1485 the first call.
1486
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001487
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001488Extension modules
1489-----------------
1490
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001491- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1492 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1493
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001494- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1495 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1496 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1497 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1498 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1499 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1500 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001501
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001502- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1503
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001504- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1505
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001506- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1507 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1508
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001509- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1510 fewer false positives.
1511
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001512- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1513 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1514
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001515- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001516 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1517
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001518- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001519 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001520 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001521 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1522 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001523
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001524- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1525 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1526 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1527 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1528
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001529- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1530 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1531 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1532 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1533 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1534 #897625.
1535
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001536- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1537 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1538
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001539- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1540 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1541 and pops on either side of the deque.
1542
1543- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1544 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1545
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001546- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1547 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1548 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1549 other functions that expect a function argument.
1550
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001551- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1552
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001553- os.getsid was added.
1554
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001555- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1556 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1557 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1558
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001559- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1560
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001561- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1562
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001563- readline.clear_history was added.
1564
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001565- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1566
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001567- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1568
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001569- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1570
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001571- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1572
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001573- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1574
1575- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1576
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001577- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1578
1579- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1580
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001581- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1582 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1583 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1584
1585- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1586 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1587 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1588 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1589 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1590 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1591 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1592
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001593- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1594 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1595 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1596 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001597
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001598- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001599 iterators from a single iterable.
1600
1601- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1602 of raising a TypeError exception.
1603
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001604- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1605 as parameter.
1606
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001607Library
1608-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001609
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001610- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1611 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1612 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001613
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001614- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1615 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1616 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001617
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001618- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001619
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001620- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1621 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001622
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001623- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1624 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1625
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001626- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1627
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001628- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001629 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001630
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001631- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001632 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001633
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001634- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1635
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001636- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1637 on cygwin and mingw32.
1638
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001639- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1640
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001641- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1642 module.
1643
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001644- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1645 installation scheme for all platforms.
1646
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001647- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001648 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001649
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001650- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1651 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1652 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1653
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001654- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1655 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1656 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1657
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001658- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1659
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001660- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1661
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001662- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1663 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1664
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001665- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1666 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1667 type pattern with the same value exists.
1668
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001669- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1670 when run from the command prompt).
1671
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001672- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1673 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1674
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001675- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1676 default sort).
1677
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001678- Added global runctx function to profile module
1679
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001680- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1681
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001682- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1683
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001684- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1685
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001686- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001687 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1688 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1689 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1690 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1691 accordingly.
1692
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001693- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1694 decoding standards.
1695
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001696- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1697 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1698 called for all requests.
1699
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001700- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1701 they are passed to the compiler.
1702
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001703- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1704 indent, width and depth.
1705
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001706- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1707 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1708
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001709- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1710 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1711
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001712- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1713
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001714- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1715
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001716- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1717
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001718- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1719 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1720
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001721- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001722 for better performance.
1723
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001724- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001725
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001726- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1727 a string).
1728
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001729- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1730
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001731- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1732
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001733- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1734
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001735- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1736
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001737- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1738 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1739 list of fieldnames.
1740
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001741- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1742 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1743
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001744- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1745
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001746- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1747 empty lists.
1748
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001749- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1750 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1751 and shelves.
1752
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001753- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1754 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1755
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001756- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001757 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1758 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001759
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001760- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1761 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001762 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001763
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001764- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001765 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1766 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1767
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001768- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1769 and removed in Py2.4.
1770
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001771- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1772
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001773- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1774
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001775Tools/Demos
1776-----------
1777
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001778- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1779 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1780
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001781- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1782
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001783- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1784 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1785 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1786 destination in situations where both files are given.
1787
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001788- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1789 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1790 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1791 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1792
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001793- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1794
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001795- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1796 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1797 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1798 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1799 now.
1800
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001801- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1802 in effect
1803
1804- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1805 C-c C-h
1806
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001807- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1808 -d option was given.
1809
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001810Build
1811-----
1812
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001813- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1814 build under OS X.
1815
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001816- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1817 --enable-profiling.
1818
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001819- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1820 is configured --with-tsc.
1821
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001822- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1823 on AMD64.
1824
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001825- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1826 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1827
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001828- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1829 removed.
1830
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001831- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1832 supported (see PEP 11).
1833
1834- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1835
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001836- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1837
1838- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1839 (see PEP 11).
1840
1841- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1842 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1843
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001844C API
1845-----
1846
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001847- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1848 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1849 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1850
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001851- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1852 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1853 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1854 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1855
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001856- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1857 generator objects.
1858
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001859- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1860 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001861 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1862 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001863
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001864- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1865 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1866
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001867- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1868 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1869 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1870 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1871 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1872
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001873- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1874 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1875 about 10% faster.
1876
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001877- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1878 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1879
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001880- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1881 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1882 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1883 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1884
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001885Windows
1886-------
1887
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001888- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1889 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1890 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1891 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1892
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001893- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1894 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1895 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1896
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001897
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001898What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1899===============================
1900
1901*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1902
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001903IDLE
1904----
1905
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001906- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1907 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1908 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1909 context-menu actions.
1910
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001911- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1912 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1913 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1914 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1915 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1916 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1917 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1918 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1919 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1920
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001921
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001922What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1923=============================================
1924
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001925*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001926
1927Core and builtins
1928-----------------
1929
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001930- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001931 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001932 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1933
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001934Extension modules
1935-----------------
1936
1937- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1938 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1939 than once. This has been fixed.
1940
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001941- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1942 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1943 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1944 call.
1945
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001946- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1947
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001948Library
1949-------
1950
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001951- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1952 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1953
1954- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1955 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1956 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1957 restored.
1958
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001959IDLE
1960----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001961
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001962- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001963
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001964Build
1965-----
1966
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001967- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1968 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1969
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001970C API
1971-----
1972
1973Windows
1974-------
1975
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001976- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1977 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1978
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001979- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1980
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001981Mac
1982---
1983
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001984- Various fixes to pimp.
1985
1986- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1987
1988- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1989 more problems than it solves.
1990
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001991
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001992What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1993=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001994
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001995*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1996
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001997Core and builtins
1998-----------------
1999
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002000- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2001 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2002
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002003- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2004 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002005 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002006
2007- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2008 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2009 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002010 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002011
2012- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2013 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002014
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002015- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2016 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2017 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2018
2019- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002020 770247.
2021
2022- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002023
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002024Extension modules
2025-----------------
2026
2027- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2028 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2029
2030- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2031
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002032- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2033
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002034- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2035 contained within the _strptime module.
2036
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002037- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2038 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2039
2040- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002041 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2042
2043- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2044 the find_class attribute, if present.
2045
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002046- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002047
2048 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2049 (SF bug 763298).
2050
2051 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002052 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2053 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2054 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002055
2056 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2057
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002058Library
2059-------
2060
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002061- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2062
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002063- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2064 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2065 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2066 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2067 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2068 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2069 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2070 or Tester().
2071
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002072- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2073 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2074 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2075 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2076 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2077 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2078 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2079 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2080 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002081
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002082 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002083
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002084- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2085 weren't before was an oversight.
2086
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002087- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2088 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2089
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002090- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2091 when there are no lines.
2092
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002093- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2094 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2095
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002096- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2097 to child processes.
2098
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002099- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2100
2101- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2102
2103- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2104 xmlrpclib.
2105
2106- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2107 responses.
2108
2109- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2110 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2111
2112- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2113 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2114 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2115
2116- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2117 used as patterns.
2118
2119- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2120 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2121 than Tk 8.3.
2122
2123- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2124
2125- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002126
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002127Tools/Demos
2128-----------
2129
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002130- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2131
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002132- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2133
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002134- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002135
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002136Build
2137-----
2138
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002139- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2140
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002141- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2142
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002143- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2144 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002145
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002146- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2147 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2148 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002149
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002150C API
2151-----
2152
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002153- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2154 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2155
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002156Windows
2157-------
2158
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002159- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2160 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2161 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2162 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2163 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2164 Python exception ::
2165
2166 thread.error: can't start new thread
2167
2168 is raised now.
2169
2170- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2171 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2172 instead of from DLL teardown.
2173
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002174Mac
2175---
2176
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002177- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002178 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002179 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2180 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2181 the executable in the bundle.
2182
2183- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002184
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002185- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2186
2187- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2188 on Panther.
2189
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002190What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2191================================
2192
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002193*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002194
2195Core and builtins
2196-----------------
2197
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002198- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2199 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2200 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2201 with the -i option.
2202
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002203- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2204 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2205
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002206- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2207 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2208
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002209- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2210 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2211 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2212 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2213 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2214 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2215 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2216 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2217 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2218 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2219 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2220 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2221 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002222
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002223- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2224 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2225 embedded in a lambda expression.
2226
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002227- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2228 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2229 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2230 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2231 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2232
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002233- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2234 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2235 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2236
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002237- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2238 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2239
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002240- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2241 It's writable again.
2242
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002243- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2244 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2245 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002246 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002247
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002248- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2249 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2250 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2251
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002252Extension modules
2253-----------------
2254
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002255- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2256 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2257
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002258- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2259 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2260 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2261 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2262
2263- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2264 collection.
2265
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002266- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2267 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2268 unique within a single program run.
2269
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002270- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2271 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2272
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002273- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2274 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2275
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002276- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2277 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002278
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002279- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2280
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002281- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2282 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2283
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002284- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2285 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2286 for many BSD-derived systems.
2287
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002288
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002289Library
2290-------
2291
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002292- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2293 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2294 primary ones:
2295
2296 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2297 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2298 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2299
2300 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2301 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2302 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2303 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2304 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2305 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2306
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002307- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2308 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2309 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2310 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2311 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2312 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2313 argument.
2314
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002315- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2316 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2317 in the archive.
2318
2319- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2320 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2321
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002322- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2323 569574).
2324
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002325- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2326 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2327 no more.
2328
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002329- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2330 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2331 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2332 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2333 code coverage.
2334
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002335- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2336 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2337 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002338 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2339 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002340
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002341- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2342 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2343 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002344 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002345
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002346- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2347
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002348- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2349 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2350 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2351 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2352
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002353- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2354 handling.
2355
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002356- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2357 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2358
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002359- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2360 in socket.py.
2361
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002362- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2363
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002364- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2365 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2366 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2367 opener with proxy support.
2368
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002369- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2370
2371- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2372
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002373Tools/Demos
2374-----------
2375
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002376- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2377
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002378- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2379
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002380- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2381 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002382
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002383- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2384 files.
2385
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002386Build
2387-----
2388
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002389- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002390 different root directory.
2391
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002392C API
2393-----
2394
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002395- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2396 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2397 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2398 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2399 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2400 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2401 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2402 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2403 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2404 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2405
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002406- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2407 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2408 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2409 from Python.
2410
2411
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002412New platforms
2413-------------
2414
2415None this time.
2416
2417Tests
2418-----
2419
2420- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2421 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2422
2423Windows
2424-------
2425
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002426- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2427
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002428- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2429 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2430 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2431 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2432 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2433 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2434 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2435 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2436 that's what it's for.
2437
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002438Mac
2439---
2440
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002441- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2442 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2443 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2444 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002445- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2446 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2447- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002448
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002449SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2450------------------------------------
2451
2452430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2453598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2454622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2455661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2456683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2457697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2458713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2459724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2460727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2461729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2462730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2463731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2464732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2465733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2466735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2467740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2468744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2469745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2470747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2471749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2472751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2473753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2474755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2475757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2476760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2477
2478
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002479What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2480================================
2481
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002482*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002483
2484Core and builtins
2485-----------------
2486
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002487- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2488 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2489
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002490- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2491 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2492 and cannot be strings).
2493
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002494- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2495 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2496 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2497 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2498
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002499- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2500 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2501 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2502 Python itself.
2503
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002504- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2505 the referenced object, if it has one.
2506
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002507- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2508 the thread started at
2509 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2510
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002511- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2512 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2513 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2514 placed on a list index.
2515
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002516- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2517 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2518 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2519 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2520
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002521- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2522 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2523 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2524 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2525 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2526 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2527 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2528
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002529- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2530 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2531 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2532 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2533 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2534
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002535- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2536 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002537
2538- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2539 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2540 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2541 #693195.)
2542
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002543- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2544 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002545
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002546- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002547 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002548 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2549 interpreter executions, would fail.
2550
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002551- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002552 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002553 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002554
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002555Extension modules
2556-----------------
2557
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002558- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2559 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2560 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2561 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2562
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002563- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2564 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2565
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002566- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2567 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2568 and Greg Chapman.)
2569
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002570- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2571 recursively.
2572
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002573- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002574 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2575 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2576 leaks.
2577
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002578- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2579
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002580- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2581 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2582 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2583 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2584 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2585 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2586 #705836.
2587
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002588- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002589 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2590
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002591- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2592 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2593 See SF bug #692416.
2594
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002595- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2596 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2597
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002598- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2599 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2600 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002601
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002602- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002603 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2604 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2605
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002606- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2607 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2608 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2609 timeouts to work properly.
2610
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002611Library
2612-------
2613
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002614- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2615 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2616 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2617 future release.
2618
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002619- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2620 for querying platform dependent features.
2621
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002622- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002623
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002624- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2625 pickle protocol versions.
2626
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002627- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2628 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2629 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2630
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002631- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2632
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002633- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2634 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2635 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2636 modules.
2637
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002638- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2639 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2640 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2641
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002642- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2643 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2644
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002645- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2646 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2647 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2648
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002649- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002650 MS Office extensions.
2651
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002652- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2653 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2654
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002655- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2656 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2657
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002658- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2659 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2660 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2661 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2662 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2663 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2664
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002665- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2666 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2667 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002668
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002669- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2670 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2671 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2672
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002673- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2674
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002675- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2676 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2677 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2678
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002679Tools/Demos
2680-----------
2681
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002682- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2683 See the module docstring for details.
2684
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002685Build
2686-----
2687
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002688- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2689 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002690
2691C API
2692-----
2693
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002694- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2695
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002696- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2697 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2698 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2699
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002700- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2701 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002702
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002703 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2704 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2705 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002706
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002707- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002708 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2709
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002710- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2711 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2712 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002713
2714New platforms
2715-------------
2716
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002717None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002718
2719Tests
2720-----
2721
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002722- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2723 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002724
2725Windows
2726-------
2727
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002728- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2729 function.
2730
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002731- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2732 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002733
2734Mac
2735---
2736
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002737- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2738 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002739
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002740- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2741 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002742
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002743- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2744 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2745 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002746
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002747- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002748 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2749 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002750
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002751- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2752 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002753
2754
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002755What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2756=================================
2757
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002758*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002759
2760Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002761-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002762
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002763- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2764 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2765 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2766
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002767- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2768 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2769 (SF patch #664376.)
2770
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002771- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2772 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2773 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2774 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2775 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2776 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002777 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002778
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002779- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2780 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2781 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2782 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002783 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002784
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002785- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2786 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2787 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2788 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2789 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2790 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2791 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2792 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2793 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2794 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2795 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2796
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002797- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2798 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2799 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2800 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2801 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2802 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2803
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002804- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2805 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2806
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002807- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2808 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2809 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2810 case.)
2811
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002812- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2813 passed as unicode strings.
2814
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002815- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2816 See SF bug #683467.
2817
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002818- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2819 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2820
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002821- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2822
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002823- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2824
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002825- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2826 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2827 arguments.
2828
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002829- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2830 See SF bug #667147.
2831
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002832- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002833 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002834 See SF bug #676155.
2835
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002836- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002837 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002838 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2839 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2840 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2841 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2842 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2843 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002844
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002845Extension modules
2846-----------------
2847
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002848- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2849 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2850 tp_as_number pointer.
2851
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002852- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2853 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2854 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2855 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2856 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2857
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002858- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2859
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002860- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2861
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002862- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002863 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002864 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2865 patch #678531.)
2866
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002867- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2868 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2869
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002870- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2871 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2872
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002873- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2874
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002875- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2876 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2877 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2878
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002879- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2880
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002881- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2882 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2883
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002884- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002885
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002886- datetime changes:
2887
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002888 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2889
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002890 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2891 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2892 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2893 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2894 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2895 now.
2896
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002897 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002898 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2899 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002900
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002901 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002902 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002903 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2904 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2905 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2906 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002907
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002908 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2909 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2910 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002911 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2912
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002913 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2914 by a later example coded by Guido.
2915
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002916 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002917 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2918 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2919 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002920 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2921 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2922
2923 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2924 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2925 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2926 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2927 tzinfo subclass instance.
2928
2929 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2930 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2931 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2932 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2933 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2934 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2935 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2936 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002937
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002938 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2939 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2940 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2941 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2942 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002943 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2944
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002945 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002946
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002947 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2948 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2949 as a naive datetime object.
2950
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002951 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2952 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2953 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2954
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002955 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2956 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2957 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2958 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2959 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2960 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2961 comparison.
2962
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002963 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2964 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2965 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2966 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002967 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002968
2969 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002970
2971 and ::
2972
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002973 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2974
2975 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2976 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2977 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2978 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2979
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002980 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2981 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2982 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2983 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2984 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2985
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002986 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2987 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002988 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2989 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002990
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002991Library
2992-------
2993
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002994- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2995 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2996
2997- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2998 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2999 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3000 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3001 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3002 See PEP 307 for details.
3003
3004- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3005 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3006
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003007- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3008 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003009 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003010 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3011 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003012 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003013
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003014- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3015 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3016
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003017- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3018 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3019 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3020
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003021- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3022
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003023- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3024 exception.
3025
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003026- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3027 class.
3028
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003029- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3030 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3031 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3032
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003033- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3034 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3035
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003036- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003037 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3038 See SF bug #659228.
3039
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003040- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3041 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3042 See SF patch #651082.
3043
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003044- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003045
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003046- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3047 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3048
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003049- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003050 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003051
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003052- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3053 DOS paths from other platforms.
3054
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003055Tools/Demos
3056-----------
3057
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003058- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3059 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3060 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3061 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3062 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3063 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3064 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3065 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3066 example:
3067
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003068 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3069 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003070
3071 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3072
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003073
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003074Build
3075-----
3076
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003077- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3078 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3079 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003080 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3081
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003082 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3083
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003084- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3085 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3086 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3087 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3088 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3089 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3090 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3091 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3092 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3093
3094- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3095 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3096 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3097 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3098
3099- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3100 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3101
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003102C API
3103-----
3104
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003105- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3106 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003107
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003108- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3109 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3110 tp_as_number pointer.
3111
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003112- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3113 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3114 (SF #681367)
3115
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003116- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3117 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3118 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3119 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003120
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003121Tests
3122-----
3123
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003124- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003125 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3126 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3127 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3128 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3129 pydoc.)
3130
3131- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3132
3133- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003134
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003135Windows
3136-------
3137
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003138- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3139 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3140 time).
3141
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003142- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3143 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3144
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003145- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3146 release without strong cryptography.
3147
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003148- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003149 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003150
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003151- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3152 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3153
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003154Mac
3155---
3156
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003157- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3158 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003159
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003160- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3161 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3162 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003163
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003164- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3165 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003166
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003167- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3168 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3169 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3170 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003171
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003172- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003173 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3174 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3175 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003176
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003177
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003178What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003179=================================
3180
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003181*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003182
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003183Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003184--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003185
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003186- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3187
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003188- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3189 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003190 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003191 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003192 a different meaning than before.
3193
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003194- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003195 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003196 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003197
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003198- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003199 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003200 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003201
3202- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3203 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3204 and deallocation.
3205
3206- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3207 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3208
3209- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3210 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3211 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3212 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3213 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3214
3215- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3216 now detected by the garbage collector.
3217
3218- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3219 [SF bug 519621]
3220
3221- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3222 identifier.
3223
3224- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3225 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3226 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3227 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3228 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3229 [SF bug 563060]
3230
3231- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3232 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3233 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3234 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3235 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3236
3237- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3238 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3239 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3240
3241- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3242
3243- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3244 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3245 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3246 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3247 state of the slots would be lost.)
3248
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003249Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003250-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003251
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003252- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003253 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3254 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3255 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3256 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003257 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3258 Jython 2.1.
3259
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003260- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003261 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003262 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3263 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3264 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3265 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3266 these, see PEP 302.
3267
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003268- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3269 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3270 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3271
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003272- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3273 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3274 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3275
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003276- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3277 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3278 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3279
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003280- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3281 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3282 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3283 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3284 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3285 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3286 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3287 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3288 releases or implementations.
3289
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003290- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003291 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3292 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003293
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003294- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3295 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3296
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003297- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3298 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3299 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3300
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003301- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3302 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3303
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003304- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3305 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003306 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3307 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003308
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003309- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3310 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3311 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3312 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3313 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3314
3315 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3316 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3317 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3318 pattern.
3319
3320 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3321 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3322 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3323 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3324
3325 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3326 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3327 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3328 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3329 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3330 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3331
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003332- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3333 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3334 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3335 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3336 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3337 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3338 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3339 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003340
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003341- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3342 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3343 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3344 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3345 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003346 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3347 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3348 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3349 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3350 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3351 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3352 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003353
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003354- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3355 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3356
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003357- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3358 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3359 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3360 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3361 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3362 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3363 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3364 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3365 to Zack Weinberg!
3366
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003367- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3368 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3369 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3370 type. This has been fixed now.
3371
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003372- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3373 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3374 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3375
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003376- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3377 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3378 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3379 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3380 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3381 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3382 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3383 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003384 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003385
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003386- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3387 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3388 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003389
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003390- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3391 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3392 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3393 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3394 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3395 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3396 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3397 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003398 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003399 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3400 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3401
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003402- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3403 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3404 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3405 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3406 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3407 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3408 this.)
3409
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003410- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3411 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003412 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003413 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003414 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3415 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003416 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3417 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003418
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003419- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3420 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3421 currently running.
3422
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003423- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3424 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3425 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3426 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3427
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003428- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3429 as directory names.
3430
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003431- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3432 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3433
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003434- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3435 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3436
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003437- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003438 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3439 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003440
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003441- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3442 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3443 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3444 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3445 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3446
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003447- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3448 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3449 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3450 removed.
3451
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003452- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3453 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3454 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3455
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003456- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3457 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3458 to __debug__.
3459
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003460- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3461 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3462 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3463
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003464- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3465 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3466 deprecated now.
3467
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003468- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3469 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3470 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003471
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003472- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3473 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3474 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3475 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3476 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003477
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003478- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3479 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3480
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003481- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3482 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3483 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003484 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003485 is backward compatible.
3486
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003487- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3488 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3489 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3490 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3491 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3492
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003493- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3494 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3495 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3496 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3497 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3498 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003499
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003500- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3501 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3502
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003503- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3504 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3505
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003506- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3507 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3508 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3509 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3510 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3511
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003512- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3513 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3514 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3515
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003516- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003517 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3518
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003519- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3520 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3521 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003522
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003523- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3524 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3525
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003526- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3527 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3528 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3529
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003530- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3531
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003532Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003533-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003534
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003535- Added three operators to the operator module:
3536 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3537 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3538 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3539
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003540- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3541
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003542- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3543 archives.
3544
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003545- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3546 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3547 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3548
3549 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3550
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003551- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3552 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3553 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003554 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003555
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003556- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3557 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3558 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3559 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003560 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3561 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3562 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3563 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003564
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003565- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3566 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003567
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003568- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3569
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003570- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3571 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3572
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003573- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3574 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3575 supported.
3576
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003577- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3578
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003579- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3580 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003581
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003582- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3583 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3584
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003585- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3586
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003587- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3588 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3589
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003590- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3591 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3592 functions but callable type objects.
3593
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003594- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003595 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003596 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003597
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003598- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3599 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003600
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003601- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3602 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003603
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003604- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3605 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3606 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3607 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3608
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003609- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3610 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003611
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003612- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3613 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3614 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3615 and __imul__.
3616
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003617- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003618 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3619 is called.
3620
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003621- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3622 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3623 interpreter was compiled.
3624
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003625- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3626 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3627 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003628 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003629 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3630 1, not 2.
3631
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003632- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3633 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3634 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3635 limit.
3636
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003637- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3638 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3639 bug #623464.
3640
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003641- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3642 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3643 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3644 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3645
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003646Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003647-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003648
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003649- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3650
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003651- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3652 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3653 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3654 with Python 2.3a2.
3655
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003656- os.path exposes getctime.
3657
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003658- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003659 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003660 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003661 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003662 unit tests of floating point results.
3663
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003664- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3665 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3666 has been increased.
3667
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003668- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3669 executed.
3670
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003671- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3672 postinstallation script.
3673
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003674- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3675 test the current module.
3676
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003677- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003678 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3679 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3680 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3681 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3682
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003683- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003684 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003685 Ward's Optik package.
3686
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003687- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3688 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3689 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3690 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3691
3692- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3693 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003694 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003695
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003696- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3697 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3698 shelf are binary pickles.
3699
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003700- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3701 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3702
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003703- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3704 modules are iterators now.
3705
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003706- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3707 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3708 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3709 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3710 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3711 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003712
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003713- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3714 with their entity value.
3715
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003716- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3717
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003718- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3719 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003720
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003721- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3722 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003723 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003724
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003725- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3726 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3727 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3728 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3729 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3730 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3731 main():
3732
3733 import locale
3734 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3735
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003736- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3737 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3738
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003739- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3740 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3741 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3742 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3743 to the new standard.
3744
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003745- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3746 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3747 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3748 an extension to the database.
3749
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003750- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3751 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3752 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3753 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003754 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003755
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003756- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003757 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003758
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003759- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3760 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3761 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3762 bounded integers.
3763
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003764- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3765 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3766 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3767 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3768 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3769 in existence.
3770
3771 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3772 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3773 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3774 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3775 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3776 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3777
3778 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3779 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3780 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3781 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3782
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003783- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3784 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3785 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3786
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003787- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3788
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003789- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3790 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3791 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3792 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3793
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003794- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3795 argument.
3796
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003797- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3798 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3799 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3800 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3801 [SF patch 560794].
3802
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003803- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3804 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3805 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003806 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3807 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3808 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003809
3810- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3811 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003812
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003813- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3814 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3815 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3816 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003817
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003818- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3819 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3820 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3821 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3822 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3823
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003824- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003825
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003826- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3827
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003828- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3829 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3830 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3831 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3832 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3833 identical to None.
3834
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003835- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3836 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3837 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3838 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3839 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3840 results now.
3841
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003842- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3843 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3844
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003845- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3846 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3847 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3848 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3849 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3850 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3851 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3852 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3853
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003854- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3855
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003856- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3857 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3858
3859- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3860 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3861 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3862 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3863 and other systems.
3864
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003865- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3866 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3867 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3868 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 +00003869 work well with these.
3870
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003871- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3872
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003873- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003874 connections.
3875
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003876- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3877 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3878 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3879
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003880- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3881 sets
3882
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003883- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3884 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3885 name.
3886
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003887- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3888 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3889 passed in.
3890
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003891- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003892 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003893 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3894 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003895
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003896- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3897
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003898- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3899
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003900- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3901 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3902 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3903
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003904- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3905 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3906 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3907 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003908 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003909
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003910- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003911 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003912 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003913
3914- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3915 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3916 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3917
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003918- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003919 the value of its expression argument.
3920
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003921- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3922 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3923 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3924
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003925- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3926 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3927 skipstone browser was included.
3928
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003929- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3930 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3931
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003932Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003933-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003934
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003935- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3936 names in addition to accepting file names.
3937
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003938- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3939 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3940 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3941 still used and useful.)
3942
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003943- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3944 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3945 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3946 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003947
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003948- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3949 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3950 the generated binary.
3951
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003952Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003953-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003954
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003955- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3956
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003957- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3958 except in the hands of experts.
3959
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003960- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003961 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3962 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3963 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003964
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003965- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3966 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3967 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3968 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3969 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3970 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3971 builds.
3972
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003973- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3974 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3975 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3976 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3977 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3978 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3979 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3980 new type.
3981
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003982- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003983
3984 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3985 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3986 positive infinities.
3987
3988 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3989 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3990 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3991 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3992 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3993 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3994 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3995
3996 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3997
3998 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3999
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004000- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4001 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4002 size of the executable.
4003
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004004- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4005 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4006 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4007 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004008
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004009- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4010
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004011- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4012 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4013 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004014
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004015- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4016 well as Unix.
4017
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004018- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4019 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4020 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4021 modules in the README file for details.
4022
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004023C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004024-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004025
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004026- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4027 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004028 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004029 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004030 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004031
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004032- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4033 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4034 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4035 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4036 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4037 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004038 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004039 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4040 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4041 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4042 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4043 aligned.)
4044
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004045- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4046 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4047 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4048
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004049- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4050 level.
4051
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004052- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4053 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4054 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4055 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4056 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4057
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004058- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4059 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4060 code.
4061
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004062- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4063 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4064 adjusting for negative indices.
4065
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004066- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4067 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4068 object.
4069
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004070- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4071 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4072 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4073
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004074- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4075 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004076
4077- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4078
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004079- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4080 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4081 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4082 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4083
4084- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4085
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004086- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004087
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004088- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004089 without going through the buffer API.
4090
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004091- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004092
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004093- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4094 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4095 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4096 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4097
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004098- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4099 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4100
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004101- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004102 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4103
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004104New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004105-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004106
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004107- OpenVMS is now supported.
4108
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004109- AtheOS is now supported.
4110
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004111- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4112
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004113- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4114
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004115Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004116-----
4117
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004118- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4119 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4120 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004121
4122Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004123-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004124
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004125- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4126 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4127 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4128 bugs.
4129 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004130 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004131 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4132 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004133 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004134
4135- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004136 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004137
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004138- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4139 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4140
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004141- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4142 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004143 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004144 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4145
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004146- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4147 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4148 use files" uninstall option).
4149
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004150- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4151
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004152- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4153 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4154
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004155- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4156 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4157 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4158
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004159- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4160 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4161 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4162 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4163 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004164 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4165 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4166 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004167
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004168- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004169 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004170 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4171 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4172 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4173 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4174 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4175 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4176 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4177 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4178 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4179 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4180 work around.
4181
4182- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4183 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4184 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4185 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4186 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4187 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4188 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4189 specified with O_CREAT too).
4190
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004191Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004192----
4193
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004194- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004195
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004196- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4197 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4198 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4199
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004200- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4201 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4202 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4203
4204- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4205 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4206 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4207 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4208 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4209 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4210 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4211 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004212
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004213- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4214 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4215 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004216
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004217- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4218 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4219 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4220 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4221 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004222
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004223- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4224 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4225 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004226
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004227- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4228 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004229
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004230- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4231 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4232 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4233 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4234 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004235
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004236- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4237 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4238 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4239
4240- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4241 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4242 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004243
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004244- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4245 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4246 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4247 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004248 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004249
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004250- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4251 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004252
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004253- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4254 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004255
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004256- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004257 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004258 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4259 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004260
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004261
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004262What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004263===============================
4264
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004265*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4266
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004267Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004268--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004269
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004270- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4271 with a custom metaclass.
4272
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004273Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004274-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004275
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004276- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4277 are proxies.
4278
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004279Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004280-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004281
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004282- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4283 very short strings.
4284
4285- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4286 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4287 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4288 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4289 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4290
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004291Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004292-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004293
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004294- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4295 close or delete time).
4296
4297- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4298 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4299
4300- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4301
4302- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004303 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004304
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004305Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004306-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004307
4308Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004309-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004310
4311C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004312-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004313
4314New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004315-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004316
4317Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004318-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004319
4320Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004321-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004322
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004323- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4324
4325- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4326 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4327
4328- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4329 deleted at process exit time.
4330
4331- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4332 in backslash.
4333
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004334Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004335----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004336
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004337- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4338 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4339 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4340
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004341
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004342What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004343===========================
4344
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004345*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4346
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004347Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004348--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004349
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004350- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4351 been extensively updated. See
4352
4353 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4354
4355 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4356
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004357- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4358 deleted!
4359
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004360- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4361 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4362 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4363 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4364 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4365
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004366- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4367
4368 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4369 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4370
4371 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4372 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4373 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4374 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4375 supported anyway.
4376
4377 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4378 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4379
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004380- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4381 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4382 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4383 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4384 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004385
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004386- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4387 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4388 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4389
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004390Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004391-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004392
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004393- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4394 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4395 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4396 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4397 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4398 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004399 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4400 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4401 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4402 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004403
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004404- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4405 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4406 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4407
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004408Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004409-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004410
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004411- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4412
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004413Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004414-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004415
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004416- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4417 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4418 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4419 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4420 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4421 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4422
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004423- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4424
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004425- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4426
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004427- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4428
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004429- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4430 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4431 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4432
4433- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4434
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004435Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004436-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004437
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004438- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4439 off a search on Google.
4440
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004441Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004442-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004443
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004444- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4445 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4446 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4447 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4448 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4449 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4450 other platforms should do likewise.
4451
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004452- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4453 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4454 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4455
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004456C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004457-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004458
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004459- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4460 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4461 producing key-value pairs.
4462
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004463- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004464 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004465 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4466 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4467 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4468 previously went unchallenged.
4469
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004470New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004471-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004472
4473Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004474-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004475
4476Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004477-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004478
4479Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004480----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004481
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004482- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4483 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004484
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004485- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4486 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4487 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4488 home.
4489
4490
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004491What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004492===========================
4493
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004494*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4495
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004496Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004497--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004498
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004499- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4500 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004501
4502 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004503 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004504
4505 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4506 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004507 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004508 This needs to be documented.
4509
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004510- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4511 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4512
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004513- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4514 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4515 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4516
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004517- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4518 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4519
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004520- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4521 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4522 class forbids it).
4523
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004524- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4525 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4526 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4527
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004528- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4529
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004530Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004531-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004532
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004533- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4534 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004535 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004536
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004537- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4538 (like 1 + '').
4539
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004540Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004541-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004542
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004543- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4544 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4545 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4546 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004547 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004548 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4549
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004550- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4551 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4552 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4553 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4554
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004555- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4556 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004557 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4558 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4559 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004560
4561- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4562 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004563
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004564- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4565 bytes on its input.
4566
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004567Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004568-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004569
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004570- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004571 convenience function.
4572
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004573- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4574 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4575 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004576 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4577 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4578 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4579 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4580 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4581 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004582
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004583- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4584 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4585 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4586 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4587
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004588- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4589 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4590 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4591
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004592- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4593 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4594 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4595 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4596
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004597- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4598 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004599 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004600 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4601 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4602 new -l and -e options.
4603
4604- statcache is now deprecated.
4605
4606- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4607 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004608 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004609 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4610 time properly taken into account.
4611
4612- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4613 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4614 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4615 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4616
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004617Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004618-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004619
4620Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004621-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004622
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004623- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4624 is built with libdb3 if available.
4625
4626- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4627
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004628C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004629-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004630
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004631- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4632 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4633 PySequence_Size().
4634
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004635- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4636
4637- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4638 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4639 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4640
4641- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4642 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4643
4644- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4645 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4646
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004647New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004648-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004649
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004650- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4651 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4652
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004653- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4654 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4655
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004656- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4657
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004658Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004659-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004660
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004661- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4662 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4663
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004664Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004665-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004666
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004667Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004668----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004669
4670- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4671 removed completely in the next release.
4672
4673- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4674 OSX.
4675
4676- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4677 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4678
4679- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4680
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004681
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004682What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004683===========================
4684
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004685*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4686
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004687Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004688--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004689
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004690- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004691 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004692 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004693 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4694 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004695 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4696 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004697 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4698 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004699
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004700- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4701 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4702
4703- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4704 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4705
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004706Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004707-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004708
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004709- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4710 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4711 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4712 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4713 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4714 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4715 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4716 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4717
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004718- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4719 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4720 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4721 example).
4722
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004723- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004724 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004725 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004726 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004727
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004728- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4729 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4730 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004731 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004732
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004733- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4734 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4735 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4736 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4737 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4738 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4739
4740 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4741
4742 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4743
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004744Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004745-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004746
4747- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4748
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004749- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4750
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004751- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4752 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004753
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004754- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4755 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4756 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4757 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4758 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4759 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004760 attributes.
4761
4762- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4763 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4764 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004765
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004766- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4767 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4768 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004769
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004770- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4771 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4772 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004773 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4774 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4775
4776- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4777 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004778
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004779Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004780-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004781
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004782- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4783 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4784
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004785- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4786 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4787 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4788 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4789
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004790- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4791 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4792 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4793 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4794
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004795 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4796 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4797 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4798 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4799 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4800 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4801 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4802 without losing information).
4803
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004804- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004805 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4806 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4807 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4808 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4809 module).
4810
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004811 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004812 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4813 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4814 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4815 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004816
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004817- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004818 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4819 encoding.
4820
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004821- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4822 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4823
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004824- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004825 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4826
4827- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4828 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4829 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4830 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4831
4832- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4833
4834- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4835 ON, and OFF.
4836
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004837- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4838 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4839
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004840Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004841-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004842
4843- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4844 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4845 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004846
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004847- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4848 been added: -X and -E.
4849
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004850Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004851-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004852
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004853- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4854 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4855
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004856C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004857-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004858
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004859- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4860 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4861 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4862 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4863 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4864
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004865- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4866 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4867 as long) arguments.
4868
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004869- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4870 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4871 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4872 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4873 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4874 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4875
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004876- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4877 input.
4878
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004879New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004880-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004881
4882Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004883-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004884
4885Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004886-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004887
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004888- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4889 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4890 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4891
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004892- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4893 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4894 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004895 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004896
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004897 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4898 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4899 import signal
4900 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004901
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004902 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004903 while 1:
4904 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004905 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004906 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4907 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4908 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4909 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004910
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004911
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004912What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4913===========================
4914
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004915*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4916
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004917Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004918--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004919
4920- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4921 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4922 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4923
4924- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4925 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4926 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4927 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4928 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4929 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4930 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004931
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004932- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004933 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004934 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4935 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4936 associate a docstring with a property.
4937
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004938- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4939 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4940 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4941 other built-in object types.
4942
4943- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4944 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4945 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4946 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4947 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4948
4949- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4950 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4951
4952- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4953 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004954 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004955 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4956 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4957 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4958 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4959 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4960
4961- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4962 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4963 class.
4964
4965- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4966 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4967 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4968 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4969
4970- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4971 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4972 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4973 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4974
4975- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4976 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4977
4978- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4979 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4980 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4981 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4982 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004983 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004984 with the same value as s.
4985
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004986- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4987
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004988Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004989----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004990
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004991- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4992
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004993- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4994 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4995 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4996 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4997 objects.
4998
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004999- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5000 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005001 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5002 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5003
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005004- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5005 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5006 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5007
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005008Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005009-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005010
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005011- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5012 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5013 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5014 by the instances.
5015
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005016- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5017 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5018 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5019
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005020- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5021 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5022 before the entire comparison is complete.
5023
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005024- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5025 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5026 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5027
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005028- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5029 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5030 getwriter().
5031
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005032- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5033 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5034
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005035- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005036 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5037 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5038
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005039- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5040 iterable object.
5041
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005042- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5043 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005044
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005045- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5046 authentication.
5047
5048- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5049 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005050
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005051- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005052 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5053 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5054 a sample driver.)
5055
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005056Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005057-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005058
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005059- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5060 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5061 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5062 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5063 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5064 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5065 kernel has large file support.
5066
5067- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5068 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5069 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5070 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5071 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5072
5073- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5074 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5075 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5076
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005077C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005078-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005079
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005080- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5081 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5082
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005083New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005084-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005085
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005086- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5087 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5088
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005089Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005090-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005091
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005092- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5093 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5094 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5095 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5096 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5097
5098- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5099 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5100 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5101 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5102
5103- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5104 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5105
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005106Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005107-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005108
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005109- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005110 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5111 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005112
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005113
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005114What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5115===========================
5116
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005117*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5118
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005119Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005120----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005121
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005122- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5123 big to represent as a C double.
5124
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005125- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5126 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5127 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5128 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5129 restriction).
5130
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005131- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5132 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5133 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5134 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5135 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5136
5137 >>> dir([])
5138 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5139 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5140 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5141 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5142 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5143 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5144 'reverse', 'sort']
5145
5146 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5147
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005148- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005149 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5150 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5151 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5152 OverflowError exception.
5153
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005154- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005155 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005156 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5157 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5158 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5159 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5160 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005161 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005162 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5163 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5164
5165 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5166 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5167 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5168 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005169
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005170- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005171 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5172 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5173 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5174 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5175 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5176 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5177 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5178 once it is created.
5179
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005180- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5181 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5182 (key, value) pairs.
5183
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005184- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005185 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5186 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5187
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005188- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5189 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5190 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5191 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5192 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005193
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005194- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005195 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5196 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5197
5198 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5199
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005200- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005201 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5202
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005203Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005204-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005205
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005206- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005207 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5208 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005209
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005210- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5211 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5212 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5213 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5214 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5215 in this area anymore).
5216
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005217- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5218 threading.Timer.
5219
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005220- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5221 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5222
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005223- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005224 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5225
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005226- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005227 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5228 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5229 converted to Python longs.
5230
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005231- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005232 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5233
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005234- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5235 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5236 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5237
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005238Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005239-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005240
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005241- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5242 division operators as per PEP 238.
5243
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005244Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005245-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005246
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005247- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5248 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5249 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5250 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5251
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005252C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005253-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005254
5255- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005256
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005257- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5258 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005259 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005260
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005261 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5262 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005263 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005264 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005265
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005266- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005267 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5268 module:
5269
5270 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005271
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005272 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5273 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005274
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005275 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5276 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005277
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005278 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5279
5280 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5281
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005282- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005283 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5284 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5285 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005286
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005287New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005288-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005289
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005290- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5291 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5292 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5293 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5294 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005295
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005296Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005297-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005298
5299Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005300-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005301
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005302- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5303 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5304 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5305 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005306 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5307 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5308 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5309 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5310 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005311
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005312- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005313 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5314
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005315
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005316What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5317===========================
5318
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005319*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5320
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005321Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005322-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005323
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005324- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5325 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5326
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005327- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5328 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5329 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005330
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005331- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5332 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5333 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5334 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005335
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005336- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5337
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005338- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005339
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005340Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005341-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005342
5343- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005344 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005345 the module docstring for details.
5346
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005347Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005348-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005349
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005350- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005351 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5352 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5353 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005354
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005355- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5356 Nick Mathewson.
5357
5358Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005359----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005360
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005361- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5362 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5363 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5364 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5365 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5366 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5367 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5368 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5369
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005370- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5371 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5372 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5373 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5374
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005375- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5376 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5377 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5378 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5379 come a long way).
5380
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005381- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5382 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5383 write filters for these warnings).
5384
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005385- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5386 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5387 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5388 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5389 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5390
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005391- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5392 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5393 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5394 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5395 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5396 older distribution.
5397
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005398Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005399-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005400
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005401- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5402 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005403 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005404
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005405- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5406 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5407 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5408
5409- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5410
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005411- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5412
5413- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5414
5415- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5416
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005417- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005418
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005419- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5420
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005421New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005422-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005423
5424C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005425-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005426
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005427- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5428 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5429 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5430 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5431 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5432 against buffer overruns.
5433
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005434- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005435 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5436 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005437 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5438 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5439 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5440
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005441- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5442 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5443 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5444 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5445 deprecated.
5446
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005447Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005448-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005449
5450- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5451 relevant is found.
5452
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005453
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005454What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005455===========================
5456
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005457*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5458
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005459Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005460----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005461
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005462- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5463 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5464 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5465 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5466 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5467 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5468 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5469 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005470 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005471 repaired.
5472
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005473- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005474 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005475 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5476 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5477 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5478 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5479 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5480 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5481 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5482 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5483
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005484- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5485 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5486 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5487 leading BMO character).
5488
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005489- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5490 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5491 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5492
5493 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5494 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5495 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005496
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005497 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5498 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5499 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5500 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5501 for various simple to use conversions.
5502
5503 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5504 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5505
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005506 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5507 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5508 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5509 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5510 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5511 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5512 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5513 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5514 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5515 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5516 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5517 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5518 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5519 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5520 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005521
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005522- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5523 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5524 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005525 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005526 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005527
5528 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005529 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5530 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5531 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5532 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5533 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005534 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5535 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005536
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005537 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5538 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5539 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005540 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005541
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005542- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5543 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5544 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5545 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5546 floating arithmetic,
5547
5548 x = 9007199254740992.0
5549 print long(x)
5550
5551 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5552 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5553 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5554 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5555 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5556 functions are of good quality).
5557
5558 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5559 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5560 algorithms to break.
5561
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005562- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5563 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5564 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5565 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5566 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5567 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5568 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5569 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5570 order.
5571
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005572- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5573 operation along the most common code paths.
5574
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005575- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5576 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5577
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005578- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5579 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5580 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5581 {}.update(UserDict())
5582
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005583- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5584 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5585 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5586 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5587 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5588 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5589 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5590 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5591
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005592- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005593 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005594
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005595 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005596 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5597 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005598 join() method of strings
5599 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005600 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5601 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005602 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005603 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005604
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005605- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5606 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5607
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005608- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5609 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5610
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005611- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5612 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5613 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5614 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5615
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005616- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5617 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005618 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005619 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5620 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005621
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005622- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5623
5624
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005625Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005626-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005627
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005628- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005629 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005630 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5631 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5632
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005633- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5634 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5635
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005636- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5637 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5638 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5639 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5640
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005641- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5642 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5643 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5644
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005645- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5646
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005647- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5648
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005649- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5650 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5651 that are still imported into string.py).
5652
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005653- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5654
5655- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5656 Now it does.
5657
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005658- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5659
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005660- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5661 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5662 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5663 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5664 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005665 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5666 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005667
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005668- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5669 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5670 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5671 'help(object)'.
5672
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005673Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005674-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005675
5676- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005677 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005678 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5679 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5680
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005681- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005682 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5683 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005684
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005685C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005686-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005687
5688- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5689 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005690
5691----
5692
5693**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**