blob: 8d86efde286cbbec1ab77ce6101be3bdb94f842b [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000015- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
16 like their int counterparts.
17
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000018- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
19 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
20 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
21 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
22 for a longer write-up of the problem).
23
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000024- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
25 serializing floats.
26
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000027- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
28 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
29 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
30
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000031- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
32 278.
33
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000034- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
35 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
36 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
37 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
38 to the base class has been moved the prroper nb_* magic slot and out of
39 PyNumber_*().
40 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
41
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000042- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
43 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
44 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
45 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
46
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000047- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
48 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
49 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
50 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
51 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
52
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000053- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
54 disabled caused a crash.
55
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000056- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
57 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
58
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000059- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
60 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
61
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000062- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
63
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000064- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000065 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
66 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
67 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000068
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000069- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
70
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000071- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
72 returning None.
73
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000074- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
75 ('\') with a specific error message.
76
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000077- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
78
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000079- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
80 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
81
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000082- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000083 an ferror() call.
84
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000085- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
86 list.sort().
87
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000088- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
89 (2+3) --> (5).
90
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000091- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
92
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000093- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
94 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000095
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000096- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
97 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
98 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
99
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000100Extension Modules
101-----------------
102
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000103- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
104
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000105- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
106 if available on the platform.
107
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000108- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
109 available on the platform.
110
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000111- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
112 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
113
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000114- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
115
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000116- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
117 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
118 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
119
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000120- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
121
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000122- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
123 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
124
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000125- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
126 file size.
127
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000128- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
129
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000130- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
131 {remove_history,replace_history}
132
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000133- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
134 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000135
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000136- stat_float_times is now True.
137
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000138- array.array objects are now picklable.
139
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000140- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
141 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
142
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000143- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
144 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
145 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
146
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000147- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
148 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000149
150Library
151-------
152
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000153- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
154 though this can be missing in embedded interpreters
155
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000156- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
157
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000158- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
159 error messages.
160
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000161- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
162
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000163- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
164 Bug #1224621.
165
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000166- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
167 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
168 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
169 terminates by raising StopIteration.
170
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000171- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
172
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000173- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
174 component of the path.
175
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000176- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
177 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
178 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
179 class at all.
180
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000181- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
182 files to PyPI.
183
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000184- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
185 them to PyPI.
186
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000187- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
188 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
189 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
190 work as expected.
191
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000192- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
193 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
194
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000195- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
196 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
197
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000198- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
199
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000200- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
201 to build.
202
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000203- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
204 symbolic links on Windows.
205
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000206- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
207 profile.py if available.
208
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000209- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
210
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000211- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
212 in LWPCookieJar.
213
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000214- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
215
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000216- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
217
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000218- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
219
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000220- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
221
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000222- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
223
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000224- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
225
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000226- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
227
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000228- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
229
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000230- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
231 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
232 be exploited in various ways.
233
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000234- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
235
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000236- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
237
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000238- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
239
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000240- Enhancements to the csv module:
241
242 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
243 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
244 PEP 305.
245 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
246 reporting.
247 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
248 dictates.
249 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000250 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000251 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000252 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
253 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000254 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
255 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000256 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000257 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
258 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
259 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
260 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
261 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
262 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
263 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
264 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
265 without first creating a dialect class.
266 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
267 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
268 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000269 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000270 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
271 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000272 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
273 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
274 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
275 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000276 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
277 This has been fixed.
278
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000279- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
280 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
281 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
282 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
283
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000284- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
285
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000286- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
287 (Bug #951915).
288
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000289- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
290 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
291 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
292 encoding alias table
293
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000294- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
295
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000296- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
297 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
298
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000299- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
300
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000301- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
302
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000303- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
304
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000305- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
306
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000307- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
308
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000309- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
310 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
311 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
312
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000313- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000314 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000315
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000316- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
317 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
318 tokenizer with very long source lines.
319
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000320- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
321 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
322
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000323- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
324 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000325
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000326- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
327 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
328
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000329- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
330 correctly.
331
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000332- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
333 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
334 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
335 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
336 between two lines.
337
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000338
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000339Build
340-----
341
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000342- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
343 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
344 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000345 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000346
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000347- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
348 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
349 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
350
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000351- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
352
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000353- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
354 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
355
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000356- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
357 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
358 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
359 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
360 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
361 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
362 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
363 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
364
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000365- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
366 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
367 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
368 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
369
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000370
371C API
372-----
373
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000374- Removed PyRange_New().
375
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000376
377Tests
378-----
379
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000380- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000381
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000382
383Documentation
384-------------
385
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000386- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
387
388- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
389
390- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
391
392- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
393
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000394- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
395 Closes bug #1166582.
396
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000397- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
398 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
399 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
400
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000401Mac
402---
403
404
405
406Tools/Demos
407-----------
408
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000409- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
410
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000411- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000412
413
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000414What's New in Python 2.4 final?
415===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000416
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000417*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000418
419Core and builtins
420-----------------
421
422- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
423 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
424 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
425
426
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000427What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
428==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000429
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000430*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000431
432Core and builtins
433-----------------
434
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000435- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
436 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
437 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
438
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000439
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000440Library
441-------
442
443- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
444 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
445 raised is re-raised.
446
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000447- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
448 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
449
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000450- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
451 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
452 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
453 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
454 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
455 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
456 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
457 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
458 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
459 by the slice are recomputed now.
460
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000461- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000462
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000463Build
464-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000465
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000466- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
467 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
468 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000469
470C API
471-----
472
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000473- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
474
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000475
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000476What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
477================================
478
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000479*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000480
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000481License
482-------
483
484The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
485is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
486changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
487Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
488intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
489durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
490the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
491License::
492
493 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
494
495says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
496to Python 2.1.1.
497
498The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
499License Version 2.
500
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000501Core and builtins
502-----------------
503
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000504- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
505 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
506 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
507 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
508 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
509 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
510 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
511 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
512 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
513 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
514
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000515- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000516
517Extension Modules
518-----------------
519
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000520- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
521 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
522 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
523 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000524
525Library
526-------
527
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000528- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
529 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
530 returned.
531
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000532- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
533
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000534- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
535 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
536
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000537- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
538
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000539- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
540 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000541
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000542- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
543
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000544- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
545
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000546- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000547 the source code is updated and reloaded.
548
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000549Build
550-----
551
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000552- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000553
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000554What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
555================================
556
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000557*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000558
559Core and builtins
560-----------------
561
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000562- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000563 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
564
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000565- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
566 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
567 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
568 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
569
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000570- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
571 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
572
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000573- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
574 constant.
575
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000576- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
577 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
578 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
579 large), and to anomalies such as
580 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
581 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
582 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
583 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000584
585Extension modules
586-----------------
587
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000588- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
589 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000590 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
591 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
592 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000593
594Library
595-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000596
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000597- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000598 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000599 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
600 --swig-cpp.
601
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000602- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
603 it is set.
604
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000605- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000606
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000607- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
608 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
609 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
610 Closes bug #1039270.
611
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000612- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000613
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000614 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000615 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
616 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
617 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
618 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
619 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
620 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
621 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
622 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
623 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
624 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
625 + Updates to documentation.
626
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000627- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
628 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
629 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
630 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
631
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000632- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000633
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000634- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
635 applications should use the getmember function.
636
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000637- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
638
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000639- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
640 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
641 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
642 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
643 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
644 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
645 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
646 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
647 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
648
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000649- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
650 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000651 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000652
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000653- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
654 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
655 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
656 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
657 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
658 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
659 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
660 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000661
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000662- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
663 the new public features (of which there are many).
664
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000665- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000666 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
667 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
668 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
669 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000670 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000671
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000672- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
673
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000674- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
675 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
676 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
677 options.
678
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000679- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
680 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
681 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
682 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
683 conditions under which non-string values work.
684
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000685Build
686-----
687
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000688- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
689 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
690 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
691
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000692- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
693 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
694 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
695 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
696 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000697
698C API
699-----
700
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000701- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
702 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
703
704- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
705
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000706- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
707 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
708 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
709 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
710 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
711 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
712 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
713 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
714 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
715
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000716- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
717
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000718- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
719 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
720 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000721
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000722Tests
723-----
724
725- test__locale ported to unittest
726
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000727Mac
728---
729
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000730- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
731 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
732 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000733
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000734Tools/Demos
735-----------
736
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000737- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
738 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
739 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
740 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
741 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000742
743
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000744What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
745=================================
746
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000747*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000748
749Core and builtins
750-----------------
751
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000752- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000753 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
754
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000755- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
756 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
757 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
758 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
759 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
760 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
761 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
762 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000763 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
764 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
765 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
766 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
767 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000768
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000769- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
770 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
771 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
772 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
773 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
774
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000775- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
776
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000777- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
778 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
779
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000780- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
781 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
782 modified the list.
783
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000784- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
785 functions is now writable.
786
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000787- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
788 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
789 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
790 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
791
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000792- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
793 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
794 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
795 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
796 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000797
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000798- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
799 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
800
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000801Extension modules
802-----------------
803
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000804- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
805
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000806- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
807 data.
808
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000809- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
810 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
811 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
812 supposed to have been truncated away.
813
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000814- Added socket.socketpair().
815
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000816- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
817 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
818
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000819- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000820 versions of Python, have now been removed.
821
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000822Library
823-------
824
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000825- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000826 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000827
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000828- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
829 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
830
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000831- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
832 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
833
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000834- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
835
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000836- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
837 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000838
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000839- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
840 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
841
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000842- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
843
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000844- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
845
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000846- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
847
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000848- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
849 Percivall.
850
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000851- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
852 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
853
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000854- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
855 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
856 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000857 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000858
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000859- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
860 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
861 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
862 and exponent.
863
864- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
865
866- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
867 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
868 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
869
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000870- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
871 to the readline module.
872
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000873- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000874 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
875 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000876
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000877- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
878 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
879 contains symlinks.
880
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000881- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
882 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
883
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000884- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
885 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
886 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
887
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000888- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
889 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
890 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
891 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
892 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
893 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
894 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
895 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
896 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
897 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
898 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
899 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
900 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
901
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000902- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
903
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000904Tools/Demos
905-----------
906
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000907- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
908 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
909
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000910- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
911
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000912Build
913-----
914
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000915- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
916 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
917 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
918 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
919 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
920 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
921 plans to do so.
922
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000923- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
924 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
925
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000926- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
927 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
928
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000929- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
930 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
931
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000932- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
933 GNU/k*BSD systems.
934
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000935- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
936 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
937
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000938C API
939-----
940
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000941..
942
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000943Documentation
944-------------
945
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000946- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
947 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
948
949- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
950 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
951 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000952
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000953New platforms
954-------------
955
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000956- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
957
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000958Tests
959-----
960
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000961..
962
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000963Windows
964-------
965
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000966- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
967 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
968 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
969 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
970 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
971 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
972 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
973 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
974 the problem.
975
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000976Mac
977---
978
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000979..
980
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000981
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000982What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
983=================================
984
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000985*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000986
987Core and builtins
988-----------------
989
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000990- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
991 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
992 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
993 sensitive code.
994
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000995- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000996 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000997
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000998 @staticmethod
999 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001000
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001001 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001002
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001003- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1004 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1005 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1006 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1007 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1008 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1009 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1010 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1011 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1012 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1013 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1014
1015 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1016 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1017 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1018 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1019 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1020 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1021 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1022
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001023- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1024 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1025
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001026- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001027 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001028
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001029- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001030 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001031 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1032
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001033- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001034 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1035 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1036
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001037- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1038 types that support garbage collection.
1039
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001040- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1041
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001042- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1043 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1044 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1045 Jython.
1046
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001047- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1048
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001049- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1050 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1051
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001052- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1053 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1054 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001055
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001056- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1057 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1058 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1059
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001060Extension modules
1061-----------------
1062
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001063- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1064
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001065Library
1066-------
1067
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001068- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1069 TIS-620
1070
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001071- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1072 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1073 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1074 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1075 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1076 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1077 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1078 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1079 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1080 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1081
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001082- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1083
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001084- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1085 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1086 same as when the argument is omitted).
1087 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1088
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001089- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1090
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001091- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1092 schemes are offered.
1093
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001094- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1095
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001096- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1097 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1098 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1099
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001100- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1101
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001102- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1103 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1104
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001105- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1106 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1107 when dummy_threading is being used.
1108
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001109- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1110 from a tarfile.
1111
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001112- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001113 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001114
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001115- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1116 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1117 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1118 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1119
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001120- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1121 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1122
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001123- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1124 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1125 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1126 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1127 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1128 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1129 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1130 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1131 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1132 by some other method in progress).
1133
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001134- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1135 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1136 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001137
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001138- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1139
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001140- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1141 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1142 AM Kuchling.
1143
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001144- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1145 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1146 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1147
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001148- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1149 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1150 instead of unsigned.
1151
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001152- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001153 no longer part of the public API.
1154
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001155- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1156 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1157 string methods of the same name).
1158
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001159- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001160 SF patch 945642.
1161
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001162- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1163
1164 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1165
1166 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1167 DocTestSuites.
1168
1169- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1170 that provide thread-local data.
1171
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001172- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1173 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1174
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001175- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1176
1177- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1178 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1179 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1180
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001181- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1182
1183 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1184 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1185 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001186
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001187 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1188 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1189 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1190 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1191
1192 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1193 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1194
1195 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1196 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1197 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1198 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1199
1200 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1201 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1202 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1203 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1204 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1205
1206 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1207 wrapping help output.
1208
1209 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1210 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1211 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001212
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001213C API
1214-----
1215
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001216- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1217 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1218 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1219 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1220 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1221 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1222 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1223 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1224 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1225 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1226 its visible semantics have not changed.
1227
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001228- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1229 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1230
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001231Documentation
1232-------------
1233
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001234- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001235
1236 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001237 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001238
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001239 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001240
1241 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1242
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001243- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001244
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001245Tests
1246-----
1247
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001248- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001249 platforms that use the Makefile.
1250
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001251- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1252 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1253 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1254
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001255
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001256What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1257=================================
1258
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001259*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001260
1261Core and builtins
1262-----------------
1263
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001264- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1265 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1266 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1267 objects now (one object instead of three).
1268
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001269- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1270 Windows DLLs.
1271
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001272- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1273 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001274
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001275- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1276 a new .pyc magic.
1277
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001278- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1279 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1280 be there.
1281
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001282- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1283 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1284 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1285
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001286- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1287 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1288 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1289
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001290- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1291
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001292- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1293 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1294 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001295
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001296- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1297 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1298
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001299- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1300
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001301- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001302 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001303
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001304- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1305
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001306- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1307
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001308- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1309 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1310
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001311- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1312 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1313 Fixes bug #858016 .
1314
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001315- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1316 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1317 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1318
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001319- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1320 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1321 improves their performance (about 35%).
1322
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001323- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1324 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1325 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1326
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001327- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1328 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1329 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1330 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1331
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001332- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1333 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001334 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001335 length is not known).
1336
1337- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1338 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001339 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1340 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001341 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1342
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001343- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1344 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1345
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001346- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1347 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1348 keyword arguments.
1349
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001350- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1351 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1352 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1353
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001354- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1355 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1356 cases.
1357
1358- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1359 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1360 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1361 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1362 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1363 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1364 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1365 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1366 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1367 a release build.
1368
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001369- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1370 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1371
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001372- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001373 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001374
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001375- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1376 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1377 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1378 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1379 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1380 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1381 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1382 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1383 destroyed.
1384
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001385- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1386 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1387 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1388 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1389 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1390 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1391 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1392 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1393
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001394- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1395 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1396 character other than a space.
1397
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001398- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1399 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1400 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1401 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1402 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1403 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1404 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1405 attributes with the same name.
1406
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001407- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1408 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1409 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1410 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1411 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1412 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1413 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1414 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1415 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1416 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1417 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1418 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1419 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1420 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001421
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001422- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1423 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1424 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1425 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1426 This has been repaired.
1427
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001428- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1429
1430- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1431
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001432- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1433 over a sequence.
1434
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001435- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001436 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001437
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001438- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1439
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001440- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1441 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1442 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1443 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1444 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1445 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1446 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1447 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1448
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001449- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1450 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1451 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1452
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001453- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1454 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1455 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1456 freelist.
1457
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001458- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1459 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1460
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001461- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1462 number.
1463
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001464- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1465 a TypeError exception.
1466
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001467- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1468 820195.
1469
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001470- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1471 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1472 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1473
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001474- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001475 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1476 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001477
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001478- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1479 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1480 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1481
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001482- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1483 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001484 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001485
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001486- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001487 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1488 the first call.
1489
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001490
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001491Extension modules
1492-----------------
1493
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001494- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1495 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1496
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001497- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1498 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1499 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1500 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1501 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1502 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1503 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001504
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001505- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1506
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001507- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1508
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001509- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1510 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1511
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001512- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1513 fewer false positives.
1514
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001515- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1516 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1517
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001518- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001519 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1520
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001521- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001522 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001523 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001524 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1525 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001526
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001527- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1528 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1529 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1530 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1531
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001532- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1533 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1534 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1535 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1536 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1537 #897625.
1538
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001539- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1540 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1541
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001542- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1543 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1544 and pops on either side of the deque.
1545
1546- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1547 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1548
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001549- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1550 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1551 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1552 other functions that expect a function argument.
1553
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001554- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1555
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001556- os.getsid was added.
1557
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001558- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1559 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1560 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1561
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001562- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1563
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001564- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1565
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001566- readline.clear_history was added.
1567
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001568- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1569
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001570- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1571
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001572- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1573
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001574- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1575
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001576- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1577
1578- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1579
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001580- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1581
1582- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1583
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001584- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1585 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1586 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1587
1588- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1589 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1590 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1591 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1592 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1593 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1594 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1595
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001596- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1597 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1598 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1599 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001600
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001601- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001602 iterators from a single iterable.
1603
1604- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1605 of raising a TypeError exception.
1606
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001607- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1608 as parameter.
1609
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001610Library
1611-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001612
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001613- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1614 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1615 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001616
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001617- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1618 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1619 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001620
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001621- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001622
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001623- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1624 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001625
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001626- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1627 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1628
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001629- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1630
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001631- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001632 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001633
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001634- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001635 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001636
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001637- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1638
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001639- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1640 on cygwin and mingw32.
1641
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001642- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1643
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001644- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1645 module.
1646
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001647- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1648 installation scheme for all platforms.
1649
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001650- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001651 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001652
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001653- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1654 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1655 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1656
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001657- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1658 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1659 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1660
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001661- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1662
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001663- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1664
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001665- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1666 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1667
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001668- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1669 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1670 type pattern with the same value exists.
1671
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001672- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1673 when run from the command prompt).
1674
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001675- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1676 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1677
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001678- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1679 default sort).
1680
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001681- Added global runctx function to profile module
1682
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001683- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1684
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001685- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1686
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001687- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1688
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001689- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001690 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1691 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1692 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1693 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1694 accordingly.
1695
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001696- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1697 decoding standards.
1698
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001699- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1700 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1701 called for all requests.
1702
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001703- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1704 they are passed to the compiler.
1705
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001706- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1707 indent, width and depth.
1708
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001709- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1710 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1711
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001712- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1713 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1714
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001715- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1716
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001717- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1718
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001719- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1720
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001721- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1722 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1723
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001724- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001725 for better performance.
1726
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001727- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001728
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001729- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1730 a string).
1731
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001732- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1733
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001734- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1735
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001736- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1737
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001738- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1739
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001740- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1741 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1742 list of fieldnames.
1743
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001744- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1745 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1746
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001747- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1748
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001749- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1750 empty lists.
1751
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001752- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1753 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1754 and shelves.
1755
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001756- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1757 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1758
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001759- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001760 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1761 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001762
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001763- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1764 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001765 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001766
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001767- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001768 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1769 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1770
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001771- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1772 and removed in Py2.4.
1773
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001774- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1775
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001776- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1777
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001778Tools/Demos
1779-----------
1780
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001781- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1782 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1783
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001784- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1785
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001786- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1787 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1788 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1789 destination in situations where both files are given.
1790
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001791- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1792 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1793 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1794 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1795
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001796- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1797
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001798- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1799 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1800 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1801 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1802 now.
1803
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001804- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1805 in effect
1806
1807- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1808 C-c C-h
1809
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001810- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1811 -d option was given.
1812
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001813Build
1814-----
1815
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001816- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1817 build under OS X.
1818
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001819- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1820 --enable-profiling.
1821
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001822- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1823 is configured --with-tsc.
1824
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001825- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1826 on AMD64.
1827
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001828- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1829 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1830
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001831- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1832 removed.
1833
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001834- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1835 supported (see PEP 11).
1836
1837- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1838
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001839- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1840
1841- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1842 (see PEP 11).
1843
1844- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1845 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1846
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001847C API
1848-----
1849
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001850- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1851 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1852 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1853
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001854- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1855 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1856 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1857 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1858
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001859- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1860 generator objects.
1861
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001862- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1863 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001864 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1865 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001866
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001867- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1868 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1869
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001870- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1871 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1872 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1873 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1874 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1875
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001876- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1877 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1878 about 10% faster.
1879
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001880- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1881 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1882
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001883- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1884 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1885 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1886 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1887
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001888Windows
1889-------
1890
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001891- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1892 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1893 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1894 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1895
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001896- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1897 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1898 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1899
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001900
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001901What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1902===============================
1903
1904*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1905
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001906IDLE
1907----
1908
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001909- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1910 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1911 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1912 context-menu actions.
1913
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001914- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1915 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1916 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1917 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1918 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1919 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1920 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1921 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1922 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1923
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001924
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001925What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1926=============================================
1927
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001928*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001929
1930Core and builtins
1931-----------------
1932
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001933- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001934 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001935 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1936
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001937Extension modules
1938-----------------
1939
1940- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1941 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1942 than once. This has been fixed.
1943
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001944- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1945 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1946 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1947 call.
1948
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001949- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1950
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001951Library
1952-------
1953
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001954- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1955 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1956
1957- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1958 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1959 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1960 restored.
1961
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001962IDLE
1963----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001964
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001965- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001966
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001967Build
1968-----
1969
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001970- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1971 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1972
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001973C API
1974-----
1975
1976Windows
1977-------
1978
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001979- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1980 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1981
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001982- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1983
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001984Mac
1985---
1986
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001987- Various fixes to pimp.
1988
1989- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1990
1991- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1992 more problems than it solves.
1993
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001994
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001995What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1996=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001997
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001998*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1999
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002000Core and builtins
2001-----------------
2002
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002003- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2004 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2005
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002006- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2007 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002008 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002009
2010- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2011 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2012 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002013 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002014
2015- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2016 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002017
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002018- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2019 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2020 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2021
2022- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002023 770247.
2024
2025- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002026
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002027Extension modules
2028-----------------
2029
2030- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2031 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2032
2033- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2034
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002035- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2036
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002037- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2038 contained within the _strptime module.
2039
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002040- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2041 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2042
2043- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002044 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2045
2046- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2047 the find_class attribute, if present.
2048
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002049- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002050
2051 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2052 (SF bug 763298).
2053
2054 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002055 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2056 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2057 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002058
2059 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2060
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002061Library
2062-------
2063
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002064- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2065
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002066- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2067 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2068 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2069 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2070 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2071 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2072 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2073 or Tester().
2074
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002075- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2076 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2077 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2078 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2079 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2080 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2081 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2082 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2083 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002084
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002085 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002086
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002087- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2088 weren't before was an oversight.
2089
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002090- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2091 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2092
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002093- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2094 when there are no lines.
2095
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002096- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2097 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2098
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002099- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2100 to child processes.
2101
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002102- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2103
2104- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2105
2106- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2107 xmlrpclib.
2108
2109- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2110 responses.
2111
2112- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2113 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2114
2115- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2116 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2117 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2118
2119- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2120 used as patterns.
2121
2122- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2123 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2124 than Tk 8.3.
2125
2126- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2127
2128- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002129
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002130Tools/Demos
2131-----------
2132
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002133- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2134
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002135- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2136
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002137- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002138
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002139Build
2140-----
2141
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002142- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2143
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002144- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2145
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002146- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2147 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002148
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002149- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2150 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2151 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002152
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002153C API
2154-----
2155
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002156- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2157 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2158
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002159Windows
2160-------
2161
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002162- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2163 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2164 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2165 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2166 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2167 Python exception ::
2168
2169 thread.error: can't start new thread
2170
2171 is raised now.
2172
2173- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2174 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2175 instead of from DLL teardown.
2176
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002177Mac
2178---
2179
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002180- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002181 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002182 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2183 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2184 the executable in the bundle.
2185
2186- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002187
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002188- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2189
2190- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2191 on Panther.
2192
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002193What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2194================================
2195
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002196*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002197
2198Core and builtins
2199-----------------
2200
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002201- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2202 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2203 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2204 with the -i option.
2205
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002206- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2207 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2208
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002209- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2210 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2211
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002212- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2213 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2214 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2215 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2216 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2217 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2218 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2219 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2220 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2221 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2222 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2223 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2224 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002225
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002226- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2227 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2228 embedded in a lambda expression.
2229
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002230- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2231 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2232 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2233 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2234 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2235
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002236- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2237 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2238 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2239
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002240- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2241 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2242
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002243- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2244 It's writable again.
2245
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002246- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2247 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2248 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002249 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002250
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002251- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2252 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2253 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2254
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002255Extension modules
2256-----------------
2257
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002258- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2259 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2260
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002261- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2262 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2263 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2264 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2265
2266- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2267 collection.
2268
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002269- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2270 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2271 unique within a single program run.
2272
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002273- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2274 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2275
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002276- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2277 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2278
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002279- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2280 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002281
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002282- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2283
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002284- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2285 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2286
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002287- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2288 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2289 for many BSD-derived systems.
2290
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002291
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002292Library
2293-------
2294
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002295- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2296 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2297 primary ones:
2298
2299 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2300 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2301 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2302
2303 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2304 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2305 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2306 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2307 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2308 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2309
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002310- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2311 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2312 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2313 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2314 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2315 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2316 argument.
2317
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002318- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2319 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2320 in the archive.
2321
2322- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2323 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2324
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002325- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2326 569574).
2327
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002328- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2329 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2330 no more.
2331
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002332- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2333 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2334 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2335 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2336 code coverage.
2337
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002338- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2339 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2340 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002341 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2342 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002343
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002344- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2345 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2346 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002347 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002348
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002349- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2350
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002351- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2352 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2353 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2354 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2355
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002356- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2357 handling.
2358
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002359- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2360 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2361
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002362- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2363 in socket.py.
2364
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002365- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2366
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002367- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2368 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2369 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2370 opener with proxy support.
2371
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002372- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2373
2374- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2375
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002376Tools/Demos
2377-----------
2378
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002379- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2380
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002381- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2382
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002383- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2384 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002385
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002386- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2387 files.
2388
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002389Build
2390-----
2391
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002392- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002393 different root directory.
2394
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002395C API
2396-----
2397
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002398- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2399 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2400 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2401 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2402 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2403 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2404 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2405 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2406 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2407 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2408
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002409- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2410 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2411 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2412 from Python.
2413
2414
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002415New platforms
2416-------------
2417
2418None this time.
2419
2420Tests
2421-----
2422
2423- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2424 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2425
2426Windows
2427-------
2428
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002429- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2430
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002431- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2432 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2433 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2434 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2435 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2436 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2437 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2438 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2439 that's what it's for.
2440
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002441Mac
2442---
2443
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002444- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2445 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2446 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2447 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002448- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2449 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2450- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002451
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002452SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2453------------------------------------
2454
2455430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2456598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2457622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2458661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2459683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2460697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2461713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2462724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2463727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2464729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2465730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2466731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2467732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2468733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2469735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2470740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2471744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2472745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2473747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2474749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2475751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2476753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2477755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2478757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2479760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2480
2481
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002482What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2483================================
2484
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002485*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002486
2487Core and builtins
2488-----------------
2489
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002490- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2491 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2492
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002493- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2494 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2495 and cannot be strings).
2496
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002497- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2498 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2499 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2500 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2501
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002502- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2503 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2504 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2505 Python itself.
2506
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002507- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2508 the referenced object, if it has one.
2509
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002510- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2511 the thread started at
2512 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2513
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002514- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2515 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2516 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2517 placed on a list index.
2518
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002519- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2520 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2521 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2522 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2523
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002524- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2525 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2526 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2527 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2528 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2529 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2530 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2531
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002532- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2533 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2534 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2535 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2536 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2537
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002538- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2539 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002540
2541- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2542 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2543 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2544 #693195.)
2545
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002546- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2547 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002548
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002549- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002550 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002551 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2552 interpreter executions, would fail.
2553
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002554- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002555 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002556 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002557
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002558Extension modules
2559-----------------
2560
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002561- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2562 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2563 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2564 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2565
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002566- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2567 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2568
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002569- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2570 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2571 and Greg Chapman.)
2572
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002573- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2574 recursively.
2575
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002576- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002577 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2578 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2579 leaks.
2580
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002581- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2582
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002583- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2584 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2585 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2586 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2587 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2588 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2589 #705836.
2590
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002591- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002592 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2593
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002594- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2595 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2596 See SF bug #692416.
2597
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002598- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2599 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2600
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002601- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2602 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2603 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002604
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002605- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002606 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2607 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2608
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002609- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2610 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2611 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2612 timeouts to work properly.
2613
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002614Library
2615-------
2616
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002617- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2618 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2619 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2620 future release.
2621
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002622- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2623 for querying platform dependent features.
2624
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002625- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002626
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002627- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2628 pickle protocol versions.
2629
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002630- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2631 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2632 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2633
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002634- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2635
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002636- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2637 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2638 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2639 modules.
2640
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002641- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2642 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2643 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2644
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002645- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2646 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2647
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002648- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2649 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2650 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2651
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002652- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002653 MS Office extensions.
2654
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002655- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2656 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2657
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002658- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2659 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2660
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002661- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2662 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2663 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2664 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2665 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2666 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2667
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002668- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2669 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2670 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002671
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002672- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2673 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2674 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2675
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002676- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2677
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002678- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2679 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2680 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2681
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002682Tools/Demos
2683-----------
2684
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002685- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2686 See the module docstring for details.
2687
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002688Build
2689-----
2690
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002691- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2692 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002693
2694C API
2695-----
2696
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002697- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2698
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002699- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2700 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2701 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2702
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002703- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2704 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002705
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002706 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2707 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2708 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002709
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002710- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002711 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2712
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002713- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2714 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2715 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002716
2717New platforms
2718-------------
2719
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002720None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002721
2722Tests
2723-----
2724
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002725- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2726 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002727
2728Windows
2729-------
2730
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002731- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2732 function.
2733
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002734- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2735 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002736
2737Mac
2738---
2739
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002740- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2741 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002742
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002743- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2744 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002745
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002746- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2747 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2748 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002749
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002750- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002751 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2752 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002753
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002754- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2755 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002756
2757
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002758What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2759=================================
2760
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002761*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002762
2763Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002764-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002765
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002766- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2767 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2768 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2769
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002770- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2771 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2772 (SF patch #664376.)
2773
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002774- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2775 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2776 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2777 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2778 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2779 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002780 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002781
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002782- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2783 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2784 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2785 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002786 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002787
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002788- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2789 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2790 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2791 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2792 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2793 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2794 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2795 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2796 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2797 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2798 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2799
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002800- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2801 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2802 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2803 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2804 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2805 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2806
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002807- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2808 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2809
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002810- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2811 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2812 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2813 case.)
2814
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002815- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2816 passed as unicode strings.
2817
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002818- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2819 See SF bug #683467.
2820
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002821- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2822 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2823
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002824- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2825
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002826- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2827
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002828- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2829 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2830 arguments.
2831
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002832- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2833 See SF bug #667147.
2834
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002835- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002836 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002837 See SF bug #676155.
2838
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002839- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002840 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002841 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2842 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2843 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2844 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2845 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2846 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002847
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002848Extension modules
2849-----------------
2850
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002851- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2852 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2853 tp_as_number pointer.
2854
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002855- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2856 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2857 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2858 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2859 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2860
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002861- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2862
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002863- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2864
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002865- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002866 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002867 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2868 patch #678531.)
2869
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002870- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2871 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2872
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002873- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2874 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2875
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002876- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2877
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002878- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2879 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2880 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2881
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002882- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2883
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002884- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2885 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2886
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002887- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002888
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002889- datetime changes:
2890
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002891 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2892
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002893 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2894 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2895 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2896 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2897 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2898 now.
2899
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002900 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002901 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2902 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002903
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002904 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002905 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002906 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2907 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2908 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2909 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002910
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002911 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2912 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2913 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002914 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2915
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002916 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2917 by a later example coded by Guido.
2918
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002919 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002920 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2921 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2922 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002923 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2924 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2925
2926 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2927 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2928 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2929 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2930 tzinfo subclass instance.
2931
2932 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2933 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2934 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2935 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2936 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2937 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2938 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2939 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002940
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002941 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2942 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2943 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2944 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2945 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002946 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2947
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002948 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002949
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002950 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2951 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2952 as a naive datetime object.
2953
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002954 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2955 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2956 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2957
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002958 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2959 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2960 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2961 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2962 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2963 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2964 comparison.
2965
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002966 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2967 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2968 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2969 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002970 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002971
2972 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002973
2974 and ::
2975
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002976 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2977
2978 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2979 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2980 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2981 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2982
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002983 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2984 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2985 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2986 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2987 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2988
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002989 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2990 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002991 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2992 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002993
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002994Library
2995-------
2996
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002997- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2998 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2999
3000- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3001 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3002 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3003 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3004 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3005 See PEP 307 for details.
3006
3007- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3008 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3009
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003010- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3011 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003012 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003013 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3014 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003015 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003016
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003017- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3018 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3019
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003020- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3021 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3022 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3023
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003024- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3025
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003026- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3027 exception.
3028
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003029- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3030 class.
3031
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003032- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3033 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3034 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3035
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003036- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3037 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3038
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003039- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003040 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3041 See SF bug #659228.
3042
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003043- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3044 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3045 See SF patch #651082.
3046
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003047- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003048
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003049- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3050 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3051
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003052- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003053 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003054
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003055- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3056 DOS paths from other platforms.
3057
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003058Tools/Demos
3059-----------
3060
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003061- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3062 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3063 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3064 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3065 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3066 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3067 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3068 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3069 example:
3070
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003071 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3072 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003073
3074 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3075
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003076
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003077Build
3078-----
3079
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003080- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3081 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3082 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003083 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3084
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003085 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3086
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003087- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3088 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3089 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3090 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3091 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3092 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3093 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3094 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3095 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3096
3097- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3098 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3099 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3100 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3101
3102- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3103 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3104
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003105C API
3106-----
3107
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003108- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3109 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003110
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003111- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3112 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3113 tp_as_number pointer.
3114
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003115- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3116 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3117 (SF #681367)
3118
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003119- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3120 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3121 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3122 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003123
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003124Tests
3125-----
3126
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003127- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003128 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3129 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3130 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3131 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3132 pydoc.)
3133
3134- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3135
3136- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003137
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003138Windows
3139-------
3140
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003141- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3142 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3143 time).
3144
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003145- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3146 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3147
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003148- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3149 release without strong cryptography.
3150
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003151- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003152 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003153
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003154- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3155 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3156
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003157Mac
3158---
3159
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003160- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3161 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003162
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003163- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3164 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3165 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003166
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003167- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3168 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003169
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003170- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3171 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3172 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3173 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003174
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003175- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003176 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3177 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3178 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003179
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003180
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003181What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003182=================================
3183
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003184*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003185
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003186Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003187--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003188
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003189- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3190
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003191- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3192 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003193 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003194 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003195 a different meaning than before.
3196
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003197- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003198 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003199 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003200
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003201- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003202 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003203 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003204
3205- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3206 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3207 and deallocation.
3208
3209- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3210 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3211
3212- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3213 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3214 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3215 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3216 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3217
3218- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3219 now detected by the garbage collector.
3220
3221- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3222 [SF bug 519621]
3223
3224- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3225 identifier.
3226
3227- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3228 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3229 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3230 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3231 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3232 [SF bug 563060]
3233
3234- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3235 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3236 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3237 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3238 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3239
3240- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3241 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3242 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3243
3244- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3245
3246- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3247 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3248 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3249 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3250 state of the slots would be lost.)
3251
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003252Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003253-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003254
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003255- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003256 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3257 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3258 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3259 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003260 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3261 Jython 2.1.
3262
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003263- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003264 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003265 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3266 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3267 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3268 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3269 these, see PEP 302.
3270
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003271- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3272 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3273 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3274
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003275- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3276 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3277 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3278
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003279- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3280 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3281 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3282
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003283- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3284 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3285 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3286 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3287 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3288 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3289 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3290 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3291 releases or implementations.
3292
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003293- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003294 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3295 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003296
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003297- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3298 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3299
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003300- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3301 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3302 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3303
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003304- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3305 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3306
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003307- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3308 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003309 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3310 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003311
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003312- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3313 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3314 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3315 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3316 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3317
3318 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3319 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3320 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3321 pattern.
3322
3323 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3324 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3325 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3326 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3327
3328 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3329 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3330 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3331 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3332 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3333 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3334
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003335- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3336 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3337 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3338 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3339 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3340 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3341 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3342 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003343
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003344- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3345 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3346 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3347 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3348 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003349 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3350 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3351 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3352 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3353 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3354 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3355 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003356
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003357- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3358 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3359
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003360- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3361 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3362 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3363 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3364 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3365 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3366 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3367 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3368 to Zack Weinberg!
3369
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003370- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3371 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3372 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3373 type. This has been fixed now.
3374
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003375- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3376 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3377 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3378
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003379- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3380 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3381 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3382 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3383 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3384 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3385 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3386 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003387 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003388
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003389- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3390 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3391 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003392
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003393- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3394 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3395 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3396 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3397 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3398 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3399 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3400 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003401 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003402 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3403 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3404
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003405- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3406 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3407 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3408 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3409 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3410 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3411 this.)
3412
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003413- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3414 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003415 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003416 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003417 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3418 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003419 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3420 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003421
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003422- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3423 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3424 currently running.
3425
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003426- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3427 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3428 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3429 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3430
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003431- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3432 as directory names.
3433
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003434- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3435 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3436
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003437- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3438 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3439
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003440- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003441 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3442 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003443
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003444- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3445 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3446 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3447 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3448 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3449
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003450- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3451 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3452 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3453 removed.
3454
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003455- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3456 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3457 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3458
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003459- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3460 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3461 to __debug__.
3462
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003463- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3464 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3465 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3466
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003467- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3468 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3469 deprecated now.
3470
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003471- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3472 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3473 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003474
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003475- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3476 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3477 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3478 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3479 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003480
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003481- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3482 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3483
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003484- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3485 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3486 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003487 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003488 is backward compatible.
3489
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003490- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3491 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3492 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3493 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3494 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3495
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003496- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3497 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3498 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3499 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3500 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3501 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003502
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003503- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3504 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3505
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003506- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3507 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3508
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003509- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3510 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3511 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3512 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3513 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3514
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003515- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3516 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3517 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3518
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003519- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003520 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3521
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003522- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3523 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3524 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003525
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003526- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3527 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3528
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003529- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3530 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3531 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3532
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003533- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3534
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003535Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003536-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003537
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003538- Added three operators to the operator module:
3539 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3540 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3541 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3542
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003543- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3544
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003545- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3546 archives.
3547
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003548- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3549 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3550 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3551
3552 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3553
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003554- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3555 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3556 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003557 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003558
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003559- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3560 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3561 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3562 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003563 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3564 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3565 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3566 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003567
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003568- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3569 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003570
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003571- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3572
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003573- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3574 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3575
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003576- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3577 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3578 supported.
3579
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003580- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3581
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003582- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3583 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003584
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003585- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3586 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3587
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003588- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3589
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003590- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3591 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3592
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003593- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3594 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3595 functions but callable type objects.
3596
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003597- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003598 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003599 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003600
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003601- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3602 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003603
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003604- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3605 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003606
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003607- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3608 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3609 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3610 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3611
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003612- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3613 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003614
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003615- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3616 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3617 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3618 and __imul__.
3619
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003620- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003621 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3622 is called.
3623
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003624- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3625 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3626 interpreter was compiled.
3627
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003628- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3629 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3630 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003631 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003632 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3633 1, not 2.
3634
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003635- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3636 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3637 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3638 limit.
3639
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003640- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3641 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3642 bug #623464.
3643
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003644- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3645 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3646 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3647 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3648
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003649Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003650-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003651
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003652- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3653
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003654- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3655 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3656 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3657 with Python 2.3a2.
3658
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003659- os.path exposes getctime.
3660
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003661- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003662 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003663 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003664 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003665 unit tests of floating point results.
3666
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003667- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3668 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3669 has been increased.
3670
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003671- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3672 executed.
3673
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003674- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3675 postinstallation script.
3676
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003677- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3678 test the current module.
3679
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003680- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003681 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3682 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3683 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3684 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3685
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003686- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003687 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003688 Ward's Optik package.
3689
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003690- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3691 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3692 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3693 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3694
3695- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3696 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003697 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003698
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003699- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3700 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3701 shelf are binary pickles.
3702
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003703- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3704 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3705
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003706- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3707 modules are iterators now.
3708
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003709- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3710 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3711 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3712 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3713 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3714 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003715
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003716- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3717 with their entity value.
3718
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003719- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3720
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003721- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3722 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003723
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003724- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3725 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003726 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003727
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003728- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3729 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3730 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3731 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3732 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3733 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3734 main():
3735
3736 import locale
3737 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3738
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003739- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3740 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3741
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003742- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3743 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3744 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3745 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3746 to the new standard.
3747
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003748- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3749 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3750 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3751 an extension to the database.
3752
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003753- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3754 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3755 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3756 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003757 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003758
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003759- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003760 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003761
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003762- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3763 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3764 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3765 bounded integers.
3766
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003767- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3768 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3769 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3770 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3771 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3772 in existence.
3773
3774 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3775 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3776 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3777 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3778 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3779 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3780
3781 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3782 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3783 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3784 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3785
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003786- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3787 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3788 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3789
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003790- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3791
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003792- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3793 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3794 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3795 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3796
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003797- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3798 argument.
3799
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003800- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3801 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3802 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3803 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3804 [SF patch 560794].
3805
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003806- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3807 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3808 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003809 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3810 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3811 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003812
3813- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3814 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003815
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003816- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3817 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3818 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3819 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003820
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003821- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3822 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3823 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3824 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3825 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3826
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003827- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003828
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003829- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3830
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003831- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3832 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3833 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3834 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3835 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3836 identical to None.
3837
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003838- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3839 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3840 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3841 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3842 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3843 results now.
3844
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003845- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3846 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3847
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003848- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3849 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3850 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3851 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3852 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3853 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3854 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3855 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3856
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003857- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3858
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003859- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3860 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3861
3862- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3863 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3864 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3865 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3866 and other systems.
3867
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003868- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3869 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3870 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3871 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 +00003872 work well with these.
3873
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003874- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3875
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003876- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003877 connections.
3878
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003879- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3880 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3881 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3882
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003883- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3884 sets
3885
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003886- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3887 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3888 name.
3889
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003890- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3891 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3892 passed in.
3893
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003894- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003895 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003896 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3897 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003898
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003899- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3900
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003901- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3902
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003903- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3904 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3905 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3906
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003907- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3908 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3909 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3910 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003911 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003912
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003913- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003914 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003915 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003916
3917- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3918 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3919 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3920
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003921- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003922 the value of its expression argument.
3923
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003924- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3925 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3926 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3927
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003928- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3929 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3930 skipstone browser was included.
3931
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003932- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3933 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3934
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003935Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003936-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003937
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003938- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3939 names in addition to accepting file names.
3940
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003941- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3942 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3943 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3944 still used and useful.)
3945
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003946- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3947 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3948 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3949 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003950
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003951- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3952 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3953 the generated binary.
3954
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003955Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003956-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003957
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003958- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3959
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003960- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3961 except in the hands of experts.
3962
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003963- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003964 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3965 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3966 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003967
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003968- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3969 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3970 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3971 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3972 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3973 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3974 builds.
3975
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003976- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3977 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3978 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3979 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3980 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3981 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3982 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3983 new type.
3984
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003985- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003986
3987 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3988 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3989 positive infinities.
3990
3991 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3992 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3993 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3994 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3995 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3996 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3997 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3998
3999 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4000
4001 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4002
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004003- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4004 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4005 size of the executable.
4006
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004007- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4008 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4009 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4010 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004011
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004012- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4013
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004014- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4015 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4016 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004017
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004018- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4019 well as Unix.
4020
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004021- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4022 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4023 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4024 modules in the README file for details.
4025
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004026C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004027-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004028
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004029- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4030 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004031 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004032 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004033 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004034
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004035- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4036 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4037 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4038 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4039 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4040 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004041 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004042 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4043 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4044 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4045 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4046 aligned.)
4047
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004048- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4049 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4050 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4051
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004052- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4053 level.
4054
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004055- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4056 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4057 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4058 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4059 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4060
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004061- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4062 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4063 code.
4064
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004065- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4066 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4067 adjusting for negative indices.
4068
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004069- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4070 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4071 object.
4072
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004073- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4074 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4075 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4076
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004077- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4078 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004079
4080- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4081
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004082- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4083 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4084 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4085 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4086
4087- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4088
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004089- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004090
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004091- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004092 without going through the buffer API.
4093
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004094- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004095
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004096- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4097 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4098 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4099 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4100
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004101- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4102 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4103
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004104- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004105 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4106
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004107New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004108-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004109
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004110- OpenVMS is now supported.
4111
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004112- AtheOS is now supported.
4113
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004114- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4115
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004116- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4117
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004118Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004119-----
4120
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004121- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4122 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4123 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004124
4125Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004126-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004127
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004128- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4129 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4130 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4131 bugs.
4132 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004133 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004134 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4135 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004136 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004137
4138- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004139 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004140
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004141- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4142 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4143
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004144- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4145 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004146 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004147 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4148
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004149- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4150 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4151 use files" uninstall option).
4152
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004153- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4154
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004155- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4156 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4157
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004158- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4159 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4160 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4161
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004162- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4163 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4164 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4165 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4166 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004167 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4168 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4169 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004170
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004171- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004172 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004173 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4174 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4175 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4176 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4177 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4178 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4179 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4180 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4181 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4182 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4183 work around.
4184
4185- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4186 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4187 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4188 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4189 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4190 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4191 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4192 specified with O_CREAT too).
4193
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004194Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004195----
4196
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004197- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004198
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004199- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4200 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4201 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4202
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004203- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4204 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4205 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4206
4207- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4208 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4209 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4210 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4211 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4212 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4213 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4214 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004215
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004216- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4217 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4218 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004219
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004220- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4221 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4222 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4223 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4224 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004225
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004226- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4227 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4228 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004229
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004230- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4231 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004232
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004233- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4234 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4235 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4236 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4237 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004238
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004239- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4240 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4241 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4242
4243- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4244 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4245 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004246
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004247- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4248 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4249 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4250 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004251 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004252
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004253- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4254 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004255
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004256- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4257 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004258
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004259- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004260 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004261 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4262 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004263
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004264
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004265What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004266===============================
4267
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004268*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4269
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004270Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004271--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004272
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004273- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4274 with a custom metaclass.
4275
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004276Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004277-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004278
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004279- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4280 are proxies.
4281
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004282Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004283-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004284
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004285- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4286 very short strings.
4287
4288- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4289 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4290 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4291 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4292 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4293
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004294Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004295-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004296
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004297- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4298 close or delete time).
4299
4300- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4301 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4302
4303- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4304
4305- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004306 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004307
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004308Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004309-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004310
4311Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004312-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004313
4314C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004315-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004316
4317New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004318-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004319
4320Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004321-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004322
4323Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004324-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004325
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004326- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4327
4328- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4329 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4330
4331- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4332 deleted at process exit time.
4333
4334- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4335 in backslash.
4336
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004337Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004338----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004339
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004340- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4341 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4342 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4343
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004344
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004345What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004346===========================
4347
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004348*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4349
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004350Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004351--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004352
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004353- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4354 been extensively updated. See
4355
4356 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4357
4358 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4359
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004360- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4361 deleted!
4362
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004363- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4364 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4365 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4366 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4367 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4368
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004369- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4370
4371 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4372 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4373
4374 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4375 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4376 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4377 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4378 supported anyway.
4379
4380 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4381 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4382
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004383- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4384 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4385 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4386 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4387 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004388
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004389- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4390 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4391 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4392
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004393Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004394-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004395
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004396- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4397 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4398 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4399 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4400 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4401 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004402 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4403 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4404 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4405 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004406
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004407- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4408 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4409 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4410
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004411Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004412-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004413
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004414- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4415
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004416Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004417-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004418
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004419- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4420 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4421 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4422 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4423 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4424 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4425
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004426- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4427
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004428- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4429
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004430- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4431
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004432- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4433 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4434 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4435
4436- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4437
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004438Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004439-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004440
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004441- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4442 off a search on Google.
4443
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004444Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004445-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004446
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004447- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4448 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4449 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4450 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4451 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4452 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4453 other platforms should do likewise.
4454
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004455- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4456 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4457 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4458
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004459C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004460-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004461
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004462- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4463 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4464 producing key-value pairs.
4465
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004466- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004467 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004468 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4469 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4470 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4471 previously went unchallenged.
4472
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004473New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004474-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004475
4476Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004477-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004478
4479Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004480-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004481
4482Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004483----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004484
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004485- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4486 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004487
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004488- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4489 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4490 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4491 home.
4492
4493
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004494What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004495===========================
4496
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004497*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4498
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004499Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004500--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004501
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004502- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4503 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004504
4505 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004506 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004507
4508 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4509 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004510 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004511 This needs to be documented.
4512
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004513- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4514 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4515
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004516- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4517 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4518 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4519
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004520- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4521 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4522
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004523- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4524 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4525 class forbids it).
4526
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004527- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4528 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4529 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4530
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004531- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4532
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004533Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004534-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004535
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004536- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4537 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004538 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004539
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004540- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4541 (like 1 + '').
4542
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004543Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004544-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004545
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004546- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4547 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4548 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4549 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004550 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004551 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4552
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004553- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4554 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4555 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4556 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4557
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004558- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4559 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004560 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4561 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4562 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004563
4564- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4565 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004566
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004567- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4568 bytes on its input.
4569
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004570Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004571-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004572
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004573- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004574 convenience function.
4575
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004576- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4577 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4578 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004579 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4580 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4581 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4582 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4583 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4584 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004585
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004586- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4587 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4588 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4589 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4590
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004591- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4592 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4593 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4594
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004595- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4596 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4597 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4598 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4599
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004600- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4601 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004602 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004603 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4604 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4605 new -l and -e options.
4606
4607- statcache is now deprecated.
4608
4609- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4610 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004611 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004612 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4613 time properly taken into account.
4614
4615- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4616 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4617 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4618 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4619
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004620Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004621-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004622
4623Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004624-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004625
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004626- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4627 is built with libdb3 if available.
4628
4629- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4630
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004631C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004632-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004633
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004634- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4635 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4636 PySequence_Size().
4637
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004638- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4639
4640- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4641 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4642 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4643
4644- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4645 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4646
4647- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4648 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4649
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004650New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004651-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004652
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004653- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4654 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4655
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004656- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4657 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4658
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004659- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4660
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004661Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004662-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004663
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004664- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4665 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4666
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004667Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004668-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004669
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004670Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004671----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004672
4673- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4674 removed completely in the next release.
4675
4676- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4677 OSX.
4678
4679- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4680 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4681
4682- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4683
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004684
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004685What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004686===========================
4687
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004688*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4689
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004690Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004691--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004692
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004693- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004694 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004695 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004696 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4697 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004698 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4699 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004700 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4701 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004702
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004703- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4704 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4705
4706- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4707 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4708
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004709Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004710-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004711
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004712- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4713 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4714 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4715 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4716 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4717 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4718 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4719 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4720
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004721- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4722 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4723 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4724 example).
4725
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004726- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004727 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004728 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004729 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004730
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004731- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4732 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4733 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004734 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004735
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004736- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4737 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4738 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4739 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4740 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4741 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4742
4743 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4744
4745 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4746
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004747Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004748-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004749
4750- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4751
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004752- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4753
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004754- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4755 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004756
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004757- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4758 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4759 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4760 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4761 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4762 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004763 attributes.
4764
4765- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4766 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4767 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004768
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004769- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4770 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4771 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004772
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004773- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4774 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4775 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004776 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4777 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4778
4779- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4780 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004781
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004782Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004783-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004784
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004785- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4786 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4787
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004788- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4789 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4790 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4791 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4792
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004793- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4794 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4795 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4796 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4797
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004798 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4799 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4800 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4801 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4802 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4803 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4804 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4805 without losing information).
4806
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004807- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004808 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4809 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4810 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4811 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4812 module).
4813
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004814 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004815 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4816 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4817 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4818 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004819
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004820- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004821 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4822 encoding.
4823
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004824- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4825 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4826
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004827- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004828 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4829
4830- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4831 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4832 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4833 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4834
4835- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4836
4837- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4838 ON, and OFF.
4839
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004840- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4841 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4842
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004843Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004844-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004845
4846- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4847 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4848 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004849
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004850- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4851 been added: -X and -E.
4852
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004853Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004854-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004855
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004856- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4857 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4858
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004859C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004860-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004861
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004862- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4863 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4864 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4865 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4866 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4867
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004868- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4869 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4870 as long) arguments.
4871
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004872- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4873 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4874 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4875 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4876 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4877 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4878
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004879- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4880 input.
4881
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004882New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004883-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004884
4885Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004886-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004887
4888Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004889-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004890
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004891- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4892 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4893 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4894
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004895- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4896 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4897 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004898 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004899
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004900 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4901 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4902 import signal
4903 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004904
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004905 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004906 while 1:
4907 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004908 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004909 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4910 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4911 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4912 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004913
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004914
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004915What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4916===========================
4917
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004918*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4919
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004920Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004921--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004922
4923- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4924 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4925 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4926
4927- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4928 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4929 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4930 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4931 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4932 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4933 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004934
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004935- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004936 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004937 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4938 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4939 associate a docstring with a property.
4940
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004941- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4942 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4943 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4944 other built-in object types.
4945
4946- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4947 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4948 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4949 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4950 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4951
4952- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4953 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4954
4955- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4956 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004957 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004958 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4959 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4960 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4961 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4962 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4963
4964- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4965 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4966 class.
4967
4968- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4969 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4970 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4971 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4972
4973- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4974 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4975 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4976 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4977
4978- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4979 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4980
4981- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4982 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4983 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4984 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4985 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004986 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004987 with the same value as s.
4988
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004989- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4990
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004991Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004992----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004993
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004994- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4995
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004996- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4997 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4998 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4999 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5000 objects.
5001
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005002- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5003 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005004 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5005 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5006
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005007- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5008 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5009 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5010
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005011Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005012-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005013
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005014- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5015 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5016 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5017 by the instances.
5018
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005019- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5020 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5021 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5022
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005023- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5024 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5025 before the entire comparison is complete.
5026
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005027- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5028 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5029 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5030
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005031- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5032 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5033 getwriter().
5034
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005035- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5036 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5037
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005038- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005039 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5040 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5041
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005042- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5043 iterable object.
5044
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005045- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5046 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005047
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005048- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5049 authentication.
5050
5051- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5052 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005053
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005054- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005055 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5056 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5057 a sample driver.)
5058
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005059Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005060-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005061
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005062- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5063 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5064 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5065 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5066 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5067 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5068 kernel has large file support.
5069
5070- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5071 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5072 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5073 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5074 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5075
5076- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5077 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5078 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5079
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005080C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005081-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005082
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005083- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5084 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5085
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005086New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005087-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005088
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005089- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5090 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5091
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005092Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005093-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005094
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005095- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5096 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5097 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5098 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5099 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5100
5101- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5102 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5103 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5104 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5105
5106- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5107 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5108
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005109Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005110-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005111
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005112- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005113 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5114 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005115
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005116
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005117What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5118===========================
5119
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005120*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5121
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005122Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005123----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005124
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005125- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5126 big to represent as a C double.
5127
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005128- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5129 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5130 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5131 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5132 restriction).
5133
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005134- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5135 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5136 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5137 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5138 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5139
5140 >>> dir([])
5141 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5142 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5143 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5144 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5145 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5146 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5147 'reverse', 'sort']
5148
5149 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5150
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005151- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005152 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5153 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5154 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5155 OverflowError exception.
5156
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005157- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005158 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005159 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5160 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5161 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5162 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5163 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005164 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005165 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5166 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5167
5168 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5169 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5170 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5171 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005172
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005173- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005174 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5175 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5176 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5177 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5178 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5179 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5180 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5181 once it is created.
5182
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005183- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5184 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5185 (key, value) pairs.
5186
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005187- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005188 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5189 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5190
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005191- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5192 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5193 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5194 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5195 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005196
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005197- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005198 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5199 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5200
5201 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5202
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005203- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005204 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5205
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005206Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005207-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005208
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005209- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005210 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5211 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005212
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005213- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5214 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5215 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5216 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5217 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5218 in this area anymore).
5219
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005220- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5221 threading.Timer.
5222
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005223- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5224 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5225
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005226- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005227 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5228
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005229- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005230 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5231 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5232 converted to Python longs.
5233
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005234- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005235 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5236
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005237- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5238 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5239 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5240
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005241Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005242-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005243
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005244- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5245 division operators as per PEP 238.
5246
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005247Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005248-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005249
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005250- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5251 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5252 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5253 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5254
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005255C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005256-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005257
5258- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005259
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005260- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5261 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005262 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005263
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005264 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5265 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005266 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005267 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005268
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005269- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005270 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5271 module:
5272
5273 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005274
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005275 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5276 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005277
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005278 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5279 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005280
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005281 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5282
5283 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5284
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005285- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005286 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5287 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5288 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005289
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005290New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005291-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005292
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005293- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5294 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5295 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5296 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5297 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005298
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005299Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005300-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005301
5302Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005303-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005304
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005305- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5306 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5307 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5308 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005309 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5310 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5311 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5312 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5313 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005314
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005315- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005316 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5317
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005318
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005319What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5320===========================
5321
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005322*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5323
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005324Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005325-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005326
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005327- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5328 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5329
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005330- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5331 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5332 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005333
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005334- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5335 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5336 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5337 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005338
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005339- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5340
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005341- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005342
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005343Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005344-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005345
5346- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005347 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005348 the module docstring for details.
5349
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005350Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005351-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005352
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005353- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005354 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5355 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5356 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005357
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005358- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5359 Nick Mathewson.
5360
5361Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005362----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005363
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005364- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5365 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5366 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5367 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5368 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5369 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5370 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5371 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5372
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005373- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5374 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5375 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5376 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5377
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005378- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5379 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5380 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5381 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5382 come a long way).
5383
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005384- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5385 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5386 write filters for these warnings).
5387
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005388- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5389 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5390 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5391 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5392 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5393
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005394- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5395 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5396 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5397 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5398 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5399 older distribution.
5400
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005401Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005402-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005403
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005404- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5405 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005406 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005407
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005408- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5409 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5410 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5411
5412- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5413
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005414- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5415
5416- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5417
5418- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5419
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005420- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005421
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005422- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5423
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005424New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005425-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005426
5427C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005428-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005429
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005430- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5431 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5432 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5433 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5434 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5435 against buffer overruns.
5436
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005437- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005438 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5439 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005440 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5441 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5442 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5443
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005444- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5445 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5446 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5447 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5448 deprecated.
5449
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005450Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005451-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005452
5453- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5454 relevant is found.
5455
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005456
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005457What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005458===========================
5459
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005460*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5461
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005462Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005463----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005464
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005465- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5466 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5467 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5468 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5469 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5470 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5471 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5472 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005473 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005474 repaired.
5475
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005476- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005477 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005478 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5479 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5480 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5481 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5482 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5483 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5484 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5485 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5486
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005487- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5488 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5489 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5490 leading BMO character).
5491
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005492- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5493 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5494 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5495
5496 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5497 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5498 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005499
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005500 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5501 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5502 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5503 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5504 for various simple to use conversions.
5505
5506 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5507 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5508
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005509 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5510 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5511 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5512 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5513 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5514 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5515 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5516 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5517 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5518 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5519 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5520 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5521 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5522 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5523 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005524
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005525- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5526 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5527 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005528 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005529 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005530
5531 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005532 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5533 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5534 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5535 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5536 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005537 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5538 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005539
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005540 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5541 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5542 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005543 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005544
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005545- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5546 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5547 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5548 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5549 floating arithmetic,
5550
5551 x = 9007199254740992.0
5552 print long(x)
5553
5554 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5555 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5556 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5557 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5558 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5559 functions are of good quality).
5560
5561 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5562 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5563 algorithms to break.
5564
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005565- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5566 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5567 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5568 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5569 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5570 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5571 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5572 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5573 order.
5574
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005575- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5576 operation along the most common code paths.
5577
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005578- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5579 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5580
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005581- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5582 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5583 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5584 {}.update(UserDict())
5585
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005586- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5587 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5588 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5589 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5590 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5591 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5592 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5593 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5594
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005595- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005596 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005597
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005598 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005599 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5600 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005601 join() method of strings
5602 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005603 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5604 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005605 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005606 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005607
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005608- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5609 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5610
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005611- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5612 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5613
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005614- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5615 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5616 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5617 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5618
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005619- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5620 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005621 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005622 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5623 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005624
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005625- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5626
5627
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005628Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005629-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005630
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005631- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005632 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005633 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5634 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5635
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005636- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5637 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5638
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005639- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5640 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5641 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5642 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5643
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005644- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5645 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5646 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5647
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005648- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5649
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005650- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5651
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005652- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5653 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5654 that are still imported into string.py).
5655
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005656- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5657
5658- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5659 Now it does.
5660
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005661- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5662
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005663- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5664 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5665 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5666 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5667 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005668 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5669 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005670
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005671- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5672 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5673 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5674 'help(object)'.
5675
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005676Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005677-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005678
5679- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005680 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005681 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5682 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5683
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005684- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005685 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5686 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005687
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005688C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005689-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005690
5691- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5692 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005693
5694----
5695
5696**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**