blob: b9c424b11888520e28c611133ee953e430c87264 [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
Thomas Woutersfb609f42006-02-28 16:37:25 +000015- Patch #1438387, PEP 328: relative and absolute imports. Imports can now be
16 explicitly relative, using 'from .module import name' to mean 'from the same
17 package as this module is in. Imports without dots still default to the
18 old relative-then-absolute, unless 'from __future__ import
19 absolute_import' is used.
20
Brett Cannona7446e32006-02-27 23:39:10 +000021- Properly check if 'warnings' raises an exception (usually when a filter set
22 to "error" is triggered) when raising a warning for raising string
23 exceptions.
24
Neal Norwitz0023a2f2006-02-27 23:24:48 +000025- CO_GENERATOR_ALLOWED is no longer defined, this behavior is the default.
26 The name was removed from Include/code.h.
27
Neal Norwitzeb651252006-02-27 16:47:12 +000028- PEP 308: conditional expressions were added (x if cond else y).
29
Guido van Rossum1968ad32006-02-25 22:38:04 +000030- Patch 1433928:
31 - The copy module now "copies" function objects (as atomic objects).
32 - dict.__getitem__ now looks for a __missing__ hook before raising
33 KeyError.
34
Thomas Wouters34aa7ba2006-02-28 19:02:24 +000035- PEP 343: with statement implemented. Needs 'from __future__ import
36 with_statement'. Use of 'with' as a variable will generate a warning.
Guido van Rossumc2e20742006-02-27 22:32:47 +000037
Marc-André Lemburgfe4b34c2006-02-19 15:22:22 +000038- Fix the encodings package codec search function to only search
39 inside its own package. Fixes problem reported in patch #1433198.
40
41 Note: Codec packages should implement and register their own
42 codec search function. PEP 100 has the details.
43
Martin v. Löwis18e16552006-02-15 17:27:45 +000044- PEP 353: Using ssize_t as the index type.
45
Neal Norwitzfc76d632006-01-10 06:03:13 +000046- Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
47 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
48 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
49
Neal Norwitz671b9e32006-01-09 07:07:12 +000050- Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
51 configure would break checking curses.h.
52
Georg Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000053- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
54 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
55
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000056- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
57
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000058- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
59
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000060- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
61
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000062- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
63 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
64
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000065- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
66 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number
67 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
68
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000069- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
70 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000071 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000072
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000073- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
74 now encodes backslash correctly.
75
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000076- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
77
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000078- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
79 and long longs.
80
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000081- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
82 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
83 message in this case.
84
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000085- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
86 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
87 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
88 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
89 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
90
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000091- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000092
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000093- Speed up some Unicode operations.
94
Martin v. Löwisbd260da2006-02-26 19:42:26 +000095- A new AST parser implementation was completed. The abstract
96 syntax tree is available for read-only (non-compile) access
Martin v. Löwis577b5b92006-02-27 15:23:19 +000097 to Python code; an _ast module was added.
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000098
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000099- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +0000100 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
101
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +0000102- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
103
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +0000104- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
105 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
106
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +0000107- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
108
109- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
110
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +0000111- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
112 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
113 was empty.
114
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +0000115- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
116 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
117
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +0000118- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +0000119 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +0000120
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +0000121- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
122 codes.
123
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +0000124- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
125 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
126 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
127
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +0000128- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
129 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
130
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +0000131- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +0000132 (fixes bug #1119418).
133
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +0000134- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
135
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +0000136- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
137 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
138
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +0000139- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
140 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
141 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
142
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000143- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
144
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000145- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
146 reference counts in some error exit cases.
147
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000148- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
149 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
150 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
151 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
152 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
153 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
154 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
155 realloc.
156
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000157- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
158 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
159
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000160- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
161 like their int counterparts.
162
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000163- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
164 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
165 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
166 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
167 for a longer write-up of the problem).
168
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000169- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
170 serializing floats.
171
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000172- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
173 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
174 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
175
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000176- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
177 278.
178
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000179- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
180 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
181 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
182 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000183 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000184 PyNumber_*().
185 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
186
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000187- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
188 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
189 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
190 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
191
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000192- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
193 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
194 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
195 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
196 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
197
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000198- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
199 disabled caused a crash.
200
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000201- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
202 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
203
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000204- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000205 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
206
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000207- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
208
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000209- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000210 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
211 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
212 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000213
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000214- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
215
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000216- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
217 returning None.
218
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000219- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000220 ('\') with a specific error message.
221
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000222- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
223
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000224- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
225 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
226
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000227- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000228 an ferror() call.
229
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000230- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
231 list.sort().
232
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000233- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
234 (2+3) --> (5).
235
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000236- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
237
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000238- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
239 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000240
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000241- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
242 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
243 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
244
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000245- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
246 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
247 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
248
Tim Petersf4e69282006-02-27 17:15:31 +0000249- Patch #1413181: changed ``PyThreadState_Delete()`` to forget about the
250 current thread state when the auto-GIL-state machinery knows about
251 it (since the thread state is being deleted, continuing to remember it
252 can't help, but can hurt if another thread happens to get created with
253 the same thread id).
254
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000255Extension Modules
256-----------------
257
Guido van Rossum1968ad32006-02-25 22:38:04 +0000258- Patch 1433928: Added a new type, defaultdict, to the collections module.
259 This uses the new __missing__ hook behavior added to dict (see above).
260
Georg Brandldbd83392006-02-20 09:42:33 +0000261- Bug #854823: socketmodule now builds on Sun platforms even when
262 INET_ADDRSTRLEN is not defined.
263
Georg Brandlf4f44152006-02-18 22:29:33 +0000264- Patch #1393157: os.startfile() now has an optional argument to specify
265 a "command verb" to invoke on the file.
266
Neal Norwitz082b2df2006-02-07 07:04:46 +0000267- Bug #876637, prevent stack corruption when socket descriptor
268 is larger than FD_SETSIZE.
269
Neal Norwitz0e6bc8c2006-02-05 05:45:43 +0000270- Patch #1407135, bug #1424041: harmonize mmap behavior of anonymous memory.
271 mmap.mmap(-1, size) now returns anonymous memory in both Unix and Windows.
272 mmap.mmap(0, size) should not be used on Windows for anonymous memory.
273
Martin v. Löwis57a34e82006-02-04 19:12:37 +0000274- Patch #1422385: The nis module now supports access to domains other
275 than the system default domain.
276
Martin v. Löwis14694662006-02-03 12:54:16 +0000277- Use Win32 API to implement os.stat/fstat. As a result, subsecond timestamps
278 are reported, the limit on path name lengths is removed, and stat reports
279 WindowsError now (instead of OSError).
280
Gregory P. Smithcfc4a8d2006-01-29 19:46:23 +0000281- Add bsddb.db.DBEnv.set_tx_timestamp allowing time based database recovery.
282
Neal Norwitz62a21122006-01-25 05:21:55 +0000283- Bug #1413192, fix seg fault in bsddb if a transaction was deleted
284 before the env.
285
Martin v. Löwis11017b12006-01-14 18:12:57 +0000286- Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
287
Neal Norwitz3b4fff82006-01-11 08:54:45 +0000288- Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
289
Neal Norwitz88bbd732006-01-10 07:05:44 +0000290- Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
291 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
292 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
293
Neal Norwitz5e3d8622006-01-09 06:24:35 +0000294- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
295 without prior setting of the userptr.
296
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000297- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
298
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000299- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
300
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000301- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
302 problem on AIX.
303
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000304- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
305
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000306- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
307
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000308- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
309
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000310- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
311 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
312
Gregory P. Smithe101df92006-01-24 20:09:45 +0000313- Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using
314 BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1.
315
316- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4
317
318- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000319
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000320- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
321 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
322
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000323- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
324
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000325- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
326 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
327
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000328- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
329 returns in cStringIO.c.
330
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000331- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
332 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
333
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000334- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
335
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000336- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
337
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000338- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
339 the file system encoding.
340
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000341- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
342 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000343
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000344- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
345
346- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000347 line without newlines.
348
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000349- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
350 on Windows.
351
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000352- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000353 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
354
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000355- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
356 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
357 for large or negative values.
358
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000359- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000360 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000361
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000362- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
363
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000364- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
365 if available on the platform.
366
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000367- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
368 available on the platform.
369
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000370- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
371 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
372
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000373- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
374
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000375- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
376 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
377 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
378
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000379- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
380
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000381- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
382 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
383
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000384- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000385 file size.
386
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000387- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
388
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000389- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
390 {remove_history,replace_history}
391
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000392- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
393 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000394
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000395- stat_float_times is now True.
396
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000397- array.array objects are now picklable.
398
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000399- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
400 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
401
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000402- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
403 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
404 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
405
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000406- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
407 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000408
409Library
410-------
411
Martin v. Löwis415ed932006-02-27 19:56:30 +0000412- The compiler package now supports future imports after the module docstring.
413
Georg Brandl8f7c54e2006-02-20 08:40:38 +0000414- Bug #1413790: zipfile now sanitizes absolute archive names that are
415 not allowed by the specs.
416
417- Bug #1413790: zipfile now sanitizes absolute archive names that are
418 not allowed by the specs.
419
Georg Brandlc98eeed2006-02-19 14:57:47 +0000420- Patch #1215184: FileInput now can be given an opening hook which can
421 be used to control how files are opened.
422
Georg Brandlc029f872006-02-19 14:12:34 +0000423- Patch #1212287: fileinput.input() now has a mode parameter for
424 specifying the file mode input files should be opened with.
425
Georg Brandl67e9fb92006-02-19 13:56:17 +0000426- Patch #1215184: fileinput now has a fileno() function for getting the
427 current file number.
428
Georg Brandl602b9ba2006-02-19 13:26:36 +0000429- Patch #1349274: gettext.install() now optionally installs additional
430 translation functions other than _() in the builtin namespace.
431
Georg Brandle4662172006-02-19 09:51:27 +0000432- Patch #1337756: fileinput now accepts Unicode filenames.
433
Georg Brandl7b4e7c22006-02-18 21:10:56 +0000434- Patch #1373643: The chunk module can now read chunks larger than
435 two gigabytes.
436
Georg Brandl21dd1af2006-02-17 13:35:13 +0000437- Patch #1417555: SimpleHTTPServer now returns Last-Modified headers.
438
Georg Brandlbd3bc4d2006-02-17 09:52:53 +0000439- Bug #1430298: It is now possible to send a mail with an empty
440 return address using smtplib.
441
Georg Brandl0e1abe22006-02-17 09:48:14 +0000442- Bug #1432260: The names of lambda functions are now properly displayed
443 in pydoc.
Georg Brandl501dd0d2006-02-17 09:45:40 +0000444
Martin v. Löwis00756902006-02-05 17:09:41 +0000445- Patch #1412872: zipfile now sets the creator system to 3 (Unix)
446 unless the system is Win32.
447
Tim Petersda1329b2006-02-27 16:50:01 +0000448- Patch #1349118: urllib now supports user:pass@ style proxy
Martin v. Löwis3e865952006-01-24 15:51:21 +0000449 specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols
450 are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections.
451
Georg Brandl531ceba2006-01-21 07:20:56 +0000452- Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications.
453
454- Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.
Georg Brandl89f35ac2006-01-20 17:24:23 +0000455
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000456- Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
457
Neal Norwitzf60cd472006-01-14 07:05:13 +0000458- Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
Georg Brandl45ab2332006-01-13 17:05:56 +0000459 any more.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000460
Georg Brandl4edd9892006-01-13 16:59:46 +0000461- Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
462 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000463
Martin v. Löwis412ed3b2006-01-08 10:45:39 +0000464- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
465
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000466- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
467
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000468- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
469 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
470 LoadError subclasses IOError.
471
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000472- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000473 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
474 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
475 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
476 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
477
478 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
479 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
480 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
481 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
482 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000483
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000484- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
485 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
486 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
487
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000488- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
489
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000490- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
491
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000492- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
493 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
494 illegal argument)
495
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000496- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
497 is an error in the format string.
498
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000499- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
500
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000501- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000502 "parent" argument.
503
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000504- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
505 for padding.
506
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000507- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
508 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
509
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000510- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
511 to get the correct encoding.
512
513- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
514 languages.
515
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000516- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
517
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000518- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
519
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000520- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
521
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000522- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
523 functionality.
524
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000525- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
526
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000527- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
528 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
529
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000530- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
531 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
532 match the Content-Length header.
533
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000534- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
535
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000536- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
537 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000538 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000539
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000540- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
541
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000542- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
543
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000544- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
545 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
546
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000547- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
548 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
549 Tkdnd.
550
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000551- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
552 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
553
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000554- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
555 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
556
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000557- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000558 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
559
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000560- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
561 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
562
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000563- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
564 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
565
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000566- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000567 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000568
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000569- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
570
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000571- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
572 error messages.
573
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000574- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
575
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000576- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
577 Bug #1224621.
578
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000579- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
580 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
581 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
582 terminates by raising StopIteration.
583
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000584- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
585
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000586- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
587 component of the path.
588
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000589- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
590 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
591 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
592 class at all.
593
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000594- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
595 files to PyPI.
596
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000597- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
598 them to PyPI.
599
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000600- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
601 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
602 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
603 work as expected.
604
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000605- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
606 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
607
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000608- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000609 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
610
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000611- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
612
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000613- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
614 to build.
615
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000616- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
617 symbolic links on Windows.
618
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000619- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000620 profile.py if available.
621
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000622- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
623
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000624- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
625 in LWPCookieJar.
626
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000627- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
628
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000629- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
630
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000631- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
632
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000633- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
634
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000635- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
636
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000637- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
638
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000639- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
640
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000641- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
642
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000643- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
644 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
645 be exploited in various ways.
646
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000647- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000648 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
649
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000650- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
651 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
652
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000653- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000654 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
655
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000656- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
657
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000658- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
659
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000660- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
661
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000662- Enhancements to the csv module:
663
664 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000665 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000666 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000667 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
668 reporting.
669 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
670 dictates.
671 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000672 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000673 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000674 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
675 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000676 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
677 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000678 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000679 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
680 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
681 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
682 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
683 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
684 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
685 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
686 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
687 without first creating a dialect class.
688 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
689 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
690 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000691 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000692 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
693 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000694 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
695 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
696 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
697 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000698 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
699 This has been fixed.
700
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000701- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
702 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
703 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
704 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
705
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000706- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
707
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000708- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
709 (Bug #951915).
710
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000711- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
712 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
713 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000714 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000715
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000716- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
717
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000718- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
719 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
720
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000721- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
722
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000723- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
724
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000725- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
726
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000727- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
728
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000729- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
730
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000731- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
732 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
733 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
734
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000735- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000736 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000737
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000738- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
739 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
740 tokenizer with very long source lines.
741
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000742- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
743 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
744 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000745
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000746- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
747 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000748
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000749- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
750 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
751
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000752- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
753 correctly.
754
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000755- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
756 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
757 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
758 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
759 between two lines.
760
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000761- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
762 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
763 handlers.
764
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000765- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000766 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
767 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000768
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000769- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
770 considering it exactly like a '*'.
771
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000772- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
773 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000774
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000775- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
776
Gustavo Niemeyer548148812006-01-31 18:34:13 +0000777- Patch #1413711: Certain patterns of differences were making difflib
778 touch the recursion limit.
779
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000780Build
781-----
782
Martin v. Löwis86d66262006-02-17 08:40:11 +0000783- Patch #1432345: Make python compile on DragonFly.
784
Martin v. Löwis856bf9a2006-02-14 20:42:55 +0000785- Build support for Win64-AMD64 was added.
786
Martin v. Löwisa55e55e2006-02-11 15:55:14 +0000787- Patch #1428494: Prefer linking against ncursesw over ncurses library.
788
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000789- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
790
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000791- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
792 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
793
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000794- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
795
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000796- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
797 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
798
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000799- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
800 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
801
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000802- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
803 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
804 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000805 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000806
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000807- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
808 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
809 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
810
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000811- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
812
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000813- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
814 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
815
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000816- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
817 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
818 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
819 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
820 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
821 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
822 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
823 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
824
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000825- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
826 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
827 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
828 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
829
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000830C API
831-----
832
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000833- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
834
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000835- Removed PyRange_New().
836
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000837- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
838 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
839 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
840 mappings.
841
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000842
843Tests
844-----
845
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000846- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000847
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000848- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
849 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
850
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000851
852Documentation
853-------------
854
Georg Brandl8cb30772006-01-20 09:34:29 +0000855- Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.
856
Georg Brandla3a93ae2006-01-20 09:14:36 +0000857- Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
858 values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
859
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000860- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
861
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000862- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
863
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000864- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
865
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000866- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
867
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000868- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
869
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000870- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
871
872- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
873
874- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
875
876- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
877
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000878- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
879 Closes bug #1166582.
880
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000881- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
882 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
883 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
884
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000885Mac
886---
887
888
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000889New platforms
890-------------
891
892- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
893
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000894
895Tools/Demos
896-----------
897
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000898- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
899 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
900 source files that need an encoding declaration.
901 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
902
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000903- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
904
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000905- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000906
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000907- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
908 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000909
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000910What's New in Python 2.4 final?
911===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000912
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000913*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000914
915Core and builtins
916-----------------
917
918- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
919 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
920 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
921
922
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000923What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
924==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000925
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000926*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000927
928Core and builtins
929-----------------
930
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000931- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
932 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
933 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
934
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000935
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000936Library
937-------
938
939- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
940 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
941 raised is re-raised.
942
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000943- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
944 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
945
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000946- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
947 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
948 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
949 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
950 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
951 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
952 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
953 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
954 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
955 by the slice are recomputed now.
956
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000957- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000958
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000959Build
960-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000961
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000962- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
963 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
964 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000965
966C API
967-----
968
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000969- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
970
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000971
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000972What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
973================================
974
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000975*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000976
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000977License
978-------
979
980The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
981is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
982changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
983Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
984intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
985durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
986the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
987License::
988
989 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
990
991says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
992to Python 2.1.1.
993
994The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
995License Version 2.
996
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000997Core and builtins
998-----------------
999
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +00001000- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
1001 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
1002 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
1003 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
1004 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
1005 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
1006 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +00001007 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +00001008 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
1009 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
1010
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +00001011- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001012
1013Extension Modules
1014-----------------
1015
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +00001016- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
1017 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
1018 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
1019 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001020
1021Library
1022-------
1023
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +00001024- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
1025 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
1026 returned.
1027
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +00001028- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
1029
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +00001030- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
1031 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
1032
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +00001033- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
1034
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +00001035- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
1036 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001037
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +00001038- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
1039
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +00001040- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
1041
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +00001042- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +00001043 the source code is updated and reloaded.
1044
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001045Build
1046-----
1047
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +00001048- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001049
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001050What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
1051================================
1052
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +00001053*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001054
1055Core and builtins
1056-----------------
1057
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001058- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +00001059 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
1060
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +00001061- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
1062 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
1063 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
1064 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
1065
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001066- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
1067 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
1068
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +00001069- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
1070 constant.
1071
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001072- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
1073 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
1074 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
1075 large), and to anomalies such as
1076 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
1077 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
1078 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
1079 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001080
1081Extension modules
1082-----------------
1083
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +00001084- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
1085 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001086 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
1087 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
1088 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001089
1090Library
1091-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001092
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001093- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001094 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001095 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
1096 --swig-cpp.
1097
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +00001098- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
1099 it is set.
1100
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +00001101- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +00001102
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +00001103- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
1104 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
1105 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
1106 Closes bug #1039270.
1107
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001108- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +00001109
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +00001110 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001111 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
1112 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
1113 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
1114 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
1115 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
1116 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
1117 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
1118 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
1119 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
1120 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
1121 + Updates to documentation.
1122
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +00001123- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
1124 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
1125 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
1126 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
1127
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001128- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001129
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +00001130- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
1131 applications should use the getmember function.
1132
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +00001133- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
1134
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +00001135- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
1136 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
1137 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
1138 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
1139 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
1140 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
1141 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
1142 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
1143 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
1144
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001145- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
1146 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +00001147 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001148
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001149- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
1150 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
1151 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
1152 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
1153 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
1154 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
1155 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
1156 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001157
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001158- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1159 the new public features (of which there are many).
1160
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001161- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001162 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1163 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1164 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1165 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001166 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001167
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001168- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1169
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001170- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1171 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1172 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1173 options.
1174
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001175- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1176 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1177 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1178 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1179 conditions under which non-string values work.
1180
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001181Build
1182-----
1183
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001184- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1185 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1186 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1187
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001188- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1189 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1190 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1191 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1192 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001193
1194C API
1195-----
1196
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001197- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1198 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1199
1200- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1201
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001202- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1203 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1204 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1205 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1206 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1207 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1208 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1209 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1210 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1211
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001212- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1213
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001214- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1215 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1216 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001217
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001218Tests
1219-----
1220
1221- test__locale ported to unittest
1222
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001223Mac
1224---
1225
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001226- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1227 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1228 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001229
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001230Tools/Demos
1231-----------
1232
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001233- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1234 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1235 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1236 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1237 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001238
1239
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001240What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1241=================================
1242
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001243*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001244
1245Core and builtins
1246-----------------
1247
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001248- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001249 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1250
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001251- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1252 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1253 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1254 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1255 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1256 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1257 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1258 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001259 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1260 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1261 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1262 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1263 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001264
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001265- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1266 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1267 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1268 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1269 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1270
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001271- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1272
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001273- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1274 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1275
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001276- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1277 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1278 modified the list.
1279
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001280- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1281 functions is now writable.
1282
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001283- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1284 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1285 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1286 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1287
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001288- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1289 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1290 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1291 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1292 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001293
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001294- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1295 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1296
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001297Extension modules
1298-----------------
1299
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001300- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1301
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001302- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1303 data.
1304
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001305- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1306 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1307 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1308 supposed to have been truncated away.
1309
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001310- Added socket.socketpair().
1311
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001312- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1313 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1314
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001315- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001316 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1317
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001318Library
1319-------
1320
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001321- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001322 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001323
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001324- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1325 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1326
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001327- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1328 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1329
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001330- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1331
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001332- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1333 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001334
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001335- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1336 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1337
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001338- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1339
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001340- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1341
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001342- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1343
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001344- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1345 Percivall.
1346
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001347- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1348 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1349
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001350- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1351 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1352 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001353 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001354
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001355- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1356 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1357 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1358 and exponent.
1359
1360- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1361
1362- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001363 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001364 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1365
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001366- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1367 to the readline module.
1368
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001369- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001370 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1371 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001372
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001373- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1374 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1375 contains symlinks.
1376
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001377- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1378 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1379
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001380- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1381 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1382 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1383
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001384- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1385 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1386 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1387 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1388 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1389 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1390 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1391 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1392 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1393 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1394 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1395 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1396 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1397
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001398- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1399
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001400Tools/Demos
1401-----------
1402
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001403- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1404 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1405
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001406- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1407
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001408Build
1409-----
1410
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001411- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1412 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1413 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1414 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1415 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1416 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1417 plans to do so.
1418
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001419- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1420 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1421
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001422- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1423 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1424
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001425- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1426 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1427
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001428- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1429 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1430
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001431- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1432 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1433
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001434C API
1435-----
1436
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001437..
1438
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001439Documentation
1440-------------
1441
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001442- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1443 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1444
1445- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1446 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1447 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001448
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001449New platforms
1450-------------
1451
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001452- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1453
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001454Tests
1455-----
1456
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001457..
1458
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001459Windows
1460-------
1461
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001462- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1463 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1464 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1465 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1466 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1467 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1468 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1469 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1470 the problem.
1471
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001472Mac
1473---
1474
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001475..
1476
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001477
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001478What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1479=================================
1480
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001481*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001482
1483Core and builtins
1484-----------------
1485
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001486- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1487 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1488 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1489 sensitive code.
1490
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001491- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001492 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001493
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001494 @staticmethod
1495 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001496
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001497 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001498
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001499- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1500 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1501 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1502 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1503 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1504 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1505 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1506 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1507 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1508 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1509 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1510
1511 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1512 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1513 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1514 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1515 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1516 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1517 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1518
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001519- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1520 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1521
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001522- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001523 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001524
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001525- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001526 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001527 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1528
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001529- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001530 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1531 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1532
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001533- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1534 types that support garbage collection.
1535
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001536- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1537
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001538- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1539 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1540 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1541 Jython.
1542
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001543- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1544
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001545- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1546 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1547
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001548- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1549 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1550 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001551
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001552- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1553 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1554 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1555
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001556Extension modules
1557-----------------
1558
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001559- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1560
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001561Library
1562-------
1563
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001564- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1565 TIS-620
1566
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001567- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1568 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1569 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1570 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1571 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1572 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1573 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1574 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1575 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1576 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1577
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001578- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1579
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001580- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1581 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1582 same as when the argument is omitted).
1583 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1584
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001585- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1586
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001587- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1588 schemes are offered.
1589
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001590- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1591
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001592- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1593 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1594 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1595
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001596- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1597
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001598- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1599 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1600
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001601- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1602 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1603 when dummy_threading is being used.
1604
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001605- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1606 from a tarfile.
1607
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001608- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001609 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001610
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001611- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1612 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1613 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1614 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1615
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001616- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1617 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1618
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001619- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1620 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1621 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1622 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1623 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1624 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1625 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1626 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1627 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1628 by some other method in progress).
1629
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001630- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1631 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1632 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001633
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001634- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1635
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001636- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1637 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1638 AM Kuchling.
1639
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001640- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1641 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1642 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1643
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001644- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1645 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1646 instead of unsigned.
1647
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001648- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001649 no longer part of the public API.
1650
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001651- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1652 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1653 string methods of the same name).
1654
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001655- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001656 SF patch 945642.
1657
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001658- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1659
1660 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1661
1662 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1663 DocTestSuites.
1664
1665- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1666 that provide thread-local data.
1667
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001668- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1669 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1670
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001671- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1672
1673- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1674 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1675 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1676
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001677- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1678
1679 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1680 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1681 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001682
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001683 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1684 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1685 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1686 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1687
1688 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1689 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1690
1691 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1692 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1693 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1694 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1695
1696 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1697 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1698 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1699 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1700 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1701
1702 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1703 wrapping help output.
1704
1705 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1706 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1707 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001708
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001709C API
1710-----
1711
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001712- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1713 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1714 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1715 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1716 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1717 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1718 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1719 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1720 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1721 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1722 its visible semantics have not changed.
1723
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001724- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1725 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1726
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001727Documentation
1728-------------
1729
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001730- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001731
1732 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001733 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001734
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001735 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001736
1737 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1738
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001739- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001740
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001741Tests
1742-----
1743
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001744- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001745 platforms that use the Makefile.
1746
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001747- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1748 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1749 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1750
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001751
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001752What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1753=================================
1754
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001755*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001756
1757Core and builtins
1758-----------------
1759
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001760- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1761 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1762 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1763 objects now (one object instead of three).
1764
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001765- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1766 Windows DLLs.
1767
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001768- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1769 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001770
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001771- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1772 a new .pyc magic.
1773
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001774- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1775 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1776 be there.
1777
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001778- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1779 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1780 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1781
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001782- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1783 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1784 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1785
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001786- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1787
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001788- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1789 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1790 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001791
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001792- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1793 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1794
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001795- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1796
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001797- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001798 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001799
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001800- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1801
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001802- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1803
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001804- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1805 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1806
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001807- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1808 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1809 Fixes bug #858016 .
1810
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001811- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1812 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1813 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1814
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001815- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1816 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1817 improves their performance (about 35%).
1818
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001819- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1820 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1821 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1822
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001823- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1824 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1825 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1826 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1827
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001828- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1829 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001830 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001831 length is not known).
1832
1833- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1834 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001835 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1836 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001837 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1838
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001839- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1840 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1841
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001842- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1843 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1844 keyword arguments.
1845
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001846- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1847 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1848 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1849
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001850- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1851 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1852 cases.
1853
1854- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1855 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1856 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1857 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1858 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1859 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1860 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1861 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1862 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1863 a release build.
1864
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001865- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1866 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1867
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001868- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001869 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001870
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001871- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1872 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1873 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1874 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1875 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1876 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1877 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1878 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1879 destroyed.
1880
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001881- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1882 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1883 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1884 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1885 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1886 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1887 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1888 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1889
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001890- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1891 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1892 character other than a space.
1893
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001894- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1895 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1896 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1897 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1898 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1899 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1900 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1901 attributes with the same name.
1902
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001903- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1904 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1905 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1906 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1907 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1908 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1909 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1910 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1911 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1912 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1913 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1914 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1915 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1916 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001917
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001918- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1919 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1920 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1921 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1922 This has been repaired.
1923
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001924- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1925
1926- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1927
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001928- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1929 over a sequence.
1930
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001931- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001932 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001933
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001934- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1935
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001936- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1937 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1938 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1939 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1940 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1941 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1942 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1943 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1944
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001945- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1946 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1947 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1948
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001949- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1950 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1951 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1952 freelist.
1953
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001954- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1955 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1956
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001957- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1958 number.
1959
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001960- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1961 a TypeError exception.
1962
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001963- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1964 820195.
1965
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001966- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1967 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1968 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1969
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001970- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001971 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1972 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001973
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001974- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1975 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1976 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1977
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001978- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1979 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001980 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001981
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001982- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001983 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1984 the first call.
1985
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001986
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001987Extension modules
1988-----------------
1989
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001990- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1991 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1992
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001993- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1994 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1995 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1996 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1997 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1998 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1999 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00002000
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00002001- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
2002
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00002003- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
2004
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00002005- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
2006 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
2007
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00002008- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
2009 fewer false positives.
2010
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00002011- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
2012 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
2013
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002014- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00002015 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
2016
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00002017- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002018 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00002019 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00002020 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
2021 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00002022
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00002023- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
2024 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
2025 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
2026 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
2027
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00002028- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
2029 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
2030 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
2031 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
2032 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
2033 #897625.
2034
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00002035- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
2036 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
2037
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00002038- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
2039 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
2040 and pops on either side of the deque.
2041
2042- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
2043 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
2044
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00002045- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
2046 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
2047 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
2048 other functions that expect a function argument.
2049
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00002050- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
2051
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002052- os.getsid was added.
2053
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00002054- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
2055 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
2056 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
2057
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00002058- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
2059
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00002060- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
2061
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00002062- readline.clear_history was added.
2063
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00002064- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
2065
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00002066- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
2067
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00002068- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
2069
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00002070- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
2071
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00002072- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
2073
2074- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
2075
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00002076- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
2077
2078- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
2079
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002080- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
2081 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
2082 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
2083
2084- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
2085 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
2086 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
2087 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
2088 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
2089 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
2090 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
2091
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00002092- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
2093 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
2094 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
2095 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002096
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002097- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002098 iterators from a single iterable.
2099
2100- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
2101 of raising a TypeError exception.
2102
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00002103- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
2104 as parameter.
2105
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002106Library
2107-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00002108
Armin Rigoa871ef22006-02-08 12:53:56 +00002109- Added a new module: cProfile, a C profiler with the same interface as the
2110 profile module. cProfile avoids some of the drawbacks of the hotshot
2111 profiler and provides a bit more information than the other two profilers.
2112 Based on "lsprof" (patch #1212837).
2113
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00002114- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
2115
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00002116- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
2117 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
2118 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002119
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00002120- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
2121 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
2122 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00002123
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00002124- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00002125
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00002126- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
2127 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00002128
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00002129- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
2130 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
2131
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002132- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
2133
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002134- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002135 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002136
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002137- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00002138 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002139
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00002140- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
2141
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00002142- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
2143 on cygwin and mingw32.
2144
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00002145- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
2146
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00002147- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
2148 module.
2149
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00002150- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
2151 installation scheme for all platforms.
2152
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002153- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00002154 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002155
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002156- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
2157 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
2158 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
2159
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00002160- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
2161 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2162 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2163
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002164- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2165
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002166- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2167
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002168- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2169 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2170
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002171- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2172 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2173 type pattern with the same value exists.
2174
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002175- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2176 when run from the command prompt).
2177
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002178- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2179 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2180
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002181- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2182 default sort).
2183
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002184- Added global runctx function to profile module
2185
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002186- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2187
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002188- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2189
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002190- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2191
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002192- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002193 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2194 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2195 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2196 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2197 accordingly.
2198
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002199- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2200 decoding standards.
2201
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002202- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2203 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2204 called for all requests.
2205
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002206- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2207 they are passed to the compiler.
2208
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002209- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2210 indent, width and depth.
2211
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002212- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2213 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2214
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002215- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2216 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2217
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002218- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2219
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002220- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2221
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002222- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2223
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002224- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2225 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2226
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002227- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002228 for better performance.
2229
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002230- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002231
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002232- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2233 a string).
2234
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002235- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2236
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002237- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2238
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002239- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2240
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002241- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2242
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002243- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2244 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2245 list of fieldnames.
2246
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002247- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2248 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2249
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002250- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2251
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002252- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2253 empty lists.
2254
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002255- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2256 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2257 and shelves.
2258
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002259- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2260 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2261
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002262- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002263 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2264 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002265
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002266- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2267 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002268 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002269
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002270- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002271 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2272 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2273
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002274- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2275 and removed in Py2.4.
2276
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002277- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2278
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002279- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2280
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002281Tools/Demos
2282-----------
2283
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002284- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2285 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2286
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002287- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2288
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002289- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2290 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2291 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2292 destination in situations where both files are given.
2293
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002294- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2295 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2296 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2297 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2298
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002299- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2300
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002301- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2302 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2303 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2304 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2305 now.
2306
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002307- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2308 in effect
2309
2310- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2311 C-c C-h
2312
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002313- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2314 -d option was given.
2315
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002316Build
2317-----
2318
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002319- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2320 build under OS X.
2321
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002322- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2323 --enable-profiling.
2324
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002325- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2326 is configured --with-tsc.
2327
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002328- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2329 on AMD64.
2330
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002331- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2332 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2333
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002334- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2335 removed.
2336
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002337- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2338 supported (see PEP 11).
2339
2340- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2341
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002342- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2343
2344- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2345 (see PEP 11).
2346
2347- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2348 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2349
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002350C API
2351-----
2352
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002353- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2354 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2355 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2356
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002357- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2358 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2359 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2360 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2361
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002362- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2363 generator objects.
2364
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002365- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2366 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002367 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2368 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002369
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002370- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2371 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2372
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002373- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2374 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2375 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2376 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2377 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2378
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002379- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2380 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2381 about 10% faster.
2382
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002383- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2384 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2385
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002386- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2387 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2388 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2389 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2390
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002391Windows
2392-------
2393
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002394- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2395 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2396 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2397 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2398
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002399- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2400 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2401 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2402
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002403
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002404What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2405===============================
2406
2407*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2408
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002409IDLE
2410----
2411
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002412- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2413 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2414 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2415 context-menu actions.
2416
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002417- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2418 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2419 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2420 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2421 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2422 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2423 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2424 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2425 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2426
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002427
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002428What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2429=============================================
2430
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002431*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002432
2433Core and builtins
2434-----------------
2435
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002436- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002437 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002438 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2439
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002440Extension modules
2441-----------------
2442
2443- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2444 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2445 than once. This has been fixed.
2446
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002447- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2448 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2449 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2450 call.
2451
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002452- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2453
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002454Library
2455-------
2456
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002457- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2458 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2459
2460- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2461 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2462 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2463 restored.
2464
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002465IDLE
2466----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002467
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002468- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002469
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002470Build
2471-----
2472
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002473- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2474 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2475
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002476C API
2477-----
2478
2479Windows
2480-------
2481
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002482- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2483 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2484
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002485- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2486
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002487Mac
2488---
2489
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002490- Various fixes to pimp.
2491
2492- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2493
2494- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2495 more problems than it solves.
2496
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002497
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002498What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2499=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002500
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002501*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2502
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002503Core and builtins
2504-----------------
2505
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002506- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2507 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2508
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002509- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2510 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002511 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002512
2513- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2514 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2515 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002516 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002517
2518- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2519 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002520
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002521- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2522 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2523 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2524
2525- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002526 770247.
2527
2528- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002529
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002530Extension modules
2531-----------------
2532
2533- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2534 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2535
2536- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2537
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002538- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2539
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002540- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2541 contained within the _strptime module.
2542
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002543- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2544 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2545
2546- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002547 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2548
2549- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2550 the find_class attribute, if present.
2551
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002552- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002553
2554 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2555 (SF bug 763298).
2556
2557 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002558 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2559 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2560 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002561
2562 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2563
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002564Library
2565-------
2566
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002567- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2568
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002569- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2570 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2571 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2572 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2573 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2574 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2575 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2576 or Tester().
2577
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002578- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2579 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2580 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2581 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2582 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2583 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2584 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2585 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2586 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002587
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002588 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002589
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002590- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2591 weren't before was an oversight.
2592
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002593- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2594 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2595
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002596- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2597 when there are no lines.
2598
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002599- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2600 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2601
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002602- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2603 to child processes.
2604
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002605- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2606
2607- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2608
2609- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2610 xmlrpclib.
2611
2612- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2613 responses.
2614
2615- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2616 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2617
2618- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2619 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2620 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2621
2622- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2623 used as patterns.
2624
2625- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2626 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2627 than Tk 8.3.
2628
2629- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2630
2631- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002632
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002633Tools/Demos
2634-----------
2635
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002636- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2637
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002638- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2639
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002640- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002641
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002642Build
2643-----
2644
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002645- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2646
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002647- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2648
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002649- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2650 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002651
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002652- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2653 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2654 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002655
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002656C API
2657-----
2658
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002659- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2660 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2661
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002662Windows
2663-------
2664
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002665- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2666 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2667 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2668 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2669 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2670 Python exception ::
2671
2672 thread.error: can't start new thread
2673
2674 is raised now.
2675
2676- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2677 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2678 instead of from DLL teardown.
2679
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002680Mac
2681---
2682
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002683- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002684 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002685 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2686 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2687 the executable in the bundle.
2688
2689- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002690
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002691- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2692
2693- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2694 on Panther.
2695
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002696What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2697================================
2698
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002699*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002700
2701Core and builtins
2702-----------------
2703
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002704- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2705 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2706 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2707 with the -i option.
2708
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002709- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2710 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2711
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002712- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2713 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2714
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002715- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2716 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2717 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2718 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2719 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2720 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2721 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2722 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2723 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2724 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2725 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2726 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2727 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002728
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002729- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2730 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2731 embedded in a lambda expression.
2732
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002733- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2734 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2735 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2736 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2737 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2738
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002739- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2740 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2741 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2742
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002743- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2744 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2745
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002746- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2747 It's writable again.
2748
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002749- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2750 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2751 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002752 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002753
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002754- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2755 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2756 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2757
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002758Extension modules
2759-----------------
2760
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002761- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2762 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2763
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002764- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2765 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2766 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2767 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2768
2769- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2770 collection.
2771
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002772- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2773 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2774 unique within a single program run.
2775
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002776- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2777 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2778
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002779- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2780 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2781
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002782- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2783 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002784
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002785- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2786
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002787- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2788 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2789
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002790- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2791 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2792 for many BSD-derived systems.
2793
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002794
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002795Library
2796-------
2797
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002798- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2799 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2800 primary ones:
2801
2802 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2803 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2804 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2805
2806 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2807 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2808 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2809 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2810 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2811 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2812
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002813- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2814 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2815 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2816 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2817 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2818 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2819 argument.
2820
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002821- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2822 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2823 in the archive.
2824
2825- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2826 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2827
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002828- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2829 569574).
2830
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002831- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2832 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2833 no more.
2834
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002835- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2836 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2837 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2838 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2839 code coverage.
2840
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002841- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2842 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2843 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002844 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2845 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002846
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002847- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2848 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2849 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002850 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002851
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002852- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2853
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002854- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2855 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2856 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2857 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2858
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002859- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2860 handling.
2861
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002862- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2863 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2864
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002865- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2866 in socket.py.
2867
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002868- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2869
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002870- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2871 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2872 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2873 opener with proxy support.
2874
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002875- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2876
2877- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2878
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002879Tools/Demos
2880-----------
2881
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002882- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2883
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002884- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2885
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002886- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2887 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002888
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002889- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2890 files.
2891
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002892Build
2893-----
2894
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002895- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002896 different root directory.
2897
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002898C API
2899-----
2900
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002901- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2902 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2903 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2904 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2905 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2906 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2907 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2908 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2909 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2910 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2911
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002912- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2913 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2914 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2915 from Python.
2916
2917
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002918New platforms
2919-------------
2920
2921None this time.
2922
2923Tests
2924-----
2925
2926- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2927 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2928
2929Windows
2930-------
2931
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002932- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2933
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002934- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2935 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2936 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2937 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2938 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2939 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2940 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2941 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2942 that's what it's for.
2943
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002944Mac
2945---
2946
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002947- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2948 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2949 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2950 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002951- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2952 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2953- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002954
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002955SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2956------------------------------------
2957
2958430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2959598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2960622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2961661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2962683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2963697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2964713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2965724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2966727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2967729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2968730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2969731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2970732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2971733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2972735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2973740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2974744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2975745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2976747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2977749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2978751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2979753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2980755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2981757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2982760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2983
2984
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002985What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2986================================
2987
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002988*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002989
2990Core and builtins
2991-----------------
2992
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002993- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2994 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2995
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002996- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2997 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2998 and cannot be strings).
2999
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00003000- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
3001 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
3002 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
3003 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
3004
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00003005- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
3006 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
3007 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
3008 Python itself.
3009
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00003010- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
3011 the referenced object, if it has one.
3012
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00003013- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
3014 the thread started at
3015 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
3016
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00003017- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
3018 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
3019 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
3020 placed on a list index.
3021
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00003022- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
3023 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
3024 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
3025 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
3026
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003027- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
3028 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
3029 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
3030 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
3031 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
3032 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
3033 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
3034
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00003035- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
3036 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
3037 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
3038 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
3039 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
3040
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00003041- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
3042 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00003043
3044- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
3045 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
3046 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
3047 #693195.)
3048
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00003049- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
3050 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003051
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00003052- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00003053 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00003054 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
3055 interpreter executions, would fail.
3056
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003057- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00003058 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00003059 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003060
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003061Extension modules
3062-----------------
3063
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00003064- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
3065 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
3066 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
3067 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
3068
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00003069- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
3070 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
3071
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00003072- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
3073 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
3074 and Greg Chapman.)
3075
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003076- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
3077 recursively.
3078
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00003079- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00003080 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
3081 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
3082 leaks.
3083
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00003084- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
3085
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00003086- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
3087 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
3088 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
3089 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
3090 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
3091 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
3092 #705836.
3093
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00003094- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00003095 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
3096
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00003097- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
3098 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
3099 See SF bug #692416.
3100
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00003101- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
3102 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
3103
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00003104- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
3105 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
3106 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003107
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003108- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00003109 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
3110 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
3111
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00003112- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
3113 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
3114 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
3115 timeouts to work properly.
3116
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003117Library
3118-------
3119
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003120- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
3121 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
3122 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
3123 future release.
3124
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00003125- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
3126 for querying platform dependent features.
3127
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00003128- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00003129
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00003130- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
3131 pickle protocol versions.
3132
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00003133- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
3134 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
3135 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
3136
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00003137- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
3138
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00003139- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
3140 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
3141 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
3142 modules.
3143
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00003144- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
3145 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
3146 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
3147
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003148- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
3149 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
3150
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00003151- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
3152 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
3153 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
3154
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003155- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00003156 MS Office extensions.
3157
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00003158- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
3159 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
3160
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00003161- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3162 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3163
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003164- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3165 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3166 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3167 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3168 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3169 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3170
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003171- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3172 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3173 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003174
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003175- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3176 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3177 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3178
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003179- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3180
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003181- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3182 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3183 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3184
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003185Tools/Demos
3186-----------
3187
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003188- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3189 See the module docstring for details.
3190
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003191Build
3192-----
3193
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003194- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3195 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003196
3197C API
3198-----
3199
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003200- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3201
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003202- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3203 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3204 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3205
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003206- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3207 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003208
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003209 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3210 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3211 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003212
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003213- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003214 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3215
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003216- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3217 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3218 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003219
3220New platforms
3221-------------
3222
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003223None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003224
3225Tests
3226-----
3227
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003228- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3229 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003230
3231Windows
3232-------
3233
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003234- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3235 function.
3236
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003237- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3238 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003239
3240Mac
3241---
3242
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003243- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3244 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003245
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003246- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3247 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003248
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003249- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3250 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3251 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003252
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003253- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003254 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3255 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003256
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003257- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3258 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003259
3260
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003261What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3262=================================
3263
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003264*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003265
3266Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003267-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003268
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003269- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3270 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3271 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3272
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003273- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3274 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3275 (SF patch #664376.)
3276
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003277- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3278 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3279 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3280 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3281 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3282 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003283 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003284
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003285- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3286 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3287 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3288 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003289 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003290
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003291- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3292 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3293 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3294 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3295 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3296 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3297 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3298 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3299 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3300 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3301 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3302
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003303- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3304 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3305 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3306 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3307 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3308 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3309
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003310- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3311 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3312
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003313- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3314 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3315 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3316 case.)
3317
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003318- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3319 passed as unicode strings.
3320
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003321- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3322 See SF bug #683467.
3323
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003324- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3325 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3326
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003327- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3328
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003329- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3330
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003331- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3332 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3333 arguments.
3334
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003335- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3336 See SF bug #667147.
3337
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003338- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003339 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003340 See SF bug #676155.
3341
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003342- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003343 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003344 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3345 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3346 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3347 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3348 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3349 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003350
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003351Extension modules
3352-----------------
3353
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003354- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3355 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3356 tp_as_number pointer.
3357
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003358- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3359 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3360 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3361 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3362 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3363
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003364- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3365
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003366- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3367
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003368- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003369 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003370 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3371 patch #678531.)
3372
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003373- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3374 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3375
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003376- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3377 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3378
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003379- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3380
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003381- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3382 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3383 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3384
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003385- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3386
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003387- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3388 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3389
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003390- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003391
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003392- datetime changes:
3393
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003394 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3395
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003396 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3397 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3398 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3399 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3400 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3401 now.
3402
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003403 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003404 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3405 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003406
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003407 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003408 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003409 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3410 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3411 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3412 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003413
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003414 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3415 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3416 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003417 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3418
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003419 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3420 by a later example coded by Guido.
3421
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003422 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003423 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3424 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3425 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003426 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3427 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3428
3429 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3430 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3431 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3432 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3433 tzinfo subclass instance.
3434
3435 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3436 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3437 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3438 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3439 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3440 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3441 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3442 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003443
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003444 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3445 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3446 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3447 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3448 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003449 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3450
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003451 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003452
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003453 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3454 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3455 as a naive datetime object.
3456
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003457 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3458 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3459 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3460
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003461 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3462 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3463 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3464 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3465 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3466 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3467 comparison.
3468
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003469 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3470 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3471 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3472 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003473 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003474
3475 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003476
3477 and ::
3478
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003479 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3480
3481 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3482 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3483 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3484 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3485
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003486 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3487 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3488 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3489 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3490 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3491
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003492 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3493 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003494 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3495 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003496
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003497Library
3498-------
3499
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003500- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3501 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3502
3503- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3504 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3505 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3506 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3507 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3508 See PEP 307 for details.
3509
3510- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3511 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3512
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003513- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3514 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003515 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003516 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3517 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003518 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003519
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003520- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3521 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3522
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003523- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3524 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3525 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3526
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003527- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3528
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003529- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3530 exception.
3531
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003532- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3533 class.
3534
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003535- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3536 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3537 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3538
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003539- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3540 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3541
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003542- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003543 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3544 See SF bug #659228.
3545
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003546- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3547 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3548 See SF patch #651082.
3549
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003550- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003551
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003552- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3553 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3554
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003555- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003556 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003557
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003558- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3559 DOS paths from other platforms.
3560
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003561Tools/Demos
3562-----------
3563
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003564- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3565 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3566 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3567 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3568 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3569 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3570 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3571 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3572 example:
3573
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003574 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3575 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003576
3577 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3578
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003579
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003580Build
3581-----
3582
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003583- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3584 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3585 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003586 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3587
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003588 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3589
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003590- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3591 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3592 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3593 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3594 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3595 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3596 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3597 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3598 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3599
3600- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3601 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3602 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3603 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3604
3605- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3606 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3607
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003608C API
3609-----
3610
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003611- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3612 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003613
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003614- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3615 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3616 tp_as_number pointer.
3617
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003618- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3619 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3620 (SF #681367)
3621
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003622- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3623 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3624 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3625 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003626
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003627Tests
3628-----
3629
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003630- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003631 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3632 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3633 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3634 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3635 pydoc.)
3636
3637- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3638
3639- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003640
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003641Windows
3642-------
3643
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003644- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3645 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3646 time).
3647
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003648- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3649 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3650
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003651- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3652 release without strong cryptography.
3653
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003654- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003655 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003656
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003657- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3658 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3659
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003660Mac
3661---
3662
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003663- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3664 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003665
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003666- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3667 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3668 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003669
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003670- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3671 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003672
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003673- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3674 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3675 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3676 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003677
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003678- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003679 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3680 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3681 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003682
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003683
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003684What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003685=================================
3686
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003687*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003688
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003689Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003690--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003691
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003692- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3693
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003694- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3695 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003696 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003697 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003698 a different meaning than before.
3699
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003700- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003701 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003702 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003703
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003704- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003705 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003706 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003707
3708- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3709 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3710 and deallocation.
3711
3712- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3713 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3714
3715- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3716 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3717 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3718 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3719 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3720
3721- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3722 now detected by the garbage collector.
3723
3724- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3725 [SF bug 519621]
3726
3727- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3728 identifier.
3729
3730- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3731 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3732 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3733 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3734 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3735 [SF bug 563060]
3736
3737- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3738 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3739 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3740 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3741 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3742
3743- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3744 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3745 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3746
3747- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3748
3749- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3750 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3751 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3752 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3753 state of the slots would be lost.)
3754
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003755Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003756-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003757
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003758- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003759 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3760 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3761 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3762 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003763 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3764 Jython 2.1.
3765
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003766- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003767 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003768 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3769 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3770 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3771 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3772 these, see PEP 302.
3773
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003774- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3775 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3776 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3777
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003778- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3779 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3780 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3781
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003782- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3783 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3784 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3785
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003786- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3787 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3788 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3789 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3790 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3791 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3792 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3793 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3794 releases or implementations.
3795
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003796- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003797 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3798 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003799
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003800- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3801 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3802
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003803- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3804 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3805 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3806
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003807- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3808 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3809
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003810- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3811 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003812 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3813 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003814
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003815- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3816 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3817 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3818 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3819 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3820
3821 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3822 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3823 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3824 pattern.
3825
3826 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3827 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3828 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3829 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3830
3831 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3832 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3833 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3834 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3835 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3836 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3837
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003838- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3839 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3840 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3841 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3842 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3843 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3844 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3845 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003846
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003847- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3848 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3849 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3850 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3851 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003852 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3853 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3854 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3855 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3856 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3857 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3858 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003859
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003860- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3861 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3862
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003863- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3864 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3865 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3866 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3867 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3868 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3869 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3870 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3871 to Zack Weinberg!
3872
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003873- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3874 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3875 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3876 type. This has been fixed now.
3877
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003878- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3879 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3880 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3881
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003882- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3883 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3884 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3885 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3886 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3887 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3888 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3889 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003890 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003891
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003892- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3893 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3894 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003895
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003896- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3897 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3898 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3899 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3900 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3901 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3902 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3903 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003904 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003905 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3906 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3907
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003908- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3909 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3910 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3911 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3912 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3913 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3914 this.)
3915
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003916- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3917 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003918 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003919 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003920 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3921 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003922 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3923 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003924
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003925- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3926 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3927 currently running.
3928
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003929- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3930 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3931 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3932 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3933
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003934- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3935 as directory names.
3936
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003937- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3938 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3939
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003940- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3941 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3942
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003943- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003944 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3945 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003946
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003947- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3948 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3949 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3950 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3951 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3952
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003953- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3954 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3955 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3956 removed.
3957
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003958- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3959 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3960 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3961
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003962- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3963 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3964 to __debug__.
3965
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003966- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3967 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3968 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3969
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003970- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3971 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3972 deprecated now.
3973
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003974- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3975 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3976 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003977
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003978- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3979 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3980 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3981 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3982 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003983
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003984- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3985 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3986
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003987- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3988 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3989 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003990 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003991 is backward compatible.
3992
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003993- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3994 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3995 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3996 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3997 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3998
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003999- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
4000 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
4001 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
4002 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
4003 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
4004 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004005
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00004006- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
4007 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
4008
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004009- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
4010 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
4011
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004012- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
4013 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
4014 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
4015 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
4016 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
4017
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00004018- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
4019 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
4020 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
4021
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004022- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00004023 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
4024
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00004025- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
4026 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
4027 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00004028
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00004029- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
4030 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
4031
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00004032- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
4033 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
4034 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
4035
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00004036- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
4037
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004038Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004039-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004040
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00004041- Added three operators to the operator module:
4042 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
4043 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
4044 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
4045
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00004046- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
4047
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00004048- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
4049 archives.
4050
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004051- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
4052 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
4053 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
4054
4055 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
4056
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004057- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
4058 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
4059 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00004060 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004061
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00004062- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
4063 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
4064 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
4065 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00004066 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
4067 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
4068 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
4069 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00004070
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00004071- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
4072 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00004073
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00004074- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
4075
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00004076- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
4077 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
4078
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00004079- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
4080 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
4081 supported.
4082
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00004083- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
4084
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00004085- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
4086 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00004087
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00004088- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
4089 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
4090
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00004091- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
4092
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004093- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
4094 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
4095
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00004096- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
4097 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
4098 functions but callable type objects.
4099
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004100- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004101 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004102 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004103
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00004104- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
4105 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00004106
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00004107- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
4108 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00004109
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00004110- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
4111 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
4112 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
4113 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
4114
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00004115- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
4116 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00004117
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00004118- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
4119 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
4120 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
4121 and __imul__.
4122
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00004123- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00004124 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
4125 is called.
4126
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00004127- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
4128 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
4129 interpreter was compiled.
4130
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004131- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
4132 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
4133 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004134 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004135 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
4136 1, not 2.
4137
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00004138- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
4139 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
4140 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
4141 limit.
4142
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00004143- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
4144 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
4145 bug #623464.
4146
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00004147- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
4148 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
4149 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
4150 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
4151
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004152Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004153-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004154
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00004155- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
4156
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00004157- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
4158 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
4159 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
4160 with Python 2.3a2.
4161
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004162- os.path exposes getctime.
4163
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004164- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004165 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004166 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004167 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004168 unit tests of floating point results.
4169
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004170- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4171 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4172 has been increased.
4173
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004174- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4175 executed.
4176
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004177- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4178 postinstallation script.
4179
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004180- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4181 test the current module.
4182
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004183- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004184 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4185 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4186 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4187 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4188
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004189- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004190 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004191 Ward's Optik package.
4192
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004193- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4194 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4195 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4196 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4197
4198- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4199 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004200 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004201
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004202- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4203 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4204 shelf are binary pickles.
4205
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004206- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4207 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4208
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004209- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4210 modules are iterators now.
4211
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004212- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4213 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4214 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4215 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4216 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4217 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004218
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004219- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4220 with their entity value.
4221
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004222- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4223
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004224- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4225 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004226
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004227- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4228 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004229 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004230
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004231- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4232 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4233 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4234 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4235 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4236 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4237 main():
4238
4239 import locale
4240 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4241
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004242- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4243 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4244
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004245- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4246 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4247 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4248 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4249 to the new standard.
4250
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004251- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4252 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4253 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4254 an extension to the database.
4255
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004256- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4257 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4258 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4259 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004260 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004261
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004262- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004263 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004264
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004265- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4266 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4267 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4268 bounded integers.
4269
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004270- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4271 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4272 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4273 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4274 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4275 in existence.
4276
4277 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4278 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4279 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4280 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4281 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4282 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4283
4284 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4285 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4286 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4287 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4288
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004289- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4290 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4291 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4292
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004293- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4294
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004295- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4296 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4297 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4298 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4299
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004300- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4301 argument.
4302
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004303- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4304 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4305 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4306 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4307 [SF patch 560794].
4308
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004309- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4310 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4311 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004312 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4313 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4314 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004315
4316- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4317 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004318
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004319- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4320 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4321 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4322 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004323
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004324- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4325 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4326 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4327 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4328 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4329
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004330- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004331
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004332- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4333
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004334- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4335 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4336 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4337 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4338 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4339 identical to None.
4340
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004341- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4342 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4343 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4344 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4345 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4346 results now.
4347
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004348- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4349 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4350
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004351- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4352 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4353 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4354 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4355 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4356 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4357 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4358 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4359
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004360- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4361
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004362- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4363 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4364
4365- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4366 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4367 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4368 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4369 and other systems.
4370
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004371- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4372 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4373 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4374 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 +00004375 work well with these.
4376
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004377- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4378
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004379- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004380 connections.
4381
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004382- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4383 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4384 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4385
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004386- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4387 sets
4388
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004389- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4390 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4391 name.
4392
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004393- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4394 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4395 passed in.
4396
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004397- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004398 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004399 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4400 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004401
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004402- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4403
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004404- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4405
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004406- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4407 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4408 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4409
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004410- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4411 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4412 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4413 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004414 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004415
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004416- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004417 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004418 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004419
4420- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4421 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4422 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4423
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004424- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004425 the value of its expression argument.
4426
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004427- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4428 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4429 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4430
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004431- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4432 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4433 skipstone browser was included.
4434
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004435- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4436 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4437
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004438Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004439-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004440
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004441- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4442 names in addition to accepting file names.
4443
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004444- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4445 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4446 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4447 still used and useful.)
4448
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004449- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4450 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4451 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4452 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004453
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004454- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4455 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4456 the generated binary.
4457
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004458Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004459-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004460
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004461- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4462
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004463- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4464 except in the hands of experts.
4465
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004466- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004467 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4468 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4469 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004470
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004471- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4472 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4473 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4474 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4475 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4476 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4477 builds.
4478
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004479- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4480 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4481 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4482 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4483 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4484 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4485 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4486 new type.
4487
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004488- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004489
4490 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4491 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4492 positive infinities.
4493
4494 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4495 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4496 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4497 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4498 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4499 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4500 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4501
4502 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4503
4504 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4505
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004506- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4507 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4508 size of the executable.
4509
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004510- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4511 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4512 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4513 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004514
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004515- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4516
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004517- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4518 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4519 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004520
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004521- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4522 well as Unix.
4523
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004524- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4525 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4526 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4527 modules in the README file for details.
4528
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004529C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004530-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004531
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004532- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4533 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004534 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004535 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004536 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004537
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004538- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4539 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4540 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4541 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4542 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4543 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004544 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004545 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4546 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4547 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4548 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4549 aligned.)
4550
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004551- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4552 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4553 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4554
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004555- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4556 level.
4557
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004558- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4559 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4560 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4561 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4562 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4563
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004564- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4565 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4566 code.
4567
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004568- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4569 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4570 adjusting for negative indices.
4571
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004572- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4573 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4574 object.
4575
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004576- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4577 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4578 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4579
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004580- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4581 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004582
4583- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4584
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004585- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4586 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4587 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4588 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4589
4590- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4591
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004592- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004593
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004594- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004595 without going through the buffer API.
4596
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004597- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004598
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004599- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4600 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4601 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4602 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4603
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004604- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4605 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4606
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004607- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004608 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4609
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004610New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004611-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004612
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004613- OpenVMS is now supported.
4614
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004615- AtheOS is now supported.
4616
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004617- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4618
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004619- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4620
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004621Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004622-----
4623
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004624- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4625 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4626 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004627
4628Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004629-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004630
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004631- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4632 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4633 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4634 bugs.
4635 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004636 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004637 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4638 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004639 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004640
4641- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004642 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004643
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004644- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4645 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4646
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004647- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4648 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004649 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004650 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4651
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004652- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4653 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4654 use files" uninstall option).
4655
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004656- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4657
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004658- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4659 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4660
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004661- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4662 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4663 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4664
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004665- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4666 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4667 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4668 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4669 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004670 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4671 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4672 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004673
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004674- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004675 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004676 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4677 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4678 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4679 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4680 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4681 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4682 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4683 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4684 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4685 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4686 work around.
4687
4688- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4689 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4690 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4691 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4692 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4693 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4694 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4695 specified with O_CREAT too).
4696
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004697Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004698----
4699
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004700- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004701
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004702- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4703 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4704 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4705
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004706- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4707 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4708 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4709
4710- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4711 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4712 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4713 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4714 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4715 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4716 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4717 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004718
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004719- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4720 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4721 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004722
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004723- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4724 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4725 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4726 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4727 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004728
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004729- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4730 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4731 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004732
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004733- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4734 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004735
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004736- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4737 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4738 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4739 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4740 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004741
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004742- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4743 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4744 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4745
4746- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4747 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4748 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004749
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004750- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4751 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4752 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4753 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004754 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004755
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004756- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4757 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004758
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004759- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4760 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004761
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004762- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004763 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004764 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4765 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004766
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004767
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004768What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004769===============================
4770
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004771*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4772
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004773Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004774--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004775
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004776- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4777 with a custom metaclass.
4778
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004779Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004780-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004781
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004782- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4783 are proxies.
4784
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004785Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004786-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004787
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004788- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4789 very short strings.
4790
4791- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4792 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4793 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4794 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4795 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4796
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004797Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004798-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004799
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004800- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4801 close or delete time).
4802
4803- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4804 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4805
4806- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4807
4808- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004809 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004810
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004811Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004812-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004813
4814Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004815-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004816
4817C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004818-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004819
4820New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004821-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004822
4823Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004824-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004825
4826Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004827-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004828
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004829- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4830
4831- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4832 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4833
4834- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4835 deleted at process exit time.
4836
4837- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4838 in backslash.
4839
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004840Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004841----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004842
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004843- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4844 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4845 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4846
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004847
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004848What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004849===========================
4850
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004851*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4852
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004853Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004854--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004855
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004856- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4857 been extensively updated. See
4858
4859 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4860
4861 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4862
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004863- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4864 deleted!
4865
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004866- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4867 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4868 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4869 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4870 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4871
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004872- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4873
4874 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4875 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4876
4877 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4878 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4879 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4880 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4881 supported anyway.
4882
4883 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4884 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4885
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004886- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4887 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4888 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4889 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4890 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004891
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004892- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4893 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4894 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4895
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004896Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004897-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004898
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004899- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4900 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4901 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4902 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4903 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4904 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004905 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4906 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4907 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4908 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004909
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004910- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4911 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4912 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4913
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004914Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004915-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004916
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004917- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4918
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004919Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004920-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004921
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004922- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4923 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4924 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4925 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4926 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4927 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4928
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004929- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4930
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004931- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4932
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004933- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4934
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004935- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4936 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4937 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4938
4939- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4940
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004941Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004942-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004943
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004944- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4945 off a search on Google.
4946
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004947Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004948-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004949
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004950- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4951 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4952 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4953 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4954 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4955 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4956 other platforms should do likewise.
4957
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004958- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4959 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4960 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4961
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004962C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004963-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004964
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004965- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4966 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4967 producing key-value pairs.
4968
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004969- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004970 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004971 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4972 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4973 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4974 previously went unchallenged.
4975
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004976New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004977-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004978
4979Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004980-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004981
4982Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004983-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004984
4985Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004986----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004987
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004988- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4989 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004990
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004991- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4992 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4993 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4994 home.
4995
4996
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004997What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004998===========================
4999
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005000*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
5001
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005002Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005003--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005004
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00005005- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
5006 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00005007
5008 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00005009 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00005010
5011 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
5012 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005013 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00005014 This needs to be documented.
5015
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00005016- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
5017 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
5018
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00005019- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
5020 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
5021 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
5022
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00005023- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
5024 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
5025
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005026- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
5027 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
5028 class forbids it).
5029
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00005030- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
5031 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
5032 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
5033
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005034- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
5035
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005036Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005037-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005038
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00005039- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
5040 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005041 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00005042
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005043- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
5044 (like 1 + '').
5045
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005046Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005047-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005048
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005049- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
5050 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
5051 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
5052 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005053 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005054 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
5055
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00005056- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
5057 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
5058 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
5059 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
5060
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005061- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
5062 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005063 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
5064 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
5065 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005066
5067- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
5068 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005069
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00005070- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
5071 bytes on its input.
5072
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005073Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005074-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005075
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005076- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00005077 convenience function.
5078
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005079- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
5080 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
5081 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005082 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
5083 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
5084 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
5085 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
5086 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
5087 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005088
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00005089- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
5090 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
5091 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
5092 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
5093
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00005094- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
5095 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
5096 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
5097
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005098- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
5099 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
5100 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
5101 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
5102
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005103- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
5104 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005105 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005106 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
5107 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
5108 new -l and -e options.
5109
5110- statcache is now deprecated.
5111
5112- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
5113 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005114 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005115 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
5116 time properly taken into account.
5117
5118- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
5119 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
5120 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
5121 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
5122
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005123Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005124-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005125
5126Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005127-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005128
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005129- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
5130 is built with libdb3 if available.
5131
5132- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
5133
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005134C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005135-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005136
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00005137- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
5138 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
5139 PySequence_Size().
5140
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005141- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
5142
5143- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
5144 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
5145 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
5146
5147- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
5148 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
5149
5150- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
5151 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
5152
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005153New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005154-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005155
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005156- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
5157 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
5158
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00005159- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
5160 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
5161
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005162- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5163
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005164Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005165-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005166
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005167- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5168 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5169
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005170Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005171-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005172
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005173Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005174----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005175
5176- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5177 removed completely in the next release.
5178
5179- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5180 OSX.
5181
5182- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5183 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5184
5185- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5186
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005187
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005188What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005189===========================
5190
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005191*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5192
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005193Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005194--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005195
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005196- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005197 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005198 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005199 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5200 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005201 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5202 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005203 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5204 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005205
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005206- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5207 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5208
5209- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5210 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5211
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005212Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005213-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005214
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005215- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5216 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5217 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5218 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5219 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5220 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5221 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5222 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5223
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005224- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5225 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5226 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5227 example).
5228
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005229- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005230 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005231 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005232 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005233
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005234- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5235 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5236 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005237 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005238
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005239- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5240 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5241 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5242 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5243 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5244 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5245
5246 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5247
5248 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5249
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005250Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005251-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005252
5253- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5254
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005255- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5256
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005257- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5258 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005259
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005260- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5261 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5262 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5263 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5264 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5265 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005266 attributes.
5267
5268- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5269 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5270 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005271
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005272- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5273 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5274 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005275
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005276- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5277 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5278 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005279 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5280 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5281
5282- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5283 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005284
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005285Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005286-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005287
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005288- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5289 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5290
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005291- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5292 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5293 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5294 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5295
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005296- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5297 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5298 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5299 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5300
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005301 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5302 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5303 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5304 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5305 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5306 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5307 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5308 without losing information).
5309
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005310- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005311 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5312 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5313 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5314 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5315 module).
5316
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005317 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005318 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5319 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5320 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5321 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005322
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005323- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005324 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5325 encoding.
5326
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005327- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5328 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5329
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005330- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005331 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5332
5333- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5334 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5335 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5336 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5337
5338- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5339
5340- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5341 ON, and OFF.
5342
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005343- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5344 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5345
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005346Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005347-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005348
5349- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5350 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5351 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005352
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005353- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5354 been added: -X and -E.
5355
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005356Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005357-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005358
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005359- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5360 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5361
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005362C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005363-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005364
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005365- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5366 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5367 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5368 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5369 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5370
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005371- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5372 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5373 as long) arguments.
5374
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005375- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5376 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5377 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5378 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5379 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5380 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5381
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005382- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5383 input.
5384
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005385New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005386-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005387
5388Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005389-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005390
5391Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005392-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005393
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005394- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5395 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5396 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5397
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005398- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5399 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5400 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005401 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005402
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005403 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5404 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5405 import signal
5406 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005407
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005408 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005409 while 1:
5410 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005411 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005412 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5413 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5414 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5415 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005416
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005417
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005418What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5419===========================
5420
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005421*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5422
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005423Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005424--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005425
5426- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5427 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5428 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5429
5430- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5431 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5432 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5433 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5434 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5435 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5436 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005437
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005438- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005439 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005440 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5441 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5442 associate a docstring with a property.
5443
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005444- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5445 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5446 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5447 other built-in object types.
5448
5449- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5450 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5451 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5452 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5453 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5454
5455- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5456 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5457
5458- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5459 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005460 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005461 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5462 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5463 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5464 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5465 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5466
5467- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5468 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5469 class.
5470
5471- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5472 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5473 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5474 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5475
5476- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5477 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5478 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5479 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5480
5481- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5482 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5483
5484- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5485 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5486 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5487 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5488 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005489 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005490 with the same value as s.
5491
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005492- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5493
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005494Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005495----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005496
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005497- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5498
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005499- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5500 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5501 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5502 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5503 objects.
5504
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005505- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5506 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005507 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5508 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5509
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005510- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5511 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5512 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5513
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005514Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005515-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005516
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005517- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5518 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5519 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5520 by the instances.
5521
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005522- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5523 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5524 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5525
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005526- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5527 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5528 before the entire comparison is complete.
5529
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005530- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5531 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5532 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5533
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005534- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5535 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5536 getwriter().
5537
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005538- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5539 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5540
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005541- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005542 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5543 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5544
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005545- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5546 iterable object.
5547
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005548- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5549 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005550
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005551- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5552 authentication.
5553
5554- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5555 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005556
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005557- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005558 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5559 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5560 a sample driver.)
5561
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005562Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005563-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005564
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005565- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5566 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5567 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5568 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5569 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5570 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5571 kernel has large file support.
5572
5573- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5574 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5575 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5576 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5577 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5578
5579- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5580 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5581 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5582
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005583C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005584-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005585
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005586- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5587 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5588
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005589New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005590-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005591
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005592- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5593 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5594
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005595Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005596-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005597
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005598- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5599 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5600 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5601 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5602 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5603
5604- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5605 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5606 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5607 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5608
5609- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5610 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5611
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005612Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005613-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005614
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005615- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005616 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5617 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005618
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005619
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005620What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5621===========================
5622
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005623*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5624
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005625Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005626----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005627
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005628- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5629 big to represent as a C double.
5630
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005631- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5632 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5633 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5634 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5635 restriction).
5636
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005637- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5638 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5639 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5640 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5641 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5642
5643 >>> dir([])
5644 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5645 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5646 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5647 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5648 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5649 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5650 'reverse', 'sort']
5651
5652 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5653
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005654- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005655 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5656 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5657 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5658 OverflowError exception.
5659
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005660- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005661 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005662 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5663 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5664 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5665 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5666 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005667 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005668 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5669 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5670
5671 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5672 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5673 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5674 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005675
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005676- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005677 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5678 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5679 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5680 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5681 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5682 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5683 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5684 once it is created.
5685
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005686- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5687 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5688 (key, value) pairs.
5689
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005690- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005691 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5692 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5693
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005694- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5695 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5696 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5697 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5698 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005699
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005700- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005701 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5702 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5703
5704 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5705
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005706- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005707 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5708
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005709Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005710-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005711
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005712- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005713 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5714 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005715
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005716- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5717 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5718 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5719 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5720 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5721 in this area anymore).
5722
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005723- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5724 threading.Timer.
5725
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005726- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5727 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5728
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005729- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005730 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5731
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005732- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005733 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5734 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5735 converted to Python longs.
5736
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005737- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005738 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5739
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005740- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5741 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5742 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5743
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005744Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005745-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005746
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005747- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5748 division operators as per PEP 238.
5749
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005750Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005751-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005752
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005753- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5754 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5755 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5756 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5757
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005758C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005759-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005760
5761- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005762
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005763- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5764 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005765 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005766
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005767 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5768 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005769 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005770 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005771
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005772- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005773 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5774 module:
5775
5776 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005777
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005778 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5779 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005780
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005781 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5782 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005783
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005784 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5785
5786 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5787
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005788- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005789 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5790 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5791 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005792
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005793New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005794-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005795
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005796- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5797 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5798 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5799 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5800 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005801
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005802Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005803-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005804
5805Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005806-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005807
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005808- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5809 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5810 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5811 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005812 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5813 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5814 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5815 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5816 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005817
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005818- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005819 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5820
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005821
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005822What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5823===========================
5824
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005825*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5826
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005827Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005828-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005829
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005830- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5831 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5832
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005833- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5834 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5835 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005836
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005837- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5838 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5839 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5840 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005841
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005842- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5843
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005844- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005845
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005846Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005847-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005848
5849- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005850 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005851 the module docstring for details.
5852
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005853Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005854-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005855
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005856- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005857 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5858 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5859 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005860
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005861- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5862 Nick Mathewson.
5863
5864Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005865----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005866
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005867- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5868 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5869 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5870 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5871 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5872 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5873 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5874 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5875
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005876- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5877 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5878 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5879 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5880
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005881- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5882 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5883 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5884 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5885 come a long way).
5886
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005887- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5888 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5889 write filters for these warnings).
5890
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005891- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5892 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5893 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5894 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5895 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5896
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005897- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5898 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5899 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5900 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5901 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5902 older distribution.
5903
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005904Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005905-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005906
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005907- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5908 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005909 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005910
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005911- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5912 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5913 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5914
5915- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5916
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005917- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5918
5919- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5920
5921- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5922
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005923- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005924
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005925- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5926
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005927New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005928-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005929
5930C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005931-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005932
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005933- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5934 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5935 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5936 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5937 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5938 against buffer overruns.
5939
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005940- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005941 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5942 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005943 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5944 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5945 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5946
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005947- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5948 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5949 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5950 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5951 deprecated.
5952
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005953Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005954-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005955
5956- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5957 relevant is found.
5958
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005959
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005960What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005961===========================
5962
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005963*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5964
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005965Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005966----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005967
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005968- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5969 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5970 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5971 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5972 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5973 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5974 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5975 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005976 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005977 repaired.
5978
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005979- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005980 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005981 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5982 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5983 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5984 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5985 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5986 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5987 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5988 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5989
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005990- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5991 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5992 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5993 leading BMO character).
5994
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005995- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5996 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5997 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5998
5999 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
6000 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
6001 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006002
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00006003 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
6004 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
6005 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
6006 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
6007 for various simple to use conversions.
6008
6009 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
6010 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
6011
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006012 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6013 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
6014 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
6015 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
6016 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6017 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
6018 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6019 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
6020 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6021 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
6022 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6023 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
6024 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6025 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
6026 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00006027
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006028- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
6029 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
6030 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006031 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006032 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006033
6034 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006035 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
6036 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
6037 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
6038 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
6039 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006040 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
6041 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006042
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006043 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
6044 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
6045 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006046 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006047
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00006048- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
6049 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
6050 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
6051 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
6052 floating arithmetic,
6053
6054 x = 9007199254740992.0
6055 print long(x)
6056
6057 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
6058 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
6059 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
6060 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
6061 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
6062 functions are of good quality).
6063
6064 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
6065 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
6066 algorithms to break.
6067
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00006068- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
6069 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
6070 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
6071 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
6072 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
6073 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
6074 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
6075 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
6076 order.
6077
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006078- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
6079 operation along the most common code paths.
6080
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006081- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
6082 the same as dict.has_key(x).
6083
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00006084- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
6085 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
6086 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
6087 {}.update(UserDict())
6088
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006089- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
6090 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
6091 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
6092 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
6093 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
6094 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
6095 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
6096 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
6097
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006098- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00006099 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006100
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006101 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00006102 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
6103 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00006104 join() method of strings
6105 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006106 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
6107 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006108 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00006109 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006110
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00006111- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
6112 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
6113
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006114- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
6115 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
6116
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00006117- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
6118 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
6119 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
6120 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
6121
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006122- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
6123 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006124 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006125 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
6126 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00006127
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00006128- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
6129
6130
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006131Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006132-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006133
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006134- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006135 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006136 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
6137 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
6138
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00006139- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
6140 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
6141
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00006142- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
6143 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
6144 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
6145 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
6146
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00006147- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
6148 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
6149 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
6150
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00006151- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
6152
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00006153- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
6154
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00006155- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
6156 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
6157 that are still imported into string.py).
6158
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006159- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
6160
6161- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6162 Now it does.
6163
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006164- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6165
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006166- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6167 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6168 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6169 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6170 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006171 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6172 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006173
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006174- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6175 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6176 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6177 'help(object)'.
6178
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006179Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006180-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006181
6182- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006183 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006184 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6185 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6186
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006187- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006188 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6189 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006190
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006191C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006192-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006193
6194- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6195 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006196
6197----
6198
6199**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**