blob: 1ffa307782ae54408394fcb0746e91a892647c03 [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
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000015- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
16 codes.
17
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000018- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
19 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
20 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
21
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000022- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
23 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
24
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000025- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000026 (fixes bug #1119418).
27
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000028- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
29
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000030- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
31 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
32
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000033- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
34 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
35 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
36
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000037- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
38
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000039- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
40 reference counts in some error exit cases.
41
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000042- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
43 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
44 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
45 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
46 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
47 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
48 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
49 realloc.
50
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000051- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
52 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
53
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000054- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
55 like their int counterparts.
56
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000057- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
58 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
59 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
60 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
61 for a longer write-up of the problem).
62
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000063- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
64 serializing floats.
65
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000066- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
67 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
68 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
69
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000070- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
71 278.
72
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000073- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
74 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
75 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
76 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +000077 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000078 PyNumber_*().
79 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
80
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000081- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
82 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
83 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
84 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
85
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000086- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
87 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
88 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
89 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
90 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
91
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000092- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
93 disabled caused a crash.
94
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000095- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
96 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
97
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000098- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000099 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
100
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000101- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
102
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000103- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000104 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
105 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
106 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000107
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000108- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
109
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000110- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
111 returning None.
112
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000113- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000114 ('\') with a specific error message.
115
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000116- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
117
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000118- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
119 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
120
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000121- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000122 an ferror() call.
123
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000124- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
125 list.sort().
126
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000127- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
128 (2+3) --> (5).
129
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000130- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
131
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000132- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
133 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000134
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000135- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
136 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
137 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
138
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000139- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
140 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
141 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
142
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000143Extension Modules
144-----------------
145
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000146- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
147
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000148- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
149 the file system encoding.
150
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000151- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
152 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000153
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000154- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
155
156- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000157 line without newlines.
158
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000159- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
160 on Windows.
161
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000162- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
163 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
164
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000165- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
166 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
167 for large or negative values.
168
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000169- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000170 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000171
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000172- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
173
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000174- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
175 if available on the platform.
176
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000177- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
178 available on the platform.
179
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000180- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
181 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
182
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000183- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
184
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000185- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
186 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
187 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
188
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000189- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
190
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000191- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
192 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
193
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000194- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000195 file size.
196
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000197- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
198
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000199- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
200 {remove_history,replace_history}
201
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000202- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
203 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000204
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000205- stat_float_times is now True.
206
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000207- array.array objects are now picklable.
208
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000209- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
210 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
211
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000212- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
213 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
214 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
215
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000216- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
217 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000218
219Library
220-------
221
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000222- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
223
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000224- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
225
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000226- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
227 functionality.
228
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000229- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
230
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000231- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
232 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
233
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000234- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
235 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
236 match the Content-Length header.
237
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000238- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
239
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000240- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
241 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
242 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
243
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000244- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
245
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000246- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
247
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000248- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
249 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
250
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000251- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
252 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
253 Tkdnd.
254
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000255- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
256 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
257
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000258- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
259 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
260
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000261- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000262 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
263
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000264- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
265 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
266
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000267- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
268 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
269
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000270- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000271 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000272
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000273- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
274
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000275- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
276 error messages.
277
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000278- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
279
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000280- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
281 Bug #1224621.
282
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000283- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
284 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
285 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
286 terminates by raising StopIteration.
287
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000288- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
289
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000290- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
291 component of the path.
292
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000293- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
294 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
295 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
296 class at all.
297
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000298- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
299 files to PyPI.
300
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000301- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
302 them to PyPI.
303
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000304- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
305 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
306 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
307 work as expected.
308
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000309- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
310 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
311
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000312- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000313 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
314
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000315- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
316
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000317- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
318 to build.
319
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000320- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
321 symbolic links on Windows.
322
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000323- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000324 profile.py if available.
325
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000326- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
327
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000328- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
329 in LWPCookieJar.
330
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000331- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
332
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000333- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
334
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000335- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
336
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000337- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
338
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000339- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
340
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000341- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
342
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000343- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
344
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000345- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
346
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000347- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
348 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
349 be exploited in various ways.
350
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000351- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
352
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000353- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
354
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000355- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
356
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000357- Enhancements to the csv module:
358
359 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000360 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000361 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000362 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
363 reporting.
364 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
365 dictates.
366 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000367 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000368 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000369 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
370 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000371 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
372 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000373 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000374 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
375 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
376 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
377 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
378 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
379 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
380 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
381 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
382 without first creating a dialect class.
383 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
384 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
385 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000386 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000387 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
388 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000389 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
390 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
391 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
392 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000393 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
394 This has been fixed.
395
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000396- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
397 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
398 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
399 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
400
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000401- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
402
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000403- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
404 (Bug #951915).
405
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000406- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
407 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
408 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000409 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000410
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000411- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
412
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000413- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
414 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
415
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000416- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
417
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000418- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
419
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000420- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
421
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000422- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
423
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000424- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
425
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000426- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
427 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
428 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
429
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000430- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000431 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000432
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000433- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
434 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
435 tokenizer with very long source lines.
436
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000437- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
438 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
439
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000440- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
441 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000442
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000443- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
444 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
445
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000446- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
447 correctly.
448
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000449- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
450 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
451 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
452 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
453 between two lines.
454
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000455- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
456 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
457 handlers.
458
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000459- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000460 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
461 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000462
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000463- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
464 considering it exactly like a '*'.
465
466
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000467Build
468-----
469
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000470- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
471 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
472
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000473- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
474 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
475
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000476- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
477 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
478 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000479 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000480
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000481- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
482 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
483 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
484
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000485- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
486
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000487- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
488 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
489
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000490- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
491 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
492 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
493 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
494 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
495 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
496 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
497 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
498
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000499- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
500 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
501 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
502 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
503
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000504
505C API
506-----
507
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000508- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
509
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000510- Removed PyRange_New().
511
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000512
513Tests
514-----
515
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000516- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000517
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000518
519Documentation
520-------------
521
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000522- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
523
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000524- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
525
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000526- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
527
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000528- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
529
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000530- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
531
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000532- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
533
534- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
535
536- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
537
538- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
539
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000540- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
541 Closes bug #1166582.
542
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000543- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
544 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
545 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
546
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000547Mac
548---
549
550
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000551New platforms
552-------------
553
554- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
555
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000556
557Tools/Demos
558-----------
559
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000560- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
561 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
562 source files that need an encoding declaration.
563 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
564
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000565- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
566
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000567- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000568
569
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000570What's New in Python 2.4 final?
571===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000572
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000573*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000574
575Core and builtins
576-----------------
577
578- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
579 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
580 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
581
582
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000583What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
584==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000585
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000586*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000587
588Core and builtins
589-----------------
590
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000591- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
592 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
593 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
594
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000595
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000596Library
597-------
598
599- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
600 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
601 raised is re-raised.
602
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000603- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
604 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
605
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000606- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
607 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
608 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
609 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
610 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
611 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
612 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
613 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
614 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
615 by the slice are recomputed now.
616
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000617- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000618
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000619Build
620-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000621
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000622- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
623 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
624 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000625
626C API
627-----
628
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000629- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
630
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000631
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000632What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
633================================
634
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000635*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000636
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000637License
638-------
639
640The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
641is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
642changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
643Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
644intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
645durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
646the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
647License::
648
649 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
650
651says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
652to Python 2.1.1.
653
654The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
655License Version 2.
656
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000657Core and builtins
658-----------------
659
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000660- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
661 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
662 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
663 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
664 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
665 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
666 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
667 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
668 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
669 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
670
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000671- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000672
673Extension Modules
674-----------------
675
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000676- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
677 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
678 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
679 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000680
681Library
682-------
683
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000684- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
685 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
686 returned.
687
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000688- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
689
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000690- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
691 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
692
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000693- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
694
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000695- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
696 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000697
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000698- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
699
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000700- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
701
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000702- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000703 the source code is updated and reloaded.
704
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000705Build
706-----
707
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000708- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000709
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000710What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
711================================
712
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000713*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000714
715Core and builtins
716-----------------
717
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000718- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000719 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
720
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000721- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
722 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
723 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
724 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
725
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000726- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
727 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
728
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000729- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
730 constant.
731
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000732- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
733 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
734 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
735 large), and to anomalies such as
736 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
737 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
738 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
739 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000740
741Extension modules
742-----------------
743
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000744- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
745 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000746 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
747 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
748 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000749
750Library
751-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000752
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000753- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000754 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000755 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
756 --swig-cpp.
757
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000758- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
759 it is set.
760
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000761- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000762
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000763- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
764 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
765 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
766 Closes bug #1039270.
767
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000768- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000769
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000770 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000771 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
772 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
773 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
774 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
775 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
776 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
777 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
778 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
779 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
780 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
781 + Updates to documentation.
782
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000783- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
784 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
785 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
786 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
787
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000788- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000789
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000790- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
791 applications should use the getmember function.
792
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000793- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
794
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000795- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
796 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
797 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
798 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
799 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
800 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
801 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
802 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
803 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
804
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000805- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
806 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000807 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000808
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000809- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
810 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
811 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
812 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
813 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
814 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
815 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
816 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000817
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000818- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
819 the new public features (of which there are many).
820
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000821- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000822 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
823 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
824 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
825 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000826 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000827
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000828- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
829
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000830- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
831 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
832 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
833 options.
834
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000835- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
836 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
837 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
838 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
839 conditions under which non-string values work.
840
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000841Build
842-----
843
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000844- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
845 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
846 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
847
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000848- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
849 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
850 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
851 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
852 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000853
854C API
855-----
856
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000857- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
858 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
859
860- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
861
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000862- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
863 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
864 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
865 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
866 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
867 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
868 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
869 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
870 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
871
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000872- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
873
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000874- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
875 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
876 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000877
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000878Tests
879-----
880
881- test__locale ported to unittest
882
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000883Mac
884---
885
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000886- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
887 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
888 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000889
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000890Tools/Demos
891-----------
892
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000893- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
894 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
895 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
896 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
897 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000898
899
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000900What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
901=================================
902
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000903*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000904
905Core and builtins
906-----------------
907
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000908- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000909 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
910
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000911- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
912 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
913 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
914 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
915 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
916 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
917 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
918 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000919 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
920 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
921 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
922 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
923 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000924
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000925- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
926 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
927 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
928 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
929 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
930
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000931- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
932
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000933- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
934 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
935
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000936- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
937 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
938 modified the list.
939
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000940- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
941 functions is now writable.
942
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000943- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
944 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
945 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
946 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
947
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000948- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
949 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
950 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
951 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
952 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000953
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000954- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
955 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
956
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000957Extension modules
958-----------------
959
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000960- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
961
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000962- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
963 data.
964
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000965- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
966 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
967 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
968 supposed to have been truncated away.
969
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000970- Added socket.socketpair().
971
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000972- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
973 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
974
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000975- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000976 versions of Python, have now been removed.
977
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000978Library
979-------
980
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000981- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000982 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000983
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000984- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
985 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
986
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000987- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
988 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
989
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000990- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
991
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000992- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
993 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000994
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000995- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
996 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
997
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000998- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
999
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001000- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1001
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001002- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1003
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001004- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1005 Percivall.
1006
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001007- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1008 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1009
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001010- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1011 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1012 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001013 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001014
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001015- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1016 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1017 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1018 and exponent.
1019
1020- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1021
1022- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001023 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001024 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1025
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001026- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1027 to the readline module.
1028
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001029- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001030 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1031 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001032
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001033- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1034 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1035 contains symlinks.
1036
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001037- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1038 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1039
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001040- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1041 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1042 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1043
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001044- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1045 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1046 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1047 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1048 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1049 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1050 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1051 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1052 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1053 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1054 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1055 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1056 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1057
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001058- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1059
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001060Tools/Demos
1061-----------
1062
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001063- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1064 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1065
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001066- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1067
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001068Build
1069-----
1070
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001071- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1072 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1073 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1074 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1075 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1076 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1077 plans to do so.
1078
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001079- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1080 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1081
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001082- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1083 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1084
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001085- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1086 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1087
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001088- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1089 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1090
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001091- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1092 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1093
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001094C API
1095-----
1096
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001097..
1098
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001099Documentation
1100-------------
1101
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001102- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1103 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1104
1105- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1106 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1107 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001108
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001109New platforms
1110-------------
1111
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001112- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1113
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001114Tests
1115-----
1116
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001117..
1118
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001119Windows
1120-------
1121
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001122- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1123 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1124 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1125 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1126 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1127 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1128 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1129 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1130 the problem.
1131
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001132Mac
1133---
1134
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001135..
1136
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001137
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001138What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1139=================================
1140
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001141*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001142
1143Core and builtins
1144-----------------
1145
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001146- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1147 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1148 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1149 sensitive code.
1150
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001151- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001152 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001153
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001154 @staticmethod
1155 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001156
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001157 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001158
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001159- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1160 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1161 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1162 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1163 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1164 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1165 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1166 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1167 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1168 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1169 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1170
1171 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1172 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1173 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1174 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1175 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1176 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1177 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1178
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001179- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1180 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1181
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001182- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001183 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001184
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001185- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001186 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001187 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1188
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001189- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001190 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1191 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1192
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001193- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1194 types that support garbage collection.
1195
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001196- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1197
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001198- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1199 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1200 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1201 Jython.
1202
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001203- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1204
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001205- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1206 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1207
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001208- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1209 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1210 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001211
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001212- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1213 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1214 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1215
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001216Extension modules
1217-----------------
1218
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001219- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1220
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001221Library
1222-------
1223
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001224- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1225 TIS-620
1226
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001227- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1228 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1229 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1230 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1231 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1232 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1233 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1234 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1235 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1236 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1237
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001238- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1239
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001240- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1241 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1242 same as when the argument is omitted).
1243 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1244
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001245- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1246
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001247- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1248 schemes are offered.
1249
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001250- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1251
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001252- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1253 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1254 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1255
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001256- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1257
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001258- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1259 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1260
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001261- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1262 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1263 when dummy_threading is being used.
1264
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001265- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1266 from a tarfile.
1267
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001268- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001269 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001270
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001271- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1272 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1273 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1274 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1275
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001276- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1277 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1278
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001279- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1280 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1281 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1282 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1283 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1284 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1285 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1286 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1287 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1288 by some other method in progress).
1289
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001290- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1291 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1292 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001293
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001294- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1295
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001296- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1297 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1298 AM Kuchling.
1299
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001300- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1301 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1302 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1303
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001304- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1305 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1306 instead of unsigned.
1307
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001308- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001309 no longer part of the public API.
1310
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001311- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1312 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1313 string methods of the same name).
1314
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001315- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001316 SF patch 945642.
1317
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001318- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1319
1320 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1321
1322 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1323 DocTestSuites.
1324
1325- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1326 that provide thread-local data.
1327
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001328- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1329 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1330
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001331- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1332
1333- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1334 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1335 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1336
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001337- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1338
1339 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1340 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1341 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001342
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001343 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1344 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1345 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1346 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1347
1348 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1349 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1350
1351 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1352 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1353 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1354 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1355
1356 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1357 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1358 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1359 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1360 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1361
1362 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1363 wrapping help output.
1364
1365 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1366 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1367 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001368
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001369C API
1370-----
1371
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001372- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1373 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1374 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1375 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1376 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1377 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1378 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1379 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1380 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1381 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1382 its visible semantics have not changed.
1383
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001384- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1385 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1386
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001387Documentation
1388-------------
1389
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001390- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001391
1392 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001393 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001394
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001395 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001396
1397 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1398
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001399- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001400
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001401Tests
1402-----
1403
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001404- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001405 platforms that use the Makefile.
1406
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001407- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1408 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1409 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1410
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001411
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001412What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1413=================================
1414
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001415*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001416
1417Core and builtins
1418-----------------
1419
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001420- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1421 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1422 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1423 objects now (one object instead of three).
1424
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001425- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1426 Windows DLLs.
1427
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001428- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1429 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001430
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001431- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1432 a new .pyc magic.
1433
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001434- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1435 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1436 be there.
1437
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001438- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1439 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1440 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1441
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001442- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1443 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1444 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1445
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001446- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1447
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001448- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1449 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1450 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001451
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001452- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1453 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1454
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001455- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1456
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001457- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001458 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001459
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001460- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1461
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001462- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1463
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001464- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1465 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1466
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001467- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1468 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1469 Fixes bug #858016 .
1470
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001471- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1472 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1473 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1474
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001475- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1476 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1477 improves their performance (about 35%).
1478
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001479- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1480 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1481 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1482
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001483- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1484 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1485 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1486 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1487
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001488- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1489 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001490 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001491 length is not known).
1492
1493- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1494 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001495 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1496 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001497 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1498
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001499- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1500 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1501
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001502- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1503 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1504 keyword arguments.
1505
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001506- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1507 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1508 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1509
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001510- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1511 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1512 cases.
1513
1514- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1515 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1516 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1517 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1518 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1519 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1520 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1521 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1522 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1523 a release build.
1524
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001525- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1526 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1527
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001528- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001529 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001530
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001531- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1532 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1533 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1534 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1535 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1536 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1537 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1538 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1539 destroyed.
1540
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001541- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1542 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1543 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1544 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1545 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1546 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1547 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1548 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1549
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001550- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1551 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1552 character other than a space.
1553
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001554- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1555 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1556 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1557 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1558 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1559 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1560 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1561 attributes with the same name.
1562
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001563- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1564 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1565 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1566 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1567 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1568 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1569 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1570 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1571 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1572 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1573 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1574 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1575 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1576 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001577
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001578- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1579 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1580 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1581 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1582 This has been repaired.
1583
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001584- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1585
1586- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1587
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001588- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1589 over a sequence.
1590
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001591- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001592 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001593
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001594- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1595
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001596- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1597 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1598 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1599 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1600 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1601 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1602 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1603 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1604
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001605- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1606 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1607 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1608
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001609- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1610 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1611 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1612 freelist.
1613
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001614- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1615 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1616
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001617- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1618 number.
1619
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001620- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1621 a TypeError exception.
1622
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001623- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1624 820195.
1625
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001626- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1627 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1628 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1629
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001630- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001631 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1632 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001633
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001634- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1635 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1636 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1637
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001638- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1639 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001640 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001641
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001642- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001643 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1644 the first call.
1645
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001646
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001647Extension modules
1648-----------------
1649
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001650- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1651 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1652
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001653- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1654 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1655 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1656 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1657 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1658 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1659 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001660
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001661- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1662
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001663- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1664
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001665- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1666 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1667
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001668- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1669 fewer false positives.
1670
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001671- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1672 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1673
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001674- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001675 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1676
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001677- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001678 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001679 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001680 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1681 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001682
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001683- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1684 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1685 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1686 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1687
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001688- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1689 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1690 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1691 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1692 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1693 #897625.
1694
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001695- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1696 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1697
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001698- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1699 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1700 and pops on either side of the deque.
1701
1702- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1703 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1704
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001705- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1706 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1707 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1708 other functions that expect a function argument.
1709
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001710- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1711
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001712- os.getsid was added.
1713
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001714- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1715 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1716 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1717
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001718- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1719
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001720- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1721
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001722- readline.clear_history was added.
1723
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001724- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1725
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001726- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1727
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001728- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1729
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001730- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1731
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001732- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1733
1734- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1735
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001736- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1737
1738- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1739
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001740- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1741 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1742 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1743
1744- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1745 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1746 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1747 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1748 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1749 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1750 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1751
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001752- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1753 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1754 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1755 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001756
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001757- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001758 iterators from a single iterable.
1759
1760- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1761 of raising a TypeError exception.
1762
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001763- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1764 as parameter.
1765
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001766Library
1767-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001768
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001769- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1770
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001771- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1772 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1773 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001774
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001775- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1776 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1777 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001778
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001779- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001780
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001781- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1782 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001783
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001784- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1785 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1786
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001787- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1788
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001789- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001790 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001791
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001792- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001793 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001794
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001795- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1796
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001797- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1798 on cygwin and mingw32.
1799
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001800- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1801
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001802- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1803 module.
1804
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001805- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1806 installation scheme for all platforms.
1807
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001808- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001809 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001810
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001811- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1812 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1813 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1814
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001815- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1816 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1817 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1818
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001819- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1820
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001821- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1822
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001823- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1824 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1825
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001826- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1827 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1828 type pattern with the same value exists.
1829
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001830- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1831 when run from the command prompt).
1832
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001833- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1834 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1835
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001836- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1837 default sort).
1838
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001839- Added global runctx function to profile module
1840
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001841- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1842
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001843- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1844
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001845- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1846
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001847- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001848 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1849 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1850 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1851 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1852 accordingly.
1853
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001854- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1855 decoding standards.
1856
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001857- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1858 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1859 called for all requests.
1860
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001861- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1862 they are passed to the compiler.
1863
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001864- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1865 indent, width and depth.
1866
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001867- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1868 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1869
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001870- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1871 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1872
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001873- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1874
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001875- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1876
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001877- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1878
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001879- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1880 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1881
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001882- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001883 for better performance.
1884
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001885- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001886
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001887- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1888 a string).
1889
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001890- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1891
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001892- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1893
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001894- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1895
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001896- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1897
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001898- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1899 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1900 list of fieldnames.
1901
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001902- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1903 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1904
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001905- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1906
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001907- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1908 empty lists.
1909
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001910- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1911 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1912 and shelves.
1913
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001914- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1915 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1916
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001917- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001918 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1919 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001920
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001921- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1922 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001923 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001924
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001925- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001926 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1927 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1928
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001929- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1930 and removed in Py2.4.
1931
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001932- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1933
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001934- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1935
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001936Tools/Demos
1937-----------
1938
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001939- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1940 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1941
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001942- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1943
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001944- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1945 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1946 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1947 destination in situations where both files are given.
1948
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001949- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1950 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1951 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1952 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1953
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001954- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1955
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001956- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1957 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1958 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1959 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1960 now.
1961
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001962- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1963 in effect
1964
1965- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1966 C-c C-h
1967
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001968- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1969 -d option was given.
1970
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001971Build
1972-----
1973
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001974- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1975 build under OS X.
1976
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001977- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1978 --enable-profiling.
1979
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001980- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1981 is configured --with-tsc.
1982
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001983- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1984 on AMD64.
1985
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001986- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1987 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1988
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001989- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1990 removed.
1991
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001992- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1993 supported (see PEP 11).
1994
1995- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1996
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001997- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1998
1999- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2000 (see PEP 11).
2001
2002- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2003 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2004
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002005C API
2006-----
2007
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002008- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2009 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2010 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2011
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002012- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2013 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2014 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2015 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2016
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002017- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2018 generator objects.
2019
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002020- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2021 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002022 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2023 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002024
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002025- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2026 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2027
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002028- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2029 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2030 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2031 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2032 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2033
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002034- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2035 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2036 about 10% faster.
2037
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002038- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2039 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2040
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002041- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2042 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2043 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2044 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2045
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002046Windows
2047-------
2048
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002049- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2050 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2051 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2052 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2053
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002054- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2055 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2056 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2057
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002058
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002059What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2060===============================
2061
2062*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2063
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002064IDLE
2065----
2066
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002067- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2068 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2069 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2070 context-menu actions.
2071
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002072- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2073 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2074 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2075 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2076 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2077 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2078 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2079 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2080 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2081
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002082
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002083What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2084=============================================
2085
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002086*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002087
2088Core and builtins
2089-----------------
2090
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002091- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002092 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002093 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2094
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002095Extension modules
2096-----------------
2097
2098- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2099 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2100 than once. This has been fixed.
2101
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002102- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2103 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2104 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2105 call.
2106
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002107- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2108
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002109Library
2110-------
2111
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002112- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2113 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2114
2115- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2116 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2117 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2118 restored.
2119
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002120IDLE
2121----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002122
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002123- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002124
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002125Build
2126-----
2127
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002128- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2129 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2130
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002131C API
2132-----
2133
2134Windows
2135-------
2136
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002137- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2138 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2139
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002140- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2141
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002142Mac
2143---
2144
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002145- Various fixes to pimp.
2146
2147- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2148
2149- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2150 more problems than it solves.
2151
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002152
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002153What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2154=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002155
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002156*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2157
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002158Core and builtins
2159-----------------
2160
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002161- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2162 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2163
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002164- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2165 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002166 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002167
2168- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2169 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2170 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002171 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002172
2173- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2174 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002175
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002176- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2177 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2178 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2179
2180- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002181 770247.
2182
2183- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002184
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002185Extension modules
2186-----------------
2187
2188- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2189 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2190
2191- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2192
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002193- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2194
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002195- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2196 contained within the _strptime module.
2197
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002198- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2199 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2200
2201- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002202 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2203
2204- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2205 the find_class attribute, if present.
2206
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002207- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002208
2209 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2210 (SF bug 763298).
2211
2212 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002213 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2214 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2215 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002216
2217 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2218
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002219Library
2220-------
2221
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002222- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2223
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002224- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2225 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2226 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2227 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2228 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2229 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2230 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2231 or Tester().
2232
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002233- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2234 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2235 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2236 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2237 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2238 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2239 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2240 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2241 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002242
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002243 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002244
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002245- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2246 weren't before was an oversight.
2247
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002248- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2249 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2250
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002251- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2252 when there are no lines.
2253
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002254- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2255 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2256
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002257- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2258 to child processes.
2259
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002260- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2261
2262- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2263
2264- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2265 xmlrpclib.
2266
2267- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2268 responses.
2269
2270- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2271 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2272
2273- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2274 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2275 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2276
2277- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2278 used as patterns.
2279
2280- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2281 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2282 than Tk 8.3.
2283
2284- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2285
2286- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002287
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002288Tools/Demos
2289-----------
2290
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002291- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2292
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002293- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2294
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002295- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002296
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002297Build
2298-----
2299
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002300- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2301
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002302- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2303
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002304- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2305 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002306
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002307- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2308 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2309 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002310
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002311C API
2312-----
2313
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002314- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2315 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2316
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002317Windows
2318-------
2319
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002320- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2321 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2322 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2323 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2324 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2325 Python exception ::
2326
2327 thread.error: can't start new thread
2328
2329 is raised now.
2330
2331- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2332 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2333 instead of from DLL teardown.
2334
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002335Mac
2336---
2337
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002338- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002339 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002340 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2341 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2342 the executable in the bundle.
2343
2344- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002345
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002346- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2347
2348- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2349 on Panther.
2350
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002351What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2352================================
2353
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002354*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002355
2356Core and builtins
2357-----------------
2358
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002359- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2360 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2361 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2362 with the -i option.
2363
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002364- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2365 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2366
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002367- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2368 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2369
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002370- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2371 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2372 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2373 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2374 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2375 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2376 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2377 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2378 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2379 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2380 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2381 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2382 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002383
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002384- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2385 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2386 embedded in a lambda expression.
2387
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002388- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2389 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2390 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2391 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2392 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2393
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002394- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2395 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2396 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2397
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002398- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2399 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2400
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002401- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2402 It's writable again.
2403
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002404- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2405 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2406 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002407 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002408
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002409- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2410 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2411 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2412
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002413Extension modules
2414-----------------
2415
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002416- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2417 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2418
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002419- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2420 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2421 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2422 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2423
2424- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2425 collection.
2426
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002427- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2428 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2429 unique within a single program run.
2430
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002431- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2432 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2433
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002434- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2435 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2436
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002437- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2438 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002439
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002440- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2441
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002442- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2443 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2444
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002445- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2446 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2447 for many BSD-derived systems.
2448
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002449
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002450Library
2451-------
2452
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002453- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2454 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2455 primary ones:
2456
2457 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2458 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2459 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2460
2461 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2462 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2463 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2464 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2465 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2466 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2467
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002468- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2469 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2470 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2471 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2472 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2473 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2474 argument.
2475
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002476- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2477 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2478 in the archive.
2479
2480- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2481 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2482
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002483- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2484 569574).
2485
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002486- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2487 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2488 no more.
2489
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002490- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2491 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2492 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2493 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2494 code coverage.
2495
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002496- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2497 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2498 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002499 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2500 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002501
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002502- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2503 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2504 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002505 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002506
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002507- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2508
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002509- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2510 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2511 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2512 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2513
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002514- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2515 handling.
2516
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002517- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2518 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2519
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002520- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2521 in socket.py.
2522
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002523- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2524
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002525- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2526 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2527 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2528 opener with proxy support.
2529
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002530- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2531
2532- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2533
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002534Tools/Demos
2535-----------
2536
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002537- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2538
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002539- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2540
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002541- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2542 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002543
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002544- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2545 files.
2546
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002547Build
2548-----
2549
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002550- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002551 different root directory.
2552
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002553C API
2554-----
2555
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002556- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2557 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2558 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2559 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2560 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2561 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2562 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2563 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2564 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2565 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2566
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002567- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2568 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2569 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2570 from Python.
2571
2572
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002573New platforms
2574-------------
2575
2576None this time.
2577
2578Tests
2579-----
2580
2581- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2582 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2583
2584Windows
2585-------
2586
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002587- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2588
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002589- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2590 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2591 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2592 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2593 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2594 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2595 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2596 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2597 that's what it's for.
2598
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002599Mac
2600---
2601
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002602- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2603 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2604 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2605 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002606- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2607 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2608- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002609
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002610SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2611------------------------------------
2612
2613430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2614598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2615622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2616661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2617683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2618697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2619713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2620724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2621727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2622729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2623730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2624731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2625732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2626733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2627735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2628740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2629744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2630745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2631747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2632749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2633751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2634753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2635755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2636757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2637760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2638
2639
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002640What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2641================================
2642
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002643*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002644
2645Core and builtins
2646-----------------
2647
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002648- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2649 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2650
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002651- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2652 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2653 and cannot be strings).
2654
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002655- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2656 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2657 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2658 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2659
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002660- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2661 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2662 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2663 Python itself.
2664
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002665- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2666 the referenced object, if it has one.
2667
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002668- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2669 the thread started at
2670 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2671
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002672- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2673 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2674 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2675 placed on a list index.
2676
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002677- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2678 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2679 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2680 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2681
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002682- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2683 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2684 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2685 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2686 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2687 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2688 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2689
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002690- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2691 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2692 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2693 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2694 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2695
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002696- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2697 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002698
2699- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2700 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2701 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2702 #693195.)
2703
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002704- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2705 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002706
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002707- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002708 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002709 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2710 interpreter executions, would fail.
2711
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002712- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002713 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002714 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002715
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002716Extension modules
2717-----------------
2718
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002719- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2720 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2721 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2722 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2723
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002724- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2725 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2726
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002727- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2728 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2729 and Greg Chapman.)
2730
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002731- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2732 recursively.
2733
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002734- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002735 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2736 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2737 leaks.
2738
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002739- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2740
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002741- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2742 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2743 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2744 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2745 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2746 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2747 #705836.
2748
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002749- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002750 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2751
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002752- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2753 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2754 See SF bug #692416.
2755
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002756- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2757 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2758
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002759- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2760 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2761 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002762
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002763- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002764 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2765 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2766
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002767- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2768 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2769 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2770 timeouts to work properly.
2771
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002772Library
2773-------
2774
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002775- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2776 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2777 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2778 future release.
2779
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002780- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2781 for querying platform dependent features.
2782
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002783- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002784
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002785- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2786 pickle protocol versions.
2787
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002788- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2789 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2790 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2791
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002792- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2793
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002794- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2795 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2796 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2797 modules.
2798
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002799- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2800 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2801 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2802
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002803- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2804 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2805
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002806- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2807 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2808 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2809
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002810- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002811 MS Office extensions.
2812
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002813- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2814 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2815
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002816- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2817 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2818
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002819- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2820 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2821 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2822 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2823 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2824 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2825
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002826- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2827 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2828 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002829
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002830- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2831 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2832 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2833
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002834- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2835
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002836- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2837 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2838 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2839
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002840Tools/Demos
2841-----------
2842
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002843- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2844 See the module docstring for details.
2845
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002846Build
2847-----
2848
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002849- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2850 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002851
2852C API
2853-----
2854
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002855- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2856
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002857- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2858 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2859 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2860
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002861- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2862 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002863
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002864 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2865 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2866 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002867
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002868- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002869 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2870
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002871- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2872 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2873 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002874
2875New platforms
2876-------------
2877
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002878None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002879
2880Tests
2881-----
2882
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002883- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2884 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002885
2886Windows
2887-------
2888
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002889- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2890 function.
2891
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002892- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2893 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002894
2895Mac
2896---
2897
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002898- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2899 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002900
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002901- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2902 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002903
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002904- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2905 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2906 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002907
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002908- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002909 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2910 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002911
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002912- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2913 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002914
2915
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002916What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2917=================================
2918
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002919*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002920
2921Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002922-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002923
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002924- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2925 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2926 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2927
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002928- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2929 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2930 (SF patch #664376.)
2931
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002932- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2933 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2934 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2935 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2936 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2937 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002938 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002939
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002940- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2941 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2942 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2943 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002944 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002945
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002946- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2947 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2948 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2949 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2950 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2951 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2952 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2953 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2954 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2955 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2956 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2957
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002958- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2959 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2960 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2961 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2962 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2963 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2964
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002965- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2966 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2967
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002968- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2969 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2970 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2971 case.)
2972
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002973- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2974 passed as unicode strings.
2975
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002976- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2977 See SF bug #683467.
2978
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002979- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2980 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2981
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002982- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2983
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002984- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2985
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002986- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2987 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2988 arguments.
2989
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002990- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2991 See SF bug #667147.
2992
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002993- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002994 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002995 See SF bug #676155.
2996
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002997- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002998 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002999 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3000 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3001 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3002 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3003 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3004 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003005
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003006Extension modules
3007-----------------
3008
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003009- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3010 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3011 tp_as_number pointer.
3012
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003013- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3014 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3015 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3016 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3017 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3018
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003019- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3020
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003021- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3022
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003023- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003024 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003025 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3026 patch #678531.)
3027
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003028- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3029 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3030
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003031- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3032 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3033
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003034- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3035
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003036- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3037 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3038 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3039
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003040- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3041
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003042- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3043 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3044
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003045- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003046
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003047- datetime changes:
3048
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003049 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3050
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003051 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3052 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3053 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3054 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3055 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3056 now.
3057
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003058 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003059 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3060 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003061
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003062 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003063 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003064 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3065 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3066 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3067 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003068
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003069 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3070 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3071 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003072 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3073
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003074 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3075 by a later example coded by Guido.
3076
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003077 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003078 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3079 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3080 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003081 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3082 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3083
3084 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3085 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3086 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3087 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3088 tzinfo subclass instance.
3089
3090 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3091 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3092 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3093 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3094 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3095 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3096 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3097 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003098
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003099 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3100 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3101 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3102 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3103 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003104 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3105
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003106 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003107
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003108 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3109 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3110 as a naive datetime object.
3111
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003112 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3113 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3114 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3115
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003116 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3117 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3118 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3119 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3120 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3121 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3122 comparison.
3123
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003124 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3125 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3126 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3127 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003128 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003129
3130 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003131
3132 and ::
3133
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003134 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3135
3136 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3137 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3138 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3139 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3140
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003141 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3142 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3143 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3144 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3145 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3146
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003147 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3148 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003149 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3150 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003151
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003152Library
3153-------
3154
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003155- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3156 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3157
3158- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3159 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3160 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3161 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3162 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3163 See PEP 307 for details.
3164
3165- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3166 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3167
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003168- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3169 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003170 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003171 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3172 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003173 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003174
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003175- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3176 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3177
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003178- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3179 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3180 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3181
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003182- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3183
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003184- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3185 exception.
3186
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003187- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3188 class.
3189
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003190- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3191 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3192 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3193
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003194- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3195 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3196
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003197- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003198 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3199 See SF bug #659228.
3200
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003201- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3202 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3203 See SF patch #651082.
3204
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003205- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003206
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003207- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3208 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3209
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003210- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003211 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003212
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003213- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3214 DOS paths from other platforms.
3215
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003216Tools/Demos
3217-----------
3218
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003219- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3220 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3221 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3222 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3223 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3224 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3225 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3226 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3227 example:
3228
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003229 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3230 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003231
3232 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3233
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003234
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003235Build
3236-----
3237
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003238- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3239 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3240 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003241 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3242
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003243 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3244
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003245- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3246 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3247 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3248 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3249 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3250 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3251 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3252 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3253 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3254
3255- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3256 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3257 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3258 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3259
3260- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3261 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3262
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003263C API
3264-----
3265
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003266- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3267 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003268
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003269- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3270 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3271 tp_as_number pointer.
3272
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003273- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3274 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3275 (SF #681367)
3276
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003277- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3278 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3279 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3280 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003281
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003282Tests
3283-----
3284
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003285- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003286 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3287 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3288 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3289 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3290 pydoc.)
3291
3292- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3293
3294- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003295
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003296Windows
3297-------
3298
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003299- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3300 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3301 time).
3302
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003303- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3304 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3305
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003306- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3307 release without strong cryptography.
3308
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003309- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003310 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003311
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003312- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3313 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3314
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003315Mac
3316---
3317
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003318- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3319 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003320
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003321- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3322 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3323 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003324
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003325- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3326 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003327
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003328- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3329 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3330 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3331 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003332
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003333- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003334 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3335 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3336 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003337
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003338
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003339What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003340=================================
3341
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003342*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003343
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003344Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003345--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003346
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003347- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3348
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003349- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3350 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003351 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003352 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003353 a different meaning than before.
3354
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003355- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003356 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003357 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003358
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003359- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003360 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003361 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003362
3363- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3364 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3365 and deallocation.
3366
3367- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3368 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3369
3370- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3371 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3372 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3373 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3374 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3375
3376- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3377 now detected by the garbage collector.
3378
3379- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3380 [SF bug 519621]
3381
3382- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3383 identifier.
3384
3385- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3386 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3387 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3388 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3389 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3390 [SF bug 563060]
3391
3392- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3393 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3394 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3395 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3396 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3397
3398- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3399 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3400 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3401
3402- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3403
3404- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3405 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3406 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3407 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3408 state of the slots would be lost.)
3409
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003410Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003411-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003412
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003413- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003414 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3415 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3416 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3417 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003418 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3419 Jython 2.1.
3420
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003421- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003422 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003423 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3424 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3425 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3426 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3427 these, see PEP 302.
3428
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003429- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3430 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3431 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3432
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003433- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3434 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3435 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3436
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003437- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3438 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3439 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3440
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003441- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3442 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3443 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3444 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3445 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3446 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3447 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3448 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3449 releases or implementations.
3450
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003451- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003452 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3453 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003454
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003455- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3456 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3457
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003458- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3459 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3460 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3461
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003462- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3463 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3464
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003465- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3466 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003467 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3468 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003469
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003470- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3471 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3472 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3473 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3474 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3475
3476 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3477 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3478 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3479 pattern.
3480
3481 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3482 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3483 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3484 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3485
3486 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3487 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3488 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3489 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3490 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3491 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3492
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003493- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3494 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3495 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3496 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3497 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3498 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3499 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3500 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003501
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003502- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3503 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3504 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3505 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3506 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003507 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3508 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3509 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3510 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3511 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3512 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3513 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003514
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003515- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3516 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3517
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003518- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3519 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3520 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3521 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3522 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3523 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3524 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3525 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3526 to Zack Weinberg!
3527
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003528- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3529 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3530 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3531 type. This has been fixed now.
3532
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003533- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3534 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3535 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3536
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003537- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3538 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3539 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3540 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3541 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3542 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3543 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3544 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003545 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003546
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003547- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3548 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3549 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003550
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003551- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3552 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3553 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3554 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3555 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3556 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3557 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3558 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003559 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003560 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3561 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3562
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003563- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3564 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3565 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3566 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3567 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3568 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3569 this.)
3570
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003571- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3572 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003573 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003574 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003575 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3576 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003577 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3578 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003579
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003580- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3581 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3582 currently running.
3583
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003584- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3585 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3586 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3587 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3588
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003589- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3590 as directory names.
3591
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003592- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3593 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3594
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003595- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3596 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3597
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003598- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003599 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3600 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003601
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003602- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3603 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3604 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3605 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3606 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3607
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003608- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3609 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3610 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3611 removed.
3612
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003613- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3614 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3615 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3616
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003617- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3618 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3619 to __debug__.
3620
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003621- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3622 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3623 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3624
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003625- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3626 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3627 deprecated now.
3628
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003629- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3630 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3631 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003632
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003633- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3634 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3635 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3636 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3637 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003638
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003639- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3640 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3641
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003642- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3643 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3644 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003645 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003646 is backward compatible.
3647
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003648- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3649 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3650 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3651 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3652 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3653
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003654- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3655 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3656 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3657 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3658 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3659 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003660
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003661- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3662 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3663
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003664- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3665 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3666
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003667- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3668 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3669 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3670 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3671 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3672
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003673- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3674 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3675 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3676
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003677- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003678 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3679
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003680- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3681 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3682 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003683
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003684- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3685 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3686
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003687- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3688 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3689 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3690
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003691- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3692
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003693Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003694-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003695
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003696- Added three operators to the operator module:
3697 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3698 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3699 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3700
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003701- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3702
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003703- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3704 archives.
3705
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003706- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3707 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3708 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3709
3710 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3711
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003712- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3713 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3714 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003715 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003716
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003717- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3718 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3719 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3720 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003721 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3722 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3723 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3724 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003725
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003726- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3727 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003728
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003729- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3730
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003731- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3732 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3733
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003734- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3735 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3736 supported.
3737
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003738- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3739
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003740- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3741 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003742
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003743- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3744 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3745
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003746- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3747
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003748- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3749 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3750
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003751- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3752 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3753 functions but callable type objects.
3754
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003755- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003756 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003757 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003758
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003759- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3760 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003761
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003762- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3763 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003764
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003765- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3766 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3767 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3768 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3769
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003770- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3771 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003772
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003773- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3774 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3775 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3776 and __imul__.
3777
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003778- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003779 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3780 is called.
3781
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003782- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3783 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3784 interpreter was compiled.
3785
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003786- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3787 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3788 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003789 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003790 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3791 1, not 2.
3792
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003793- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3794 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3795 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3796 limit.
3797
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003798- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3799 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3800 bug #623464.
3801
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003802- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3803 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3804 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3805 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3806
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003807Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003808-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003809
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003810- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3811
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003812- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3813 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3814 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3815 with Python 2.3a2.
3816
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003817- os.path exposes getctime.
3818
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003819- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003820 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003821 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003822 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003823 unit tests of floating point results.
3824
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003825- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3826 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3827 has been increased.
3828
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003829- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3830 executed.
3831
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003832- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3833 postinstallation script.
3834
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003835- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3836 test the current module.
3837
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003838- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003839 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3840 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3841 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3842 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3843
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003844- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003845 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003846 Ward's Optik package.
3847
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003848- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3849 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3850 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3851 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3852
3853- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3854 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003855 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003856
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003857- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3858 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3859 shelf are binary pickles.
3860
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003861- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3862 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3863
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003864- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3865 modules are iterators now.
3866
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003867- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3868 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3869 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3870 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3871 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3872 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003873
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003874- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3875 with their entity value.
3876
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003877- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3878
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003879- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3880 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003881
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003882- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3883 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003884 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003885
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003886- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3887 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3888 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3889 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3890 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3891 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3892 main():
3893
3894 import locale
3895 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3896
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003897- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3898 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3899
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003900- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3901 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3902 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3903 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3904 to the new standard.
3905
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003906- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3907 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3908 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3909 an extension to the database.
3910
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003911- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3912 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3913 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3914 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003915 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003916
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003917- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003918 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003919
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003920- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3921 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3922 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3923 bounded integers.
3924
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003925- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3926 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3927 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3928 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3929 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3930 in existence.
3931
3932 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3933 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3934 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3935 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3936 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3937 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3938
3939 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3940 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3941 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3942 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3943
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003944- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3945 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3946 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3947
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003948- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3949
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003950- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3951 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3952 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3953 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3954
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003955- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3956 argument.
3957
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003958- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3959 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3960 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3961 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3962 [SF patch 560794].
3963
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003964- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3965 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3966 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003967 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3968 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3969 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003970
3971- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3972 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003973
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003974- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3975 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3976 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3977 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003978
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003979- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3980 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3981 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3982 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3983 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3984
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003985- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003986
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003987- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3988
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003989- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3990 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3991 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3992 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3993 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3994 identical to None.
3995
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003996- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3997 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3998 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3999 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4000 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4001 results now.
4002
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004003- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4004 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4005
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004006- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4007 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4008 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4009 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4010 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4011 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4012 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4013 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4014
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004015- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4016
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004017- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4018 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4019
4020- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4021 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4022 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4023 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4024 and other systems.
4025
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004026- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4027 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4028 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4029 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 +00004030 work well with these.
4031
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004032- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4033
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004034- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004035 connections.
4036
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004037- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4038 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4039 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4040
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004041- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4042 sets
4043
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004044- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4045 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4046 name.
4047
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004048- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4049 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4050 passed in.
4051
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004052- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004053 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004054 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4055 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004056
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004057- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4058
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004059- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4060
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004061- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4062 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4063 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4064
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004065- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4066 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4067 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4068 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004069 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004070
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004071- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004072 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004073 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004074
4075- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4076 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4077 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4078
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004079- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004080 the value of its expression argument.
4081
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004082- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4083 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4084 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4085
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004086- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4087 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4088 skipstone browser was included.
4089
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004090- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4091 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4092
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004093Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004094-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004095
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004096- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4097 names in addition to accepting file names.
4098
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004099- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4100 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4101 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4102 still used and useful.)
4103
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004104- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4105 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4106 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4107 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004108
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004109- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4110 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4111 the generated binary.
4112
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004113Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004114-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004115
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004116- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4117
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004118- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4119 except in the hands of experts.
4120
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004121- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004122 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4123 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4124 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004125
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004126- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4127 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4128 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4129 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4130 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4131 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4132 builds.
4133
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004134- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4135 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4136 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4137 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4138 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4139 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4140 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4141 new type.
4142
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004143- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004144
4145 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4146 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4147 positive infinities.
4148
4149 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4150 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4151 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4152 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4153 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4154 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4155 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4156
4157 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4158
4159 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4160
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004161- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4162 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4163 size of the executable.
4164
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004165- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4166 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4167 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4168 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004169
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004170- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4171
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004172- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4173 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4174 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004175
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004176- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4177 well as Unix.
4178
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004179- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4180 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4181 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4182 modules in the README file for details.
4183
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004184C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004185-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004186
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004187- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4188 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004189 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004190 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004191 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004192
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004193- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4194 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4195 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4196 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4197 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4198 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004199 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004200 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4201 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4202 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4203 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4204 aligned.)
4205
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004206- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4207 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4208 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4209
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004210- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4211 level.
4212
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004213- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4214 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4215 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4216 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4217 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4218
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004219- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4220 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4221 code.
4222
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004223- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4224 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4225 adjusting for negative indices.
4226
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004227- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4228 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4229 object.
4230
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004231- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4232 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4233 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4234
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004235- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4236 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004237
4238- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4239
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004240- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4241 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4242 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4243 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4244
4245- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4246
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004247- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004248
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004249- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004250 without going through the buffer API.
4251
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004252- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004253
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004254- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4255 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4256 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4257 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4258
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004259- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4260 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4261
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004262- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004263 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4264
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004265New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004266-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004267
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004268- OpenVMS is now supported.
4269
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004270- AtheOS is now supported.
4271
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004272- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4273
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004274- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4275
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004276Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004277-----
4278
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004279- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4280 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4281 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004282
4283Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004284-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004285
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004286- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4287 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4288 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4289 bugs.
4290 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004291 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004292 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4293 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004294 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004295
4296- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004297 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004298
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004299- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4300 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4301
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004302- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4303 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004304 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004305 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4306
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004307- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4308 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4309 use files" uninstall option).
4310
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004311- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4312
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004313- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4314 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4315
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004316- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4317 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4318 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4319
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004320- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4321 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4322 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4323 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4324 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004325 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4326 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4327 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004328
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004329- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004330 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004331 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4332 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4333 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4334 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4335 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4336 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4337 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4338 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4339 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4340 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4341 work around.
4342
4343- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4344 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4345 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4346 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4347 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4348 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4349 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4350 specified with O_CREAT too).
4351
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004352Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004353----
4354
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004355- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004356
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004357- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4358 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4359 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4360
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004361- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4362 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4363 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4364
4365- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4366 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4367 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4368 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4369 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4370 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4371 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4372 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004373
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004374- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4375 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4376 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004377
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004378- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4379 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4380 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4381 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4382 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004383
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004384- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4385 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4386 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004387
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004388- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4389 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004390
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004391- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4392 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4393 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4394 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4395 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004396
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004397- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4398 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4399 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4400
4401- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4402 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4403 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004404
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004405- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4406 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4407 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4408 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004409 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004410
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004411- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4412 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004413
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004414- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4415 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004416
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004417- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004418 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004419 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4420 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004421
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004422
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004423What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004424===============================
4425
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004426*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4427
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004428Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004429--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004430
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004431- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4432 with a custom metaclass.
4433
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004434Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004435-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004436
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004437- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4438 are proxies.
4439
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004440Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004441-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004442
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004443- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4444 very short strings.
4445
4446- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4447 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4448 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4449 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4450 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4451
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004452Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004453-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004454
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004455- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4456 close or delete time).
4457
4458- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4459 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4460
4461- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4462
4463- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004464 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004465
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004466Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004467-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004468
4469Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004470-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004471
4472C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004473-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004474
4475New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004476-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004477
4478Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004479-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004480
4481Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004482-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004483
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004484- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4485
4486- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4487 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4488
4489- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4490 deleted at process exit time.
4491
4492- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4493 in backslash.
4494
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004495Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004496----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004497
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004498- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4499 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4500 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4501
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004502
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004503What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004504===========================
4505
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004506*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4507
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004508Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004509--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004510
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004511- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4512 been extensively updated. See
4513
4514 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4515
4516 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4517
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004518- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4519 deleted!
4520
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004521- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4522 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4523 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4524 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4525 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4526
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004527- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4528
4529 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4530 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4531
4532 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4533 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4534 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4535 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4536 supported anyway.
4537
4538 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4539 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4540
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004541- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4542 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4543 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4544 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4545 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004546
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004547- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4548 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4549 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4550
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004551Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004552-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004553
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004554- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4555 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4556 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4557 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4558 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4559 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004560 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4561 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4562 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4563 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004564
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004565- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4566 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4567 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4568
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004569Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004570-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004571
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004572- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4573
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004574Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004575-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004576
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004577- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4578 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4579 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4580 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4581 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4582 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4583
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004584- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4585
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004586- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4587
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004588- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4589
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004590- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4591 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4592 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4593
4594- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4595
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004596Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004597-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004598
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004599- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4600 off a search on Google.
4601
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004602Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004603-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004604
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004605- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4606 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4607 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4608 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4609 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4610 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4611 other platforms should do likewise.
4612
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004613- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4614 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4615 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4616
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004617C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004618-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004619
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004620- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4621 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4622 producing key-value pairs.
4623
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004624- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004625 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004626 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4627 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4628 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4629 previously went unchallenged.
4630
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004631New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004632-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004633
4634Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004635-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004636
4637Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004638-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004639
4640Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004641----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004642
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004643- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4644 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004645
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004646- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4647 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4648 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4649 home.
4650
4651
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004652What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004653===========================
4654
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004655*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4656
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004657Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004658--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004659
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004660- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4661 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004662
4663 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004664 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004665
4666 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4667 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004668 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004669 This needs to be documented.
4670
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004671- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4672 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4673
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004674- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4675 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4676 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4677
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004678- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4679 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4680
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004681- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4682 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4683 class forbids it).
4684
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004685- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4686 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4687 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4688
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004689- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4690
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004691Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004692-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004693
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004694- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4695 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004696 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004697
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004698- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4699 (like 1 + '').
4700
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004701Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004702-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004703
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004704- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4705 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4706 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4707 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004708 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004709 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4710
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004711- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4712 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4713 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4714 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4715
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004716- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4717 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004718 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4719 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4720 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004721
4722- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4723 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004724
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004725- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4726 bytes on its input.
4727
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004728Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004729-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004730
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004731- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004732 convenience function.
4733
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004734- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4735 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4736 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004737 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4738 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4739 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4740 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4741 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4742 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004743
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004744- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4745 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4746 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4747 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4748
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004749- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4750 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4751 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4752
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004753- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4754 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4755 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4756 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4757
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004758- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4759 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004760 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004761 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4762 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4763 new -l and -e options.
4764
4765- statcache is now deprecated.
4766
4767- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4768 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004769 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004770 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4771 time properly taken into account.
4772
4773- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4774 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4775 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4776 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4777
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004778Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004779-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004780
4781Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004782-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004783
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004784- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4785 is built with libdb3 if available.
4786
4787- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4788
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004789C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004790-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004791
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004792- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4793 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4794 PySequence_Size().
4795
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004796- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4797
4798- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4799 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4800 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4801
4802- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4803 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4804
4805- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4806 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4807
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004808New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004809-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004810
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004811- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4812 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4813
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004814- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4815 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4816
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004817- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4818
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004819Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004820-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004821
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004822- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4823 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4824
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004825Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004826-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004827
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004828Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004829----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004830
4831- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4832 removed completely in the next release.
4833
4834- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4835 OSX.
4836
4837- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4838 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4839
4840- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4841
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004842
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004843What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004844===========================
4845
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004846*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4847
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004848Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004849--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004850
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004851- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004852 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004853 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004854 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4855 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004856 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4857 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004858 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4859 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004860
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004861- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4862 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4863
4864- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4865 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4866
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004867Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004868-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004869
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004870- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4871 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4872 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4873 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4874 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4875 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4876 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4877 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4878
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004879- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4880 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4881 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4882 example).
4883
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004884- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004885 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004886 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004887 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004888
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004889- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4890 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4891 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004892 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004893
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004894- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4895 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4896 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4897 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4898 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4899 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4900
4901 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4902
4903 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4904
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004905Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004906-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004907
4908- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4909
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004910- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4911
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004912- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4913 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004914
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004915- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4916 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4917 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4918 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4919 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4920 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004921 attributes.
4922
4923- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4924 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4925 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004926
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004927- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4928 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4929 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004930
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004931- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4932 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4933 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004934 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4935 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4936
4937- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4938 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004939
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004940Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004941-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004942
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004943- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4944 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4945
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004946- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4947 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4948 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4949 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4950
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004951- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4952 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4953 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4954 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4955
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004956 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4957 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4958 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4959 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4960 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4961 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4962 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4963 without losing information).
4964
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004965- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004966 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4967 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4968 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4969 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4970 module).
4971
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004972 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004973 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4974 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4975 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4976 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004977
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004978- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004979 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4980 encoding.
4981
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004982- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4983 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4984
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004985- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004986 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4987
4988- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4989 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4990 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4991 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4992
4993- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4994
4995- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4996 ON, and OFF.
4997
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004998- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4999 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5000
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005001Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005002-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005003
5004- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5005 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5006 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005007
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005008- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5009 been added: -X and -E.
5010
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005011Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005012-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005013
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005014- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5015 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5016
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005017C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005018-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005019
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005020- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5021 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5022 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5023 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5024 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5025
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005026- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5027 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5028 as long) arguments.
5029
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005030- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5031 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5032 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5033 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5034 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5035 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5036
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005037- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5038 input.
5039
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005040New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005041-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005042
5043Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005044-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005045
5046Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005047-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005048
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005049- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5050 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5051 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5052
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005053- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5054 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5055 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005056 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005057
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005058 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5059 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5060 import signal
5061 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005062
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005063 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005064 while 1:
5065 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005066 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005067 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5068 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5069 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5070 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005071
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005072
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005073What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5074===========================
5075
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005076*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5077
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005078Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005079--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005080
5081- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5082 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5083 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5084
5085- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5086 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5087 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5088 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5089 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5090 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5091 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005092
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005093- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005094 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005095 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5096 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5097 associate a docstring with a property.
5098
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005099- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5100 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5101 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5102 other built-in object types.
5103
5104- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5105 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5106 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5107 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5108 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5109
5110- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5111 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5112
5113- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5114 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005115 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005116 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5117 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5118 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5119 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5120 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5121
5122- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5123 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5124 class.
5125
5126- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5127 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5128 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5129 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5130
5131- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5132 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5133 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5134 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5135
5136- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5137 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5138
5139- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5140 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5141 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5142 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5143 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005144 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005145 with the same value as s.
5146
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005147- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5148
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005149Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005150----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005151
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005152- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5153
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005154- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5155 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5156 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5157 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5158 objects.
5159
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005160- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5161 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005162 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5163 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5164
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005165- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5166 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5167 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5168
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005169Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005170-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005171
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005172- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5173 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5174 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5175 by the instances.
5176
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005177- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5178 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5179 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5180
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005181- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5182 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5183 before the entire comparison is complete.
5184
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005185- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5186 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5187 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5188
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005189- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5190 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5191 getwriter().
5192
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005193- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5194 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5195
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005196- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005197 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5198 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5199
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005200- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5201 iterable object.
5202
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005203- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5204 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005205
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005206- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5207 authentication.
5208
5209- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5210 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005211
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005212- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005213 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5214 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5215 a sample driver.)
5216
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005217Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005218-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005219
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005220- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5221 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5222 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5223 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5224 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5225 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5226 kernel has large file support.
5227
5228- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5229 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5230 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5231 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5232 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5233
5234- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5235 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5236 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5237
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005238C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005239-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005240
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005241- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5242 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5243
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005244New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005245-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005246
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005247- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5248 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5249
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005250Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005251-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005252
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005253- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5254 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5255 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5256 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5257 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5258
5259- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5260 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5261 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5262 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5263
5264- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5265 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5266
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005267Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005268-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005269
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005270- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005271 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5272 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005273
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005274
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005275What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5276===========================
5277
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005278*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5279
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005280Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005281----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005282
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005283- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5284 big to represent as a C double.
5285
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005286- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5287 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5288 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5289 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5290 restriction).
5291
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005292- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5293 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5294 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5295 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5296 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5297
5298 >>> dir([])
5299 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5300 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5301 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5302 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5303 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5304 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5305 'reverse', 'sort']
5306
5307 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5308
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005309- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005310 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5311 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5312 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5313 OverflowError exception.
5314
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005315- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005316 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005317 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5318 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5319 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5320 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5321 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005322 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005323 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5324 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5325
5326 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5327 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5328 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5329 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005330
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005331- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005332 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5333 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5334 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5335 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5336 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5337 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5338 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5339 once it is created.
5340
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005341- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5342 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5343 (key, value) pairs.
5344
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005345- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005346 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5347 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5348
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005349- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5350 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5351 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5352 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5353 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005354
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005355- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005356 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5357 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5358
5359 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5360
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005361- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005362 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5363
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005364Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005365-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005366
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005367- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005368 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5369 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005370
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005371- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5372 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5373 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5374 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5375 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5376 in this area anymore).
5377
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005378- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5379 threading.Timer.
5380
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005381- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5382 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5383
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005384- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005385 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5386
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005387- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005388 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5389 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5390 converted to Python longs.
5391
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005392- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005393 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5394
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005395- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5396 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5397 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5398
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005399Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005400-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005401
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005402- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5403 division operators as per PEP 238.
5404
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005405Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005406-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005407
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005408- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5409 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5410 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5411 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5412
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005413C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005414-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005415
5416- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005417
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005418- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5419 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005420 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005421
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005422 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5423 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005424 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005425 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005426
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005427- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005428 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5429 module:
5430
5431 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005432
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005433 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5434 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005435
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005436 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5437 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005438
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005439 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5440
5441 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5442
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005443- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005444 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5445 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5446 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005447
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005448New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005449-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005450
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005451- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5452 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5453 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5454 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5455 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005456
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005457Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005458-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005459
5460Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005461-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005462
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005463- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5464 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5465 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5466 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005467 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5468 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5469 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5470 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5471 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005472
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005473- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005474 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5475
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005476
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005477What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5478===========================
5479
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005480*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5481
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005482Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005483-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005484
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005485- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5486 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5487
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005488- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5489 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5490 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005491
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005492- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5493 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5494 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5495 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005496
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005497- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5498
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005499- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005500
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005501Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005502-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005503
5504- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005505 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005506 the module docstring for details.
5507
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005508Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005509-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005510
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005511- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005512 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5513 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5514 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005515
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005516- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5517 Nick Mathewson.
5518
5519Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005520----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005521
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005522- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5523 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5524 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5525 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5526 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5527 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5528 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5529 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5530
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005531- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5532 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5533 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5534 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5535
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005536- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5537 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5538 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5539 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5540 come a long way).
5541
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005542- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5543 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5544 write filters for these warnings).
5545
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005546- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5547 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5548 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5549 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5550 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5551
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005552- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5553 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5554 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5555 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5556 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5557 older distribution.
5558
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005559Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005560-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005561
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005562- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5563 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005564 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005565
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005566- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5567 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5568 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5569
5570- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5571
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005572- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5573
5574- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5575
5576- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5577
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005578- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005579
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005580- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5581
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005582New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005583-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005584
5585C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005586-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005587
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005588- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5589 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5590 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5591 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5592 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5593 against buffer overruns.
5594
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005595- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005596 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5597 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005598 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5599 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5600 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5601
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005602- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5603 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5604 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5605 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5606 deprecated.
5607
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005608Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005609-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005610
5611- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5612 relevant is found.
5613
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005614
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005615What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005616===========================
5617
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005618*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5619
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005620Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005621----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005622
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005623- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5624 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5625 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5626 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5627 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5628 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5629 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5630 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005631 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005632 repaired.
5633
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005634- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005635 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005636 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5637 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5638 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5639 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5640 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5641 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5642 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5643 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5644
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005645- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5646 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5647 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5648 leading BMO character).
5649
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005650- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5651 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5652 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5653
5654 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5655 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5656 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005657
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005658 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5659 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5660 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5661 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5662 for various simple to use conversions.
5663
5664 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5665 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5666
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005667 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5668 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5669 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5670 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5671 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5672 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5673 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5674 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5675 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5676 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5677 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5678 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5679 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5680 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5681 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005682
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005683- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5684 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5685 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005686 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005687 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005688
5689 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005690 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5691 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5692 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5693 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5694 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005695 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5696 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005697
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005698 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5699 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5700 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005701 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005702
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005703- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5704 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5705 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5706 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5707 floating arithmetic,
5708
5709 x = 9007199254740992.0
5710 print long(x)
5711
5712 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5713 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5714 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5715 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5716 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5717 functions are of good quality).
5718
5719 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5720 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5721 algorithms to break.
5722
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005723- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5724 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5725 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5726 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5727 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5728 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5729 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5730 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5731 order.
5732
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005733- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5734 operation along the most common code paths.
5735
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005736- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5737 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5738
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005739- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5740 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5741 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5742 {}.update(UserDict())
5743
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005744- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5745 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5746 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5747 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5748 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5749 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5750 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5751 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5752
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005753- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005754 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005755
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005756 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005757 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5758 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005759 join() method of strings
5760 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005761 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5762 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005763 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005764 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005765
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005766- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5767 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5768
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005769- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5770 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5771
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005772- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5773 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5774 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5775 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5776
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005777- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5778 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005779 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005780 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5781 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005782
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005783- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5784
5785
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005786Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005787-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005788
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005789- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005790 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005791 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5792 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5793
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005794- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5795 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5796
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005797- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5798 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5799 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5800 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5801
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005802- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5803 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5804 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5805
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005806- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5807
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005808- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5809
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005810- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5811 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5812 that are still imported into string.py).
5813
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005814- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5815
5816- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5817 Now it does.
5818
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005819- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5820
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005821- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5822 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5823 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5824 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5825 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005826 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5827 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005828
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005829- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5830 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5831 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5832 'help(object)'.
5833
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005834Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005835-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005836
5837- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005838 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005839 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5840 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5841
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005842- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005843 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5844 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005845
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005846C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005847-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005848
5849- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5850 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005851
5852----
5853
5854**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**