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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 Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000015- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
16 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
17
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000018- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
19
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000020- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
21
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000022- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
23
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000024- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
25 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
26
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000027- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
28 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number
29 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
30
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000031- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
32 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000033 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000034
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000035- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
36 now encodes backslash correctly.
37
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000038- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
39
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000040- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
41 and long longs.
42
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000043- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
44 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
45 message in this case.
46
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000047- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
48 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
49 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
50 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
51 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
52
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000053- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000054
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000055- Speed up some Unicode operations.
56
57- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
58
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000059- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000060 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
61
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000062- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
63
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000064- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
65 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
66
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000067- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
68
69- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
70
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000071- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
72 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
73 was empty.
74
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000075- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
76 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
77
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000078- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000079 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000080
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000081- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
82 codes.
83
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000084- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
85 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
86 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
87
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000088- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
89 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
90
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000091- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000092 (fixes bug #1119418).
93
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000094- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
95
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000096- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
97 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
98
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000099- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
100 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
101 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
102
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000103- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
104
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000105- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
106 reference counts in some error exit cases.
107
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000108- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
109 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
110 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
111 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
112 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
113 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
114 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
115 realloc.
116
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000117- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
118 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
119
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000120- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
121 like their int counterparts.
122
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000123- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
124 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
125 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
126 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
127 for a longer write-up of the problem).
128
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000129- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
130 serializing floats.
131
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000132- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
133 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
134 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
135
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000136- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
137 278.
138
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000139- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
140 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
141 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
142 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000143 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000144 PyNumber_*().
145 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
146
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000147- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
148 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
149 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
150 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
151
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000152- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
153 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
154 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
155 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
156 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
157
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000158- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
159 disabled caused a crash.
160
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000161- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
162 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
163
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000164- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000165 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
166
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000167- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
168
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000169- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000170 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
171 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
172 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000173
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000174- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
175
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000176- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
177 returning None.
178
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000179- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000180 ('\') with a specific error message.
181
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000182- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
183
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000184- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
185 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
186
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000187- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000188 an ferror() call.
189
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000190- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
191 list.sort().
192
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000193- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
194 (2+3) --> (5).
195
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000196- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
197
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000198- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
199 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000200
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000201- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
202 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
203 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
204
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000205- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
206 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
207 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
208
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000209Extension Modules
210-----------------
211
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000212- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
213
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000214- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
215 problem on AIX.
216
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000217- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
218
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000219- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
220
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000221- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
222
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000223- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
224 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
225
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000226- Get bsddb module to build with BSD DB version 3.2
227
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000228- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
229 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
230
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000231- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
232
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000233- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
234 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
235
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000236- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
237 returns in cStringIO.c.
238
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000239- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
240 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
241
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000242- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
243
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000244- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
245
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000246- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
247 the file system encoding.
248
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000249- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
250 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000251
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000252- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
253
254- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000255 line without newlines.
256
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000257- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
258 on Windows.
259
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000260- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000261 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
262
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000263- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
264 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
265 for large or negative values.
266
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000267- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000268 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000269
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000270- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
271
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000272- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
273 if available on the platform.
274
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000275- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
276 available on the platform.
277
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000278- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
279 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
280
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000281- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
282
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000283- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
284 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
285 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
286
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000287- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
288
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000289- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
290 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
291
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000292- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000293 file size.
294
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000295- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
296
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000297- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
298 {remove_history,replace_history}
299
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000300- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
301 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000302
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000303- stat_float_times is now True.
304
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000305- array.array objects are now picklable.
306
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000307- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
308 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
309
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000310- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
311 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
312 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
313
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000314- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
315 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000316
317Library
318-------
319
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000320- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
321
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000322- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
323 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
324 LoadError subclasses IOError.
325
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000326- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000327 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
328 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
329 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
330 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
331
332 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
333 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
334 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
335 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
336 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000337
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000338- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
339 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
340 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
341
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000342- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
343
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000344- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
345
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000346- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
347 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
348 illegal argument)
349
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000350- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
351 is an error in the format string.
352
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000353- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
354
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000355- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000356 "parent" argument.
357
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000358- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
359 for padding.
360
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000361- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
362 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
363
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000364- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
365 to get the correct encoding.
366
367- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
368 languages.
369
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000370- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
371
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000372- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
373
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000374- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
375
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000376- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
377 functionality.
378
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000379- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
380
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000381- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
382 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
383
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000384- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
385 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
386 match the Content-Length header.
387
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000388- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
389
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000390- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
391 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000392 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000393
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000394- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
395
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000396- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
397
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000398- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
399 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
400
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000401- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
402 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
403 Tkdnd.
404
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000405- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
406 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
407
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000408- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
409 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
410
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000411- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000412 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
413
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000414- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
415 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
416
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000417- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
418 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
419
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000420- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000421 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000422
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000423- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
424
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000425- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
426 error messages.
427
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000428- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
429
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000430- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
431 Bug #1224621.
432
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000433- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
434 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
435 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
436 terminates by raising StopIteration.
437
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000438- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
439
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000440- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
441 component of the path.
442
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000443- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
444 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
445 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
446 class at all.
447
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000448- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
449 files to PyPI.
450
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000451- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
452 them to PyPI.
453
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000454- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
455 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
456 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
457 work as expected.
458
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000459- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
460 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
461
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000462- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000463 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
464
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000465- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
466
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000467- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
468 to build.
469
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000470- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
471 symbolic links on Windows.
472
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000473- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000474 profile.py if available.
475
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000476- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
477
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000478- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
479 in LWPCookieJar.
480
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000481- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
482
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000483- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
484
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000485- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
486
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000487- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
488
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000489- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
490
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000491- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
492
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000493- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
494
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000495- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
496
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000497- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
498 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
499 be exploited in various ways.
500
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000501- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000502 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
503
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000504- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
505 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
506
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000507- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000508 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
509
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000510- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
511
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000512- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
513
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000514- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
515
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000516- Enhancements to the csv module:
517
518 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000519 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000520 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000521 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
522 reporting.
523 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
524 dictates.
525 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000526 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000527 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000528 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
529 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000530 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
531 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000532 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000533 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
534 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
535 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
536 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
537 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
538 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
539 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
540 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
541 without first creating a dialect class.
542 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
543 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
544 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000545 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000546 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
547 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000548 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
549 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
550 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
551 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000552 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
553 This has been fixed.
554
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000555- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
556 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
557 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
558 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
559
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000560- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
561
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000562- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
563 (Bug #951915).
564
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000565- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
566 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
567 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000568 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000569
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000570- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
571
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000572- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
573 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
574
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000575- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
576
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000577- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
578
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000579- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
580
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000581- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
582
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000583- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
584
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000585- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
586 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
587 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
588
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000589- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000590 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000591
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000592- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
593 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
594 tokenizer with very long source lines.
595
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000596- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
597 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
598 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000599
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000600- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
601 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000602
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000603- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
604 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
605
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000606- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
607 correctly.
608
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000609- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
610 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
611 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
612 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
613 between two lines.
614
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000615- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
616 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
617 handlers.
618
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000619- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000620 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
621 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000622
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000623- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
624 considering it exactly like a '*'.
625
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000626- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
627 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000628
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000629- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
630
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000631Build
632-----
633
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000634- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
635
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000636- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
637 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
638
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000639- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
640 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
641
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000642- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
643 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
644 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000645 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000646
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000647- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
648 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
649 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
650
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000651- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
652
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000653- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
654 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
655
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000656- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
657 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
658 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
659 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
660 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
661 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
662 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
663 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
664
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000665- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
666 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
667 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
668 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
669
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000670
671C API
672-----
673
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000674- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
675
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000676- Removed PyRange_New().
677
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000678- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
679 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
680 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
681 mappings.
682
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000683
684Tests
685-----
686
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000687- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000688
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000689- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
690 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
691
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000692
693Documentation
694-------------
695
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000696- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
697
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000698- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
699
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000700- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
701
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000702- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
703
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000704- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
705
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000706- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
707
708- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
709
710- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
711
712- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
713
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000714- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
715 Closes bug #1166582.
716
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000717- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
718 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
719 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
720
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000721Mac
722---
723
724
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000725New platforms
726-------------
727
728- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
729
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000730
731Tools/Demos
732-----------
733
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000734- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
735 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
736 source files that need an encoding declaration.
737 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
738
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000739- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
740
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000741- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000742
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000743- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
744 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000745
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000746What's New in Python 2.4 final?
747===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000748
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000749*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000750
751Core and builtins
752-----------------
753
754- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
755 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
756 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
757
758
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000759What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
760==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000761
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000762*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000763
764Core and builtins
765-----------------
766
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000767- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
768 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
769 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
770
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000771
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000772Library
773-------
774
775- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
776 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
777 raised is re-raised.
778
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000779- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
780 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
781
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000782- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
783 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
784 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
785 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
786 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
787 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
788 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
789 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
790 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
791 by the slice are recomputed now.
792
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000793- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000794
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000795Build
796-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000797
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000798- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
799 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
800 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000801
802C API
803-----
804
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000805- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
806
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000807
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000808What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
809================================
810
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000811*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000812
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000813License
814-------
815
816The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
817is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
818changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
819Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
820intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
821durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
822the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
823License::
824
825 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
826
827says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
828to Python 2.1.1.
829
830The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
831License Version 2.
832
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000833Core and builtins
834-----------------
835
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000836- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
837 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
838 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
839 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
840 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
841 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
842 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000843 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000844 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
845 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
846
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000847- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000848
849Extension Modules
850-----------------
851
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000852- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
853 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
854 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
855 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000856
857Library
858-------
859
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000860- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
861 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
862 returned.
863
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000864- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
865
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000866- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
867 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
868
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000869- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
870
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000871- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
872 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000873
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000874- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
875
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000876- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
877
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000878- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000879 the source code is updated and reloaded.
880
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000881Build
882-----
883
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000884- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000885
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000886What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
887================================
888
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000889*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000890
891Core and builtins
892-----------------
893
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000894- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000895 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
896
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000897- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
898 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
899 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
900 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
901
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000902- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
903 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
904
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000905- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
906 constant.
907
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000908- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
909 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
910 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
911 large), and to anomalies such as
912 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
913 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
914 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
915 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000916
917Extension modules
918-----------------
919
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000920- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
921 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000922 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
923 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
924 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000925
926Library
927-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000928
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000929- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000930 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000931 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
932 --swig-cpp.
933
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000934- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
935 it is set.
936
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000937- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000938
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000939- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
940 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
941 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
942 Closes bug #1039270.
943
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000944- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000945
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000946 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000947 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
948 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
949 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
950 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
951 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
952 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
953 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
954 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
955 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
956 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
957 + Updates to documentation.
958
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000959- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
960 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
961 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
962 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
963
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000964- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000965
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000966- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
967 applications should use the getmember function.
968
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000969- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
970
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000971- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
972 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
973 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
974 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
975 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
976 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
977 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
978 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
979 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
980
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000981- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
982 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000983 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000984
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000985- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
986 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
987 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
988 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
989 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
990 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
991 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
992 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000993
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000994- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
995 the new public features (of which there are many).
996
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000997- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000998 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
999 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1000 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1001 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001002 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001003
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001004- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1005
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001006- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1007 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1008 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1009 options.
1010
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001011- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1012 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1013 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1014 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1015 conditions under which non-string values work.
1016
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001017Build
1018-----
1019
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001020- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1021 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1022 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1023
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001024- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1025 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1026 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1027 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1028 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001029
1030C API
1031-----
1032
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001033- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1034 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1035
1036- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1037
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001038- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1039 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1040 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1041 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1042 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1043 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1044 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1045 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1046 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1047
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001048- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1049
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001050- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1051 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1052 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001053
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001054Tests
1055-----
1056
1057- test__locale ported to unittest
1058
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001059Mac
1060---
1061
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001062- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1063 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1064 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001065
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001066Tools/Demos
1067-----------
1068
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001069- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1070 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1071 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1072 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1073 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001074
1075
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001076What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1077=================================
1078
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001079*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001080
1081Core and builtins
1082-----------------
1083
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001084- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001085 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1086
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001087- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1088 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1089 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1090 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1091 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1092 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1093 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1094 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001095 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1096 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1097 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1098 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1099 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001100
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001101- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1102 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1103 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1104 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1105 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1106
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001107- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1108
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001109- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1110 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1111
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001112- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1113 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1114 modified the list.
1115
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001116- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1117 functions is now writable.
1118
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001119- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1120 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1121 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1122 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1123
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001124- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1125 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1126 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1127 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1128 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001129
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001130- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1131 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1132
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001133Extension modules
1134-----------------
1135
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001136- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1137
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001138- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1139 data.
1140
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001141- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1142 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1143 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1144 supposed to have been truncated away.
1145
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001146- Added socket.socketpair().
1147
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001148- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1149 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1150
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001151- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001152 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1153
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001154Library
1155-------
1156
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001157- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001158 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001159
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001160- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1161 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1162
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001163- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1164 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1165
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001166- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1167
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001168- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1169 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001170
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001171- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1172 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1173
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001174- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1175
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001176- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1177
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001178- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1179
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001180- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1181 Percivall.
1182
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001183- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1184 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1185
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001186- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1187 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1188 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001189 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001190
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001191- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1192 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1193 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1194 and exponent.
1195
1196- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1197
1198- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001199 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001200 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1201
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001202- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1203 to the readline module.
1204
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001205- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001206 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1207 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001208
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001209- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1210 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1211 contains symlinks.
1212
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001213- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1214 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1215
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001216- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1217 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1218 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1219
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001220- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1221 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1222 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1223 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1224 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1225 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1226 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1227 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1228 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1229 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1230 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1231 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1232 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1233
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001234- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1235
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001236Tools/Demos
1237-----------
1238
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001239- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1240 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1241
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001242- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1243
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001244Build
1245-----
1246
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001247- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1248 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1249 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1250 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1251 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1252 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1253 plans to do so.
1254
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001255- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1256 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1257
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001258- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1259 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1260
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001261- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1262 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1263
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001264- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1265 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1266
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001267- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1268 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1269
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001270C API
1271-----
1272
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001273..
1274
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001275Documentation
1276-------------
1277
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001278- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1279 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1280
1281- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1282 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1283 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001284
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001285New platforms
1286-------------
1287
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001288- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1289
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001290Tests
1291-----
1292
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001293..
1294
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001295Windows
1296-------
1297
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001298- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1299 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1300 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1301 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1302 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1303 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1304 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1305 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1306 the problem.
1307
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001308Mac
1309---
1310
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001311..
1312
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001313
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001314What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1315=================================
1316
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001317*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001318
1319Core and builtins
1320-----------------
1321
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001322- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1323 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1324 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1325 sensitive code.
1326
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001327- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001328 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001329
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001330 @staticmethod
1331 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001332
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001333 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001334
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001335- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1336 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1337 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1338 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1339 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1340 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1341 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1342 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1343 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1344 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1345 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1346
1347 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1348 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1349 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1350 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1351 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1352 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1353 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1354
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001355- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1356 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1357
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001358- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001359 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001360
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001361- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001362 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001363 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1364
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001365- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001366 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1367 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1368
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001369- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1370 types that support garbage collection.
1371
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001372- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1373
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001374- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1375 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1376 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1377 Jython.
1378
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001379- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1380
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001381- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1382 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1383
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001384- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1385 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1386 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001387
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001388- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1389 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1390 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1391
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001392Extension modules
1393-----------------
1394
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001395- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1396
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001397Library
1398-------
1399
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001400- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1401 TIS-620
1402
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001403- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1404 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1405 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1406 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1407 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1408 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1409 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1410 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1411 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1412 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1413
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001414- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1415
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001416- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1417 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1418 same as when the argument is omitted).
1419 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1420
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001421- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1422
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001423- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1424 schemes are offered.
1425
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001426- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1427
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001428- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1429 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1430 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1431
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001432- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1433
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001434- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1435 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1436
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001437- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1438 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1439 when dummy_threading is being used.
1440
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001441- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1442 from a tarfile.
1443
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001444- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001445 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001446
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001447- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1448 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1449 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1450 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1451
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001452- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1453 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1454
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001455- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1456 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1457 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1458 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1459 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1460 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1461 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1462 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1463 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1464 by some other method in progress).
1465
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001466- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1467 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1468 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001469
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001470- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1471
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001472- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1473 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1474 AM Kuchling.
1475
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001476- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1477 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1478 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1479
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001480- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1481 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1482 instead of unsigned.
1483
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001484- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001485 no longer part of the public API.
1486
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001487- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1488 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1489 string methods of the same name).
1490
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001491- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001492 SF patch 945642.
1493
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001494- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1495
1496 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1497
1498 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1499 DocTestSuites.
1500
1501- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1502 that provide thread-local data.
1503
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001504- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1505 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1506
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001507- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1508
1509- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1510 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1511 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1512
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001513- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1514
1515 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1516 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1517 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001518
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001519 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1520 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1521 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1522 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1523
1524 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1525 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1526
1527 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1528 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1529 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1530 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1531
1532 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1533 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1534 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1535 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1536 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1537
1538 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1539 wrapping help output.
1540
1541 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1542 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1543 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001544
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001545C API
1546-----
1547
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001548- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1549 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1550 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1551 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1552 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1553 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1554 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1555 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1556 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1557 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1558 its visible semantics have not changed.
1559
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001560- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1561 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1562
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001563Documentation
1564-------------
1565
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001566- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001567
1568 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001569 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001570
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001571 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001572
1573 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1574
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001575- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001576
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001577Tests
1578-----
1579
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001580- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001581 platforms that use the Makefile.
1582
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001583- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1584 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1585 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1586
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001587
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001588What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1589=================================
1590
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001591*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001592
1593Core and builtins
1594-----------------
1595
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001596- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1597 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1598 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1599 objects now (one object instead of three).
1600
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001601- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1602 Windows DLLs.
1603
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001604- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1605 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001606
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001607- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1608 a new .pyc magic.
1609
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001610- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1611 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1612 be there.
1613
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001614- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1615 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1616 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1617
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001618- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1619 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1620 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1621
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001622- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1623
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001624- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1625 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1626 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001627
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001628- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1629 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1630
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001631- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1632
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001633- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001634 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001635
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001636- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1637
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001638- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1639
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001640- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1641 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1642
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001643- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1644 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1645 Fixes bug #858016 .
1646
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001647- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1648 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1649 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1650
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001651- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1652 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1653 improves their performance (about 35%).
1654
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001655- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1656 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1657 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1658
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001659- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1660 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1661 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1662 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1663
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001664- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1665 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001666 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001667 length is not known).
1668
1669- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1670 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001671 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1672 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001673 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1674
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001675- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1676 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1677
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001678- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1679 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1680 keyword arguments.
1681
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001682- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1683 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1684 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1685
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001686- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1687 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1688 cases.
1689
1690- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1691 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1692 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1693 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1694 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1695 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1696 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1697 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1698 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1699 a release build.
1700
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001701- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1702 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1703
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001704- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001705 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001706
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001707- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1708 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1709 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1710 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1711 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1712 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1713 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1714 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1715 destroyed.
1716
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001717- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1718 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1719 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1720 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1721 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1722 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1723 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1724 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1725
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001726- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1727 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1728 character other than a space.
1729
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001730- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1731 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1732 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1733 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1734 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1735 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1736 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1737 attributes with the same name.
1738
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001739- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1740 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1741 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1742 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1743 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1744 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1745 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1746 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1747 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1748 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1749 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1750 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1751 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1752 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001753
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001754- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1755 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1756 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1757 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1758 This has been repaired.
1759
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001760- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1761
1762- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1763
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001764- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1765 over a sequence.
1766
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001767- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001768 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001769
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001770- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1771
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001772- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1773 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1774 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1775 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1776 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1777 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1778 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1779 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1780
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001781- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1782 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1783 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1784
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001785- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1786 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1787 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1788 freelist.
1789
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001790- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1791 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1792
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001793- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1794 number.
1795
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001796- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1797 a TypeError exception.
1798
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001799- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1800 820195.
1801
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001802- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1803 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1804 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1805
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001806- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001807 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1808 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001809
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001810- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1811 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1812 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1813
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001814- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1815 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001816 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001817
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001818- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001819 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1820 the first call.
1821
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001822
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001823Extension modules
1824-----------------
1825
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001826- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1827 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1828
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001829- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1830 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1831 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1832 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1833 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1834 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1835 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001836
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001837- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1838
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001839- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1840
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001841- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1842 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1843
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001844- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1845 fewer false positives.
1846
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001847- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1848 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1849
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001850- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001851 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1852
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001853- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001854 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001855 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001856 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1857 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001858
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001859- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1860 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1861 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1862 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1863
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001864- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1865 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1866 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1867 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1868 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1869 #897625.
1870
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001871- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1872 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1873
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001874- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1875 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1876 and pops on either side of the deque.
1877
1878- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1879 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1880
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001881- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1882 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1883 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1884 other functions that expect a function argument.
1885
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001886- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1887
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001888- os.getsid was added.
1889
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001890- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1891 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1892 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1893
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001894- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1895
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001896- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1897
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001898- readline.clear_history was added.
1899
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001900- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1901
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001902- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1903
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001904- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1905
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001906- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1907
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001908- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1909
1910- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1911
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001912- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1913
1914- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1915
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001916- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1917 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1918 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1919
1920- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1921 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1922 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1923 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1924 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1925 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1926 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1927
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001928- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1929 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1930 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1931 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001932
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001933- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001934 iterators from a single iterable.
1935
1936- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1937 of raising a TypeError exception.
1938
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001939- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1940 as parameter.
1941
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001942Library
1943-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001944
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001945- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1946
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001947- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1948 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1949 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001950
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001951- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1952 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1953 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001954
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001955- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001956
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001957- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1958 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001959
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001960- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1961 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1962
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001963- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1964
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001965- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001966 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001967
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001968- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001969 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001970
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001971- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1972
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001973- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1974 on cygwin and mingw32.
1975
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001976- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1977
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001978- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1979 module.
1980
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001981- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1982 installation scheme for all platforms.
1983
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001984- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001985 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001986
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001987- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1988 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1989 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1990
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001991- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1992 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1993 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1994
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001995- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1996
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001997- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1998
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001999- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2000 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2001
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002002- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2003 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2004 type pattern with the same value exists.
2005
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002006- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2007 when run from the command prompt).
2008
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002009- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2010 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2011
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002012- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2013 default sort).
2014
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002015- Added global runctx function to profile module
2016
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002017- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2018
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002019- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2020
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002021- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2022
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002023- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002024 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2025 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2026 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2027 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2028 accordingly.
2029
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002030- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2031 decoding standards.
2032
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002033- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2034 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2035 called for all requests.
2036
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002037- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2038 they are passed to the compiler.
2039
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002040- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2041 indent, width and depth.
2042
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002043- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2044 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2045
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002046- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2047 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2048
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002049- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2050
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002051- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2052
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002053- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2054
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002055- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2056 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2057
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002058- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002059 for better performance.
2060
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002061- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002062
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002063- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2064 a string).
2065
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002066- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2067
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002068- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2069
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002070- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2071
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002072- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2073
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002074- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2075 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2076 list of fieldnames.
2077
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002078- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2079 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2080
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002081- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2082
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002083- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2084 empty lists.
2085
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002086- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2087 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2088 and shelves.
2089
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002090- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2091 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2092
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002093- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002094 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2095 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002096
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002097- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2098 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002099 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002100
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002101- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002102 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2103 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2104
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002105- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2106 and removed in Py2.4.
2107
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002108- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2109
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002110- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2111
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002112Tools/Demos
2113-----------
2114
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002115- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2116 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2117
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002118- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2119
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002120- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2121 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2122 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2123 destination in situations where both files are given.
2124
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002125- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2126 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2127 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2128 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2129
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002130- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2131
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002132- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2133 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2134 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2135 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2136 now.
2137
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002138- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2139 in effect
2140
2141- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2142 C-c C-h
2143
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002144- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2145 -d option was given.
2146
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002147Build
2148-----
2149
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002150- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2151 build under OS X.
2152
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002153- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2154 --enable-profiling.
2155
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002156- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2157 is configured --with-tsc.
2158
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002159- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2160 on AMD64.
2161
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002162- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2163 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2164
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002165- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2166 removed.
2167
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002168- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2169 supported (see PEP 11).
2170
2171- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2172
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002173- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2174
2175- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2176 (see PEP 11).
2177
2178- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2179 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2180
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002181C API
2182-----
2183
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002184- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2185 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2186 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2187
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002188- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2189 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2190 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2191 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2192
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002193- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2194 generator objects.
2195
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002196- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2197 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002198 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2199 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002200
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002201- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2202 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2203
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002204- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2205 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2206 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2207 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2208 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2209
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002210- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2211 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2212 about 10% faster.
2213
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002214- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2215 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2216
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002217- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2218 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2219 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2220 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2221
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002222Windows
2223-------
2224
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002225- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2226 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2227 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2228 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2229
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002230- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2231 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2232 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2233
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002234
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002235What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2236===============================
2237
2238*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2239
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002240IDLE
2241----
2242
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002243- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2244 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2245 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2246 context-menu actions.
2247
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002248- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2249 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2250 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2251 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2252 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2253 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2254 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2255 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2256 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2257
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002258
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002259What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2260=============================================
2261
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002262*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002263
2264Core and builtins
2265-----------------
2266
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002267- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002268 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002269 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2270
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002271Extension modules
2272-----------------
2273
2274- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2275 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2276 than once. This has been fixed.
2277
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002278- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2279 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2280 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2281 call.
2282
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002283- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2284
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002285Library
2286-------
2287
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002288- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2289 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2290
2291- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2292 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2293 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2294 restored.
2295
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002296IDLE
2297----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002298
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002299- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002300
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002301Build
2302-----
2303
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002304- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2305 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2306
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002307C API
2308-----
2309
2310Windows
2311-------
2312
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002313- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2314 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2315
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002316- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2317
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002318Mac
2319---
2320
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002321- Various fixes to pimp.
2322
2323- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2324
2325- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2326 more problems than it solves.
2327
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002328
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002329What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2330=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002331
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002332*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2333
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002334Core and builtins
2335-----------------
2336
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002337- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2338 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2339
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002340- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2341 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002342 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002343
2344- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2345 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2346 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002347 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002348
2349- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2350 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002351
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002352- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2353 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2354 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2355
2356- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002357 770247.
2358
2359- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002360
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002361Extension modules
2362-----------------
2363
2364- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2365 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2366
2367- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2368
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002369- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2370
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002371- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2372 contained within the _strptime module.
2373
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002374- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2375 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2376
2377- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002378 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2379
2380- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2381 the find_class attribute, if present.
2382
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002383- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002384
2385 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2386 (SF bug 763298).
2387
2388 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002389 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2390 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2391 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002392
2393 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2394
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002395Library
2396-------
2397
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002398- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2399
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002400- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2401 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2402 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2403 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2404 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2405 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2406 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2407 or Tester().
2408
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002409- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2410 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2411 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2412 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2413 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2414 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2415 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2416 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2417 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002418
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002419 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002420
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002421- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2422 weren't before was an oversight.
2423
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002424- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2425 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2426
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002427- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2428 when there are no lines.
2429
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002430- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2431 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2432
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002433- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2434 to child processes.
2435
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002436- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2437
2438- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2439
2440- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2441 xmlrpclib.
2442
2443- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2444 responses.
2445
2446- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2447 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2448
2449- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2450 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2451 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2452
2453- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2454 used as patterns.
2455
2456- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2457 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2458 than Tk 8.3.
2459
2460- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2461
2462- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002463
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002464Tools/Demos
2465-----------
2466
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002467- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2468
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002469- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2470
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002471- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002472
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002473Build
2474-----
2475
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002476- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2477
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002478- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2479
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002480- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2481 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002482
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002483- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2484 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2485 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002486
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002487C API
2488-----
2489
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002490- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2491 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2492
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002493Windows
2494-------
2495
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002496- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2497 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2498 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2499 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2500 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2501 Python exception ::
2502
2503 thread.error: can't start new thread
2504
2505 is raised now.
2506
2507- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2508 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2509 instead of from DLL teardown.
2510
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002511Mac
2512---
2513
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002514- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002515 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002516 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2517 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2518 the executable in the bundle.
2519
2520- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002521
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002522- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2523
2524- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2525 on Panther.
2526
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002527What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2528================================
2529
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002530*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002531
2532Core and builtins
2533-----------------
2534
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002535- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2536 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2537 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2538 with the -i option.
2539
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002540- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2541 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2542
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002543- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2544 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2545
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002546- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2547 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2548 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2549 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2550 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2551 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2552 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2553 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2554 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2555 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2556 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2557 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2558 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002559
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002560- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2561 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2562 embedded in a lambda expression.
2563
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002564- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2565 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2566 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2567 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2568 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2569
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002570- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2571 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2572 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2573
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002574- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2575 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2576
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002577- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2578 It's writable again.
2579
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002580- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2581 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2582 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002583 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002584
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002585- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2586 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2587 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2588
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002589Extension modules
2590-----------------
2591
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002592- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2593 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2594
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002595- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2596 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2597 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2598 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2599
2600- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2601 collection.
2602
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002603- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2604 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2605 unique within a single program run.
2606
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002607- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2608 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2609
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002610- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2611 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2612
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002613- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2614 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002615
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002616- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2617
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002618- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2619 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2620
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002621- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2622 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2623 for many BSD-derived systems.
2624
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002625
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002626Library
2627-------
2628
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002629- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2630 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2631 primary ones:
2632
2633 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2634 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2635 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2636
2637 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2638 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2639 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2640 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2641 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2642 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2643
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002644- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2645 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2646 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2647 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2648 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2649 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2650 argument.
2651
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002652- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2653 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2654 in the archive.
2655
2656- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2657 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2658
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002659- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2660 569574).
2661
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002662- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2663 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2664 no more.
2665
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002666- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2667 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2668 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2669 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2670 code coverage.
2671
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002672- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2673 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2674 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002675 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2676 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002677
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002678- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2679 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2680 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002681 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002682
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002683- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2684
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002685- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2686 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2687 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2688 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2689
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002690- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2691 handling.
2692
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002693- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2694 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2695
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002696- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2697 in socket.py.
2698
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002699- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2700
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002701- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2702 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2703 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2704 opener with proxy support.
2705
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002706- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2707
2708- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2709
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002710Tools/Demos
2711-----------
2712
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002713- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2714
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002715- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2716
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002717- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2718 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002719
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002720- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2721 files.
2722
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002723Build
2724-----
2725
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002726- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002727 different root directory.
2728
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002729C API
2730-----
2731
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002732- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2733 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2734 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2735 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2736 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2737 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2738 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2739 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2740 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2741 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2742
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002743- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2744 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2745 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2746 from Python.
2747
2748
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002749New platforms
2750-------------
2751
2752None this time.
2753
2754Tests
2755-----
2756
2757- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2758 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2759
2760Windows
2761-------
2762
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002763- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2764
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002765- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2766 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2767 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2768 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2769 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2770 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2771 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2772 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2773 that's what it's for.
2774
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002775Mac
2776---
2777
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002778- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2779 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2780 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2781 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002782- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2783 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2784- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002785
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002786SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2787------------------------------------
2788
2789430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2790598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2791622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2792661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2793683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2794697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2795713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2796724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2797727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2798729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2799730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2800731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2801732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2802733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2803735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2804740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2805744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2806745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2807747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2808749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2809751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2810753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2811755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2812757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2813760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2814
2815
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002816What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2817================================
2818
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002819*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002820
2821Core and builtins
2822-----------------
2823
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002824- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2825 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2826
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002827- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2828 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2829 and cannot be strings).
2830
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002831- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2832 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2833 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2834 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2835
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002836- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2837 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2838 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2839 Python itself.
2840
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002841- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2842 the referenced object, if it has one.
2843
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002844- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2845 the thread started at
2846 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2847
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002848- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2849 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2850 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2851 placed on a list index.
2852
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002853- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2854 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2855 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2856 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2857
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002858- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2859 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2860 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2861 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2862 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2863 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2864 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2865
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002866- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2867 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2868 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2869 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2870 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2871
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002872- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2873 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002874
2875- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2876 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2877 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2878 #693195.)
2879
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002880- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2881 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002882
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002883- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002884 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002885 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2886 interpreter executions, would fail.
2887
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002888- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002889 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002890 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002891
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002892Extension modules
2893-----------------
2894
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002895- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2896 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2897 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2898 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2899
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002900- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2901 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2902
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002903- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2904 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2905 and Greg Chapman.)
2906
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002907- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2908 recursively.
2909
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002910- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002911 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2912 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2913 leaks.
2914
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002915- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2916
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002917- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2918 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2919 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2920 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2921 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2922 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2923 #705836.
2924
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002925- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002926 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2927
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002928- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2929 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2930 See SF bug #692416.
2931
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002932- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2933 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2934
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002935- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2936 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2937 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002938
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002939- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002940 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2941 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2942
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002943- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2944 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2945 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2946 timeouts to work properly.
2947
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002948Library
2949-------
2950
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002951- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2952 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2953 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2954 future release.
2955
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002956- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2957 for querying platform dependent features.
2958
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002959- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002960
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002961- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2962 pickle protocol versions.
2963
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002964- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2965 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2966 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2967
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002968- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2969
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002970- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2971 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2972 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2973 modules.
2974
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002975- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2976 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2977 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2978
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002979- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2980 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2981
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002982- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2983 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2984 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2985
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002986- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002987 MS Office extensions.
2988
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002989- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2990 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2991
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002992- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2993 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2994
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002995- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2996 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2997 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2998 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2999 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3000 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3001
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003002- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3003 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3004 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003005
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003006- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3007 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3008 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3009
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003010- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3011
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003012- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3013 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3014 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3015
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003016Tools/Demos
3017-----------
3018
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003019- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3020 See the module docstring for details.
3021
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003022Build
3023-----
3024
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003025- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3026 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003027
3028C API
3029-----
3030
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003031- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3032
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003033- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3034 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3035 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3036
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003037- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3038 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003039
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003040 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3041 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3042 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003043
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003044- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003045 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3046
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003047- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3048 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3049 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003050
3051New platforms
3052-------------
3053
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003054None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003055
3056Tests
3057-----
3058
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003059- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3060 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003061
3062Windows
3063-------
3064
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003065- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3066 function.
3067
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003068- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3069 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003070
3071Mac
3072---
3073
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003074- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3075 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003076
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003077- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3078 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003079
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003080- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3081 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3082 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003083
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003084- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003085 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3086 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003087
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003088- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3089 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003090
3091
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003092What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3093=================================
3094
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003095*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003096
3097Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003098-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003099
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003100- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3101 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3102 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3103
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003104- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3105 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3106 (SF patch #664376.)
3107
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003108- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3109 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3110 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3111 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3112 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3113 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003114 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003115
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003116- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3117 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3118 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3119 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003120 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003121
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003122- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3123 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3124 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3125 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3126 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3127 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3128 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3129 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3130 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3131 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3132 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3133
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003134- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3135 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3136 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3137 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3138 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3139 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3140
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003141- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3142 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3143
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003144- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3145 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3146 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3147 case.)
3148
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003149- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3150 passed as unicode strings.
3151
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003152- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3153 See SF bug #683467.
3154
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003155- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3156 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3157
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003158- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3159
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003160- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3161
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003162- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3163 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3164 arguments.
3165
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003166- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3167 See SF bug #667147.
3168
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003169- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003170 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003171 See SF bug #676155.
3172
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003173- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003174 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003175 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3176 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3177 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3178 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3179 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3180 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003181
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003182Extension modules
3183-----------------
3184
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003185- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3186 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3187 tp_as_number pointer.
3188
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003189- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3190 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3191 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3192 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3193 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3194
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003195- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3196
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003197- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3198
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003199- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003200 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003201 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3202 patch #678531.)
3203
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003204- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3205 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3206
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003207- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3208 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3209
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003210- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3211
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003212- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3213 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3214 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3215
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003216- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3217
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003218- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3219 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3220
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003221- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003222
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003223- datetime changes:
3224
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003225 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3226
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003227 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3228 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3229 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3230 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3231 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3232 now.
3233
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003234 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003235 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3236 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003237
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003238 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003239 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003240 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3241 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3242 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3243 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003244
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003245 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3246 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3247 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003248 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3249
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003250 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3251 by a later example coded by Guido.
3252
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003253 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003254 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3255 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3256 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003257 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3258 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3259
3260 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3261 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3262 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3263 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3264 tzinfo subclass instance.
3265
3266 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3267 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3268 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3269 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3270 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3271 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3272 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3273 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003274
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003275 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3276 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3277 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3278 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3279 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003280 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3281
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003282 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003283
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003284 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3285 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3286 as a naive datetime object.
3287
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003288 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3289 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3290 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3291
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003292 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3293 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3294 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3295 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3296 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3297 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3298 comparison.
3299
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003300 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3301 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3302 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3303 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003304 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003305
3306 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003307
3308 and ::
3309
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003310 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3311
3312 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3313 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3314 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3315 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3316
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003317 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3318 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3319 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3320 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3321 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3322
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003323 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3324 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003325 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3326 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003327
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003328Library
3329-------
3330
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003331- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3332 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3333
3334- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3335 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3336 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3337 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3338 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3339 See PEP 307 for details.
3340
3341- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3342 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3343
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003344- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3345 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003346 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003347 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3348 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003349 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003350
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003351- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3352 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3353
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003354- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3355 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3356 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3357
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003358- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3359
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003360- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3361 exception.
3362
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003363- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3364 class.
3365
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003366- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3367 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3368 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3369
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003370- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3371 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3372
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003373- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003374 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3375 See SF bug #659228.
3376
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003377- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3378 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3379 See SF patch #651082.
3380
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003381- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003382
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003383- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3384 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3385
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003386- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003387 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003388
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003389- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3390 DOS paths from other platforms.
3391
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003392Tools/Demos
3393-----------
3394
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003395- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3396 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3397 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3398 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3399 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3400 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3401 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3402 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3403 example:
3404
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003405 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3406 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003407
3408 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3409
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003410
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003411Build
3412-----
3413
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003414- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3415 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3416 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003417 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3418
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003419 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3420
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003421- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3422 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3423 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3424 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3425 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3426 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3427 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3428 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3429 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3430
3431- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3432 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3433 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3434 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3435
3436- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3437 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3438
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003439C API
3440-----
3441
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003442- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3443 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003444
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003445- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3446 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3447 tp_as_number pointer.
3448
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003449- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3450 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3451 (SF #681367)
3452
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003453- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3454 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3455 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3456 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003457
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003458Tests
3459-----
3460
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003461- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003462 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3463 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3464 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3465 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3466 pydoc.)
3467
3468- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3469
3470- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003471
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003472Windows
3473-------
3474
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003475- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3476 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3477 time).
3478
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003479- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3480 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3481
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003482- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3483 release without strong cryptography.
3484
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003485- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003486 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003487
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003488- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3489 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3490
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003491Mac
3492---
3493
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003494- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3495 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003496
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003497- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3498 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3499 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003500
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003501- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3502 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003503
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003504- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3505 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3506 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3507 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003508
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003509- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003510 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3511 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3512 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003513
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003514
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003515What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003516=================================
3517
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003518*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003519
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003520Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003521--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003522
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003523- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3524
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003525- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3526 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003527 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003528 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003529 a different meaning than before.
3530
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003531- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003532 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003533 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003534
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003535- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003536 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003537 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003538
3539- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3540 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3541 and deallocation.
3542
3543- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3544 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3545
3546- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3547 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3548 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3549 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3550 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3551
3552- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3553 now detected by the garbage collector.
3554
3555- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3556 [SF bug 519621]
3557
3558- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3559 identifier.
3560
3561- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3562 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3563 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3564 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3565 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3566 [SF bug 563060]
3567
3568- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3569 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3570 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3571 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3572 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3573
3574- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3575 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3576 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3577
3578- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3579
3580- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3581 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3582 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3583 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3584 state of the slots would be lost.)
3585
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003586Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003587-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003588
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003589- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003590 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3591 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3592 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3593 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003594 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3595 Jython 2.1.
3596
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003597- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003598 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003599 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3600 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3601 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3602 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3603 these, see PEP 302.
3604
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003605- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3606 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3607 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3608
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003609- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3610 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3611 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3612
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003613- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3614 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3615 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3616
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003617- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3618 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3619 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3620 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3621 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3622 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3623 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3624 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3625 releases or implementations.
3626
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003627- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003628 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3629 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003630
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003631- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3632 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3633
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003634- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3635 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3636 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3637
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003638- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3639 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3640
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003641- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3642 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003643 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3644 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003645
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003646- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3647 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3648 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3649 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3650 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3651
3652 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3653 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3654 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3655 pattern.
3656
3657 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3658 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3659 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3660 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3661
3662 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3663 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3664 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3665 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3666 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3667 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3668
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003669- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3670 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3671 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3672 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3673 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3674 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3675 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3676 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003677
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003678- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3679 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3680 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3681 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3682 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003683 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3684 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3685 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3686 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3687 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3688 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3689 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003690
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003691- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3692 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3693
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003694- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3695 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3696 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3697 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3698 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3699 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3700 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3701 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3702 to Zack Weinberg!
3703
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003704- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3705 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3706 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3707 type. This has been fixed now.
3708
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003709- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3710 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3711 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3712
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003713- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3714 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3715 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3716 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3717 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3718 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3719 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3720 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003721 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003722
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003723- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3724 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3725 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003726
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003727- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3728 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3729 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3730 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3731 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3732 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3733 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3734 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003735 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003736 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3737 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3738
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003739- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3740 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3741 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3742 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3743 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3744 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3745 this.)
3746
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003747- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3748 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003749 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003750 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003751 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3752 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003753 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3754 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003755
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003756- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3757 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3758 currently running.
3759
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003760- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3761 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3762 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3763 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3764
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003765- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3766 as directory names.
3767
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003768- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3769 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3770
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003771- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3772 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3773
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003774- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003775 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3776 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003777
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003778- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3779 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3780 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3781 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3782 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3783
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003784- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3785 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3786 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3787 removed.
3788
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003789- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3790 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3791 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3792
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003793- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3794 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3795 to __debug__.
3796
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003797- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3798 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3799 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3800
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003801- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3802 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3803 deprecated now.
3804
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003805- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3806 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3807 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003808
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003809- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3810 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3811 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3812 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3813 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003814
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003815- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3816 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3817
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003818- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3819 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3820 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003821 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003822 is backward compatible.
3823
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003824- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3825 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3826 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3827 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3828 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3829
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003830- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3831 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3832 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3833 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3834 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3835 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003836
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003837- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3838 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3839
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003840- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3841 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3842
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003843- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3844 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3845 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3846 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3847 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3848
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003849- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3850 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3851 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3852
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003853- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003854 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3855
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003856- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3857 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3858 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003859
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003860- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3861 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3862
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003863- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3864 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3865 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3866
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003867- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3868
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003869Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003870-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003871
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003872- Added three operators to the operator module:
3873 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3874 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3875 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3876
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003877- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3878
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003879- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3880 archives.
3881
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003882- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3883 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3884 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3885
3886 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3887
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003888- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3889 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3890 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003891 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003892
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003893- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3894 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3895 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3896 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003897 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3898 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3899 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3900 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003901
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003902- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3903 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003904
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003905- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3906
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003907- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3908 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3909
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003910- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3911 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3912 supported.
3913
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003914- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3915
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003916- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3917 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003918
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003919- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3920 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3921
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003922- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3923
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003924- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3925 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3926
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003927- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3928 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3929 functions but callable type objects.
3930
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003931- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003932 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003933 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003934
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003935- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3936 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003937
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003938- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3939 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003940
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003941- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3942 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3943 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3944 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3945
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003946- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3947 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003948
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003949- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3950 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3951 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3952 and __imul__.
3953
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003954- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003955 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3956 is called.
3957
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003958- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3959 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3960 interpreter was compiled.
3961
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003962- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3963 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3964 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003965 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003966 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3967 1, not 2.
3968
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003969- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3970 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3971 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3972 limit.
3973
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003974- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3975 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3976 bug #623464.
3977
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003978- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3979 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3980 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3981 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3982
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003983Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003984-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003985
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003986- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3987
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003988- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3989 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3990 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3991 with Python 2.3a2.
3992
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003993- os.path exposes getctime.
3994
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003995- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003996 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003997 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003998 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003999 unit tests of floating point results.
4000
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004001- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4002 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4003 has been increased.
4004
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004005- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4006 executed.
4007
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004008- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4009 postinstallation script.
4010
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004011- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4012 test the current module.
4013
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004014- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004015 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4016 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4017 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4018 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4019
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004020- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004021 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004022 Ward's Optik package.
4023
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004024- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4025 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4026 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4027 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4028
4029- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4030 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004031 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004032
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004033- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4034 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4035 shelf are binary pickles.
4036
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004037- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4038 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4039
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004040- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4041 modules are iterators now.
4042
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004043- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4044 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4045 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4046 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4047 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4048 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004049
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004050- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4051 with their entity value.
4052
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004053- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4054
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004055- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4056 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004057
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004058- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4059 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004060 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004061
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004062- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4063 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4064 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4065 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4066 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4067 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4068 main():
4069
4070 import locale
4071 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4072
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004073- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4074 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4075
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004076- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4077 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4078 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4079 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4080 to the new standard.
4081
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004082- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4083 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4084 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4085 an extension to the database.
4086
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004087- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4088 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4089 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4090 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004091 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004092
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004093- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004094 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004095
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004096- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4097 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4098 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4099 bounded integers.
4100
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004101- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4102 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4103 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4104 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4105 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4106 in existence.
4107
4108 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4109 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4110 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4111 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4112 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4113 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4114
4115 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4116 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4117 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4118 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4119
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004120- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4121 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4122 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4123
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004124- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4125
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004126- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4127 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4128 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4129 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4130
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004131- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4132 argument.
4133
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004134- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4135 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4136 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4137 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4138 [SF patch 560794].
4139
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004140- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4141 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4142 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004143 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4144 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4145 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004146
4147- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4148 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004149
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004150- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4151 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4152 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4153 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004154
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004155- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4156 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4157 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4158 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4159 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4160
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004161- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004162
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004163- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4164
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004165- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4166 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4167 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4168 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4169 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4170 identical to None.
4171
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004172- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4173 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4174 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4175 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4176 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4177 results now.
4178
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004179- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4180 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4181
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004182- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4183 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4184 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4185 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4186 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4187 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4188 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4189 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4190
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004191- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4192
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004193- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4194 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4195
4196- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4197 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4198 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4199 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4200 and other systems.
4201
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004202- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4203 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4204 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4205 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 +00004206 work well with these.
4207
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004208- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4209
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004210- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004211 connections.
4212
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004213- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4214 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4215 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4216
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004217- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4218 sets
4219
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004220- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4221 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4222 name.
4223
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004224- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4225 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4226 passed in.
4227
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004228- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004229 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004230 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4231 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004232
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004233- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4234
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004235- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4236
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004237- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4238 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4239 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4240
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004241- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4242 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4243 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4244 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004245 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004246
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004247- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004248 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004249 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004250
4251- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4252 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4253 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4254
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004255- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004256 the value of its expression argument.
4257
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004258- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4259 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4260 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4261
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004262- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4263 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4264 skipstone browser was included.
4265
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004266- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4267 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4268
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004269Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004270-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004271
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004272- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4273 names in addition to accepting file names.
4274
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004275- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4276 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4277 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4278 still used and useful.)
4279
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004280- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4281 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4282 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4283 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004284
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004285- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4286 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4287 the generated binary.
4288
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004289Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004290-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004291
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004292- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4293
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004294- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4295 except in the hands of experts.
4296
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004297- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004298 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4299 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4300 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004301
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004302- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4303 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4304 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4305 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4306 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4307 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4308 builds.
4309
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004310- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4311 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4312 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4313 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4314 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4315 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4316 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4317 new type.
4318
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004319- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004320
4321 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4322 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4323 positive infinities.
4324
4325 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4326 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4327 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4328 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4329 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4330 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4331 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4332
4333 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4334
4335 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4336
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004337- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4338 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4339 size of the executable.
4340
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004341- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4342 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4343 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4344 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004345
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004346- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4347
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004348- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4349 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4350 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004351
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004352- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4353 well as Unix.
4354
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004355- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4356 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4357 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4358 modules in the README file for details.
4359
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004360C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004361-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004362
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004363- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4364 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004365 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004366 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004367 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004368
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004369- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4370 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4371 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4372 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4373 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4374 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004375 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004376 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4377 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4378 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4379 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4380 aligned.)
4381
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004382- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4383 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4384 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4385
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004386- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4387 level.
4388
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004389- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4390 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4391 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4392 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4393 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4394
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004395- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4396 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4397 code.
4398
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004399- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4400 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4401 adjusting for negative indices.
4402
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004403- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4404 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4405 object.
4406
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004407- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4408 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4409 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4410
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004411- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4412 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004413
4414- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4415
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004416- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4417 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4418 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4419 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4420
4421- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4422
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004423- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004424
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004425- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004426 without going through the buffer API.
4427
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004428- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004429
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004430- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4431 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4432 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4433 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4434
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004435- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4436 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4437
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004438- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004439 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4440
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004441New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004442-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004443
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004444- OpenVMS is now supported.
4445
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004446- AtheOS is now supported.
4447
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004448- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4449
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004450- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4451
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004452Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004453-----
4454
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004455- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4456 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4457 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004458
4459Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004460-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004461
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004462- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4463 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4464 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4465 bugs.
4466 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004467 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004468 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4469 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004470 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004471
4472- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004473 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004474
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004475- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4476 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4477
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004478- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4479 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004480 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004481 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4482
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004483- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4484 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4485 use files" uninstall option).
4486
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004487- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4488
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004489- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4490 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4491
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004492- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4493 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4494 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4495
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004496- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4497 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4498 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4499 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4500 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004501 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4502 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4503 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004504
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004505- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004506 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004507 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4508 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4509 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4510 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4511 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4512 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4513 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4514 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4515 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4516 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4517 work around.
4518
4519- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4520 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4521 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4522 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4523 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4524 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4525 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4526 specified with O_CREAT too).
4527
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004528Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004529----
4530
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004531- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004532
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004533- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4534 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4535 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4536
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004537- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4538 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4539 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4540
4541- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4542 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4543 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4544 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4545 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4546 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4547 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4548 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004549
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004550- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4551 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4552 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004553
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004554- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4555 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4556 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4557 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4558 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004559
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004560- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4561 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4562 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004563
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004564- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4565 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004566
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004567- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4568 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4569 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4570 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4571 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004572
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004573- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4574 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4575 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4576
4577- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4578 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4579 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004580
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004581- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4582 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4583 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4584 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004585 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004586
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004587- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4588 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004589
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004590- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4591 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004592
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004593- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004594 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004595 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4596 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004597
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004598
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004599What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004600===============================
4601
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004602*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4603
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004604Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004605--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004606
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004607- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4608 with a custom metaclass.
4609
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004610Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004611-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004612
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004613- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4614 are proxies.
4615
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004616Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004617-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004618
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004619- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4620 very short strings.
4621
4622- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4623 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4624 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4625 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4626 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4627
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004628Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004629-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004630
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004631- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4632 close or delete time).
4633
4634- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4635 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4636
4637- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4638
4639- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004640 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004641
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004642Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004643-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004644
4645Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004646-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004647
4648C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004649-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004650
4651New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004652-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004653
4654Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004655-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004656
4657Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004658-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004659
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004660- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4661
4662- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4663 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4664
4665- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4666 deleted at process exit time.
4667
4668- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4669 in backslash.
4670
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004671Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004672----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004673
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004674- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4675 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4676 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4677
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004678
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004679What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004680===========================
4681
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004682*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4683
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004684Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004685--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004686
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004687- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4688 been extensively updated. See
4689
4690 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4691
4692 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4693
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004694- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4695 deleted!
4696
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004697- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4698 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4699 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4700 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4701 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4702
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004703- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4704
4705 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4706 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4707
4708 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4709 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4710 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4711 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4712 supported anyway.
4713
4714 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4715 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4716
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004717- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4718 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4719 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4720 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4721 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004722
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004723- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4724 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4725 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4726
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004727Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004728-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004729
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004730- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4731 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4732 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4733 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4734 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4735 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004736 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4737 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4738 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4739 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004740
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004741- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4742 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4743 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4744
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004745Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004746-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004747
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004748- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4749
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004750Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004751-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004752
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004753- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4754 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4755 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4756 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4757 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4758 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4759
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004760- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4761
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004762- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4763
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004764- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4765
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004766- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4767 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4768 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4769
4770- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4771
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004772Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004773-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004774
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004775- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4776 off a search on Google.
4777
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004778Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004779-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004780
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004781- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4782 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4783 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4784 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4785 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4786 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4787 other platforms should do likewise.
4788
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004789- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4790 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4791 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4792
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004793C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004794-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004795
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004796- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4797 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4798 producing key-value pairs.
4799
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004800- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004801 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004802 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4803 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4804 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4805 previously went unchallenged.
4806
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004807New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004808-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004809
4810Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004811-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004812
4813Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004814-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004815
4816Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004817----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004818
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004819- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4820 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004821
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004822- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4823 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4824 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4825 home.
4826
4827
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004828What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004829===========================
4830
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004831*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4832
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004833Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004834--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004835
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004836- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4837 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004838
4839 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004840 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004841
4842 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4843 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004844 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004845 This needs to be documented.
4846
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004847- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4848 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4849
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004850- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4851 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4852 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4853
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004854- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4855 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4856
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004857- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4858 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4859 class forbids it).
4860
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004861- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4862 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4863 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4864
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004865- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4866
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004867Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004868-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004869
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004870- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4871 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004872 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004873
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004874- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4875 (like 1 + '').
4876
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004877Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004878-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004879
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004880- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4881 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4882 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4883 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004884 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004885 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4886
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004887- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4888 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4889 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4890 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4891
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004892- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4893 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004894 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4895 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4896 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004897
4898- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4899 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004900
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004901- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4902 bytes on its input.
4903
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004904Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004905-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004906
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004907- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004908 convenience function.
4909
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004910- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4911 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4912 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004913 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4914 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4915 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4916 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4917 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4918 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004919
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004920- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4921 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4922 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4923 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4924
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004925- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4926 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4927 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4928
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004929- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4930 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4931 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4932 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4933
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004934- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4935 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004936 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004937 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4938 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4939 new -l and -e options.
4940
4941- statcache is now deprecated.
4942
4943- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4944 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004945 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004946 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4947 time properly taken into account.
4948
4949- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4950 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4951 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4952 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4953
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004954Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004955-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004956
4957Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004958-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004959
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004960- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4961 is built with libdb3 if available.
4962
4963- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4964
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004965C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004966-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004967
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004968- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4969 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4970 PySequence_Size().
4971
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004972- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4973
4974- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4975 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4976 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4977
4978- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4979 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4980
4981- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4982 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4983
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004984New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004985-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004986
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004987- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4988 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4989
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004990- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4991 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4992
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004993- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4994
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004995Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004996-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004997
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004998- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4999 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5000
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005001Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005002-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005003
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005004Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005005----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005006
5007- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5008 removed completely in the next release.
5009
5010- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5011 OSX.
5012
5013- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5014 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5015
5016- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5017
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005018
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005019What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005020===========================
5021
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005022*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5023
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005024Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005025--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005026
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005027- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005028 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005029 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005030 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5031 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005032 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5033 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005034 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5035 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005036
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005037- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5038 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5039
5040- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5041 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5042
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005043Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005044-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005045
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005046- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5047 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5048 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5049 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5050 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5051 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5052 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5053 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5054
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005055- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5056 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5057 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5058 example).
5059
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005060- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005061 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005062 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005063 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005064
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005065- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5066 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5067 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005068 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005069
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005070- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5071 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5072 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5073 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5074 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5075 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5076
5077 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5078
5079 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5080
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005081Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005082-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005083
5084- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5085
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005086- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5087
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005088- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5089 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005090
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005091- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5092 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5093 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5094 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5095 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5096 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005097 attributes.
5098
5099- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5100 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5101 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005102
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005103- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5104 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5105 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005106
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005107- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5108 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5109 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005110 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5111 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5112
5113- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5114 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005115
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005116Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005117-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005118
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005119- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5120 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5121
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005122- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5123 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5124 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5125 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5126
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005127- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5128 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5129 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5130 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5131
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005132 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5133 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5134 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5135 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5136 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5137 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5138 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5139 without losing information).
5140
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005141- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005142 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5143 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5144 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5145 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5146 module).
5147
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005148 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005149 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5150 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5151 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5152 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005153
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005154- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005155 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5156 encoding.
5157
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005158- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5159 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5160
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005161- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005162 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5163
5164- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5165 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5166 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5167 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5168
5169- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5170
5171- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5172 ON, and OFF.
5173
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005174- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5175 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5176
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005177Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005178-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005179
5180- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5181 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5182 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005183
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005184- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5185 been added: -X and -E.
5186
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005187Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005188-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005189
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005190- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5191 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5192
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005193C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005194-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005195
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005196- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5197 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5198 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5199 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5200 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5201
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005202- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5203 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5204 as long) arguments.
5205
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005206- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5207 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5208 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5209 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5210 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5211 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5212
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005213- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5214 input.
5215
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005216New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005217-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005218
5219Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005220-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005221
5222Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005223-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005224
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005225- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5226 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5227 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5228
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005229- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5230 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5231 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005232 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005233
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005234 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5235 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5236 import signal
5237 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005238
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005239 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005240 while 1:
5241 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005242 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005243 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5244 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5245 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5246 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005247
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005248
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005249What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5250===========================
5251
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005252*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5253
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005254Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005255--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005256
5257- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5258 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5259 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5260
5261- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5262 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5263 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5264 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5265 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5266 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5267 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005268
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005269- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005270 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005271 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5272 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5273 associate a docstring with a property.
5274
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005275- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5276 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5277 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5278 other built-in object types.
5279
5280- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5281 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5282 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5283 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5284 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5285
5286- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5287 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5288
5289- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5290 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005291 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005292 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5293 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5294 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5295 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5296 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5297
5298- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5299 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5300 class.
5301
5302- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5303 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5304 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5305 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5306
5307- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5308 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5309 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5310 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5311
5312- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5313 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5314
5315- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5316 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5317 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5318 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5319 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005320 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005321 with the same value as s.
5322
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005323- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5324
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005325Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005326----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005327
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005328- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5329
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005330- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5331 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5332 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5333 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5334 objects.
5335
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005336- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5337 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005338 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5339 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5340
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005341- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5342 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5343 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5344
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005345Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005346-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005347
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005348- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5349 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5350 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5351 by the instances.
5352
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005353- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5354 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5355 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5356
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005357- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5358 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5359 before the entire comparison is complete.
5360
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005361- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5362 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5363 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5364
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005365- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5366 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5367 getwriter().
5368
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005369- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5370 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5371
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005372- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005373 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5374 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5375
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005376- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5377 iterable object.
5378
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005379- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5380 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005381
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005382- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5383 authentication.
5384
5385- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5386 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005387
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005388- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005389 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5390 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5391 a sample driver.)
5392
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005393Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005394-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005395
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005396- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5397 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5398 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5399 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5400 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5401 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5402 kernel has large file support.
5403
5404- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5405 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5406 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5407 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5408 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5409
5410- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5411 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5412 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5413
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005414C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005415-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005416
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005417- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5418 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5419
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005420New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005421-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005422
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005423- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5424 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5425
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005426Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005427-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005428
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005429- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5430 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5431 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5432 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5433 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5434
5435- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5436 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5437 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5438 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5439
5440- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5441 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5442
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005443Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005444-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005445
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005446- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005447 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5448 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005449
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005450
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005451What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5452===========================
5453
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005454*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5455
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005456Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005457----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005458
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005459- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5460 big to represent as a C double.
5461
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005462- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5463 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5464 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5465 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5466 restriction).
5467
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005468- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5469 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5470 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5471 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5472 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5473
5474 >>> dir([])
5475 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5476 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5477 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5478 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5479 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5480 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5481 'reverse', 'sort']
5482
5483 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5484
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005485- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005486 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5487 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5488 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5489 OverflowError exception.
5490
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005491- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005492 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005493 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5494 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5495 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5496 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5497 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005498 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005499 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5500 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5501
5502 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5503 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5504 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5505 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005506
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005507- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005508 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5509 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5510 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5511 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5512 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5513 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5514 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5515 once it is created.
5516
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005517- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5518 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5519 (key, value) pairs.
5520
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005521- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005522 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5523 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5524
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005525- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5526 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5527 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5528 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5529 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005530
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005531- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005532 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5533 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5534
5535 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5536
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005537- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005538 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5539
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005540Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005541-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005542
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005543- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005544 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5545 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005546
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005547- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5548 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5549 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5550 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5551 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5552 in this area anymore).
5553
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005554- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5555 threading.Timer.
5556
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005557- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5558 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5559
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005560- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005561 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5562
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005563- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005564 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5565 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5566 converted to Python longs.
5567
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005568- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005569 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5570
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005571- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5572 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5573 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5574
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005575Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005576-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005577
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005578- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5579 division operators as per PEP 238.
5580
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005581Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005582-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005583
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005584- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5585 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5586 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5587 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5588
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005589C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005590-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005591
5592- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005593
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005594- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5595 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005596 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005597
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005598 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5599 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005600 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005601 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005602
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005603- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005604 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5605 module:
5606
5607 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005608
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005609 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5610 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005611
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005612 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5613 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005614
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005615 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5616
5617 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5618
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005619- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005620 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5621 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5622 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005623
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005624New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005625-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005626
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005627- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5628 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5629 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5630 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5631 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005632
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005633Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005634-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005635
5636Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005637-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005638
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005639- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5640 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5641 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5642 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005643 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5644 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5645 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5646 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5647 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005648
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005649- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005650 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5651
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005652
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005653What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5654===========================
5655
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005656*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5657
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005658Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005659-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005660
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005661- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5662 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5663
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005664- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5665 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5666 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005667
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005668- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5669 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5670 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5671 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005672
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005673- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5674
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005675- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005676
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005677Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005678-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005679
5680- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005681 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005682 the module docstring for details.
5683
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005684Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005685-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005686
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005687- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005688 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5689 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5690 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005691
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005692- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5693 Nick Mathewson.
5694
5695Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005696----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005697
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005698- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5699 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5700 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5701 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5702 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5703 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5704 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5705 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5706
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005707- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5708 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5709 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5710 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5711
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005712- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5713 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5714 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5715 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5716 come a long way).
5717
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005718- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5719 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5720 write filters for these warnings).
5721
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005722- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5723 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5724 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5725 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5726 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5727
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005728- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5729 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5730 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5731 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5732 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5733 older distribution.
5734
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005735Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005736-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005737
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005738- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5739 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005740 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005741
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005742- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5743 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5744 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5745
5746- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5747
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005748- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5749
5750- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5751
5752- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5753
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005754- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005755
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005756- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5757
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005758New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005759-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005760
5761C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005762-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005763
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005764- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5765 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5766 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5767 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5768 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5769 against buffer overruns.
5770
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005771- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005772 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5773 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005774 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5775 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5776 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5777
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005778- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5779 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5780 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5781 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5782 deprecated.
5783
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005784Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005785-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005786
5787- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5788 relevant is found.
5789
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005790
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005791What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005792===========================
5793
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005794*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5795
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005796Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005797----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005798
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005799- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5800 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5801 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5802 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5803 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5804 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5805 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5806 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005807 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005808 repaired.
5809
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005810- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005811 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005812 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5813 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5814 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5815 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5816 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5817 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5818 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5819 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5820
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005821- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5822 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5823 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5824 leading BMO character).
5825
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005826- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5827 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5828 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5829
5830 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5831 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5832 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005833
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005834 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5835 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5836 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5837 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5838 for various simple to use conversions.
5839
5840 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5841 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5842
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005843 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5844 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5845 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5846 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5847 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5848 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5849 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5850 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5851 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5852 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5853 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5854 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5855 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5856 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5857 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005858
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005859- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5860 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5861 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005862 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005863 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005864
5865 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005866 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5867 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5868 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5869 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5870 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005871 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5872 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005873
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005874 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5875 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5876 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005877 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005878
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005879- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5880 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5881 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5882 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5883 floating arithmetic,
5884
5885 x = 9007199254740992.0
5886 print long(x)
5887
5888 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5889 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5890 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5891 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5892 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5893 functions are of good quality).
5894
5895 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5896 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5897 algorithms to break.
5898
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005899- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5900 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5901 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5902 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5903 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5904 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5905 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5906 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5907 order.
5908
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005909- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5910 operation along the most common code paths.
5911
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005912- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5913 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5914
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005915- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5916 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5917 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5918 {}.update(UserDict())
5919
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005920- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5921 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5922 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5923 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5924 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5925 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5926 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5927 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5928
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005929- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005930 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005931
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005932 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005933 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5934 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005935 join() method of strings
5936 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005937 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5938 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005939 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005940 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005941
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005942- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5943 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5944
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005945- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5946 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5947
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005948- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5949 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5950 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5951 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5952
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005953- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5954 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005955 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005956 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5957 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005958
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005959- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5960
5961
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005962Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005963-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005964
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005965- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005966 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005967 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5968 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5969
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005970- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5971 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5972
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005973- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5974 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5975 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5976 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5977
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005978- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5979 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5980 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5981
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005982- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5983
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005984- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5985
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005986- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5987 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5988 that are still imported into string.py).
5989
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005990- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5991
5992- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5993 Now it does.
5994
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005995- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5996
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005997- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5998 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5999 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6000 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6001 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006002 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6003 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006004
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006005- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6006 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6007 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6008 'help(object)'.
6009
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006010Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006011-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006012
6013- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006014 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006015 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6016 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6017
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006018- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006019 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6020 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006021
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006022C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006023-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006024
6025- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6026 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006027
6028----
6029
6030**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**