blob: 2065ede0e411606c750f19b8cf432ef75a2200dc [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Georg 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 Norwitz5e3d8622006-01-09 06:24:35 +0000212- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
213 without prior setting of the userptr.
214
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000215- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
216
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000217- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
218
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000219- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
220 problem on AIX.
221
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000222- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
223
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000224- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
225
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000226- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
227
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000228- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
229 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
230
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000231- Get bsddb module to build with BSD DB version 3.2
232
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000233- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
234 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
235
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000236- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
237
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000238- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
239 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
240
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000241- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
242 returns in cStringIO.c.
243
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000244- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
245 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
246
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000247- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
248
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000249- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
250
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000251- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
252 the file system encoding.
253
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000254- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
255 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000256
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000257- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
258
259- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000260 line without newlines.
261
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000262- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
263 on Windows.
264
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000265- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000266 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
267
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000268- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
269 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
270 for large or negative values.
271
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000272- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000273 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000274
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000275- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
276
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000277- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
278 if available on the platform.
279
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000280- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
281 available on the platform.
282
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000283- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
284 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
285
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000286- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
287
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000288- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
289 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
290 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
291
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000292- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
293
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000294- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
295 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
296
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000297- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000298 file size.
299
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000300- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
301
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000302- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
303 {remove_history,replace_history}
304
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000305- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
306 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000307
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000308- stat_float_times is now True.
309
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000310- array.array objects are now picklable.
311
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000312- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
313 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
314
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000315- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
316 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
317 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
318
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000319- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
320 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000321
322Library
323-------
324
Martin v. Löwis412ed3b2006-01-08 10:45:39 +0000325- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
326
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000327- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
328
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000329- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
330 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
331 LoadError subclasses IOError.
332
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000333- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000334 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
335 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
336 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
337 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
338
339 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
340 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
341 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
342 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
343 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000344
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000345- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
346 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
347 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
348
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000349- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
350
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000351- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
352
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000353- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
354 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
355 illegal argument)
356
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000357- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
358 is an error in the format string.
359
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000360- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
361
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000362- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000363 "parent" argument.
364
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000365- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
366 for padding.
367
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000368- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
369 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
370
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000371- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
372 to get the correct encoding.
373
374- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
375 languages.
376
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000377- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
378
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000379- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
380
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000381- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
382
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000383- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
384 functionality.
385
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000386- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
387
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000388- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
389 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
390
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000391- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
392 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
393 match the Content-Length header.
394
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000395- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
396
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000397- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
398 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000399 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000400
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000401- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
402
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000403- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
404
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000405- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
406 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
407
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000408- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
409 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
410 Tkdnd.
411
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000412- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
413 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
414
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000415- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
416 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
417
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000418- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000419 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
420
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000421- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
422 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
423
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000424- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
425 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
426
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000427- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000428 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000429
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000430- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
431
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000432- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
433 error messages.
434
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000435- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
436
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000437- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
438 Bug #1224621.
439
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000440- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
441 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
442 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
443 terminates by raising StopIteration.
444
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000445- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
446
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000447- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
448 component of the path.
449
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000450- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
451 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
452 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
453 class at all.
454
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000455- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
456 files to PyPI.
457
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000458- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
459 them to PyPI.
460
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000461- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
462 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
463 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
464 work as expected.
465
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000466- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
467 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
468
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000469- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000470 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
471
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000472- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
473
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000474- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
475 to build.
476
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000477- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
478 symbolic links on Windows.
479
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000480- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000481 profile.py if available.
482
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000483- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
484
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000485- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
486 in LWPCookieJar.
487
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000488- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
489
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000490- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
491
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000492- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
493
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000494- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
495
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000496- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
497
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000498- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
499
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000500- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
501
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000502- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
503
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000504- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
505 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
506 be exploited in various ways.
507
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000508- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000509 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
510
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000511- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
512 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
513
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000514- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000515 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
516
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000517- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
518
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000519- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
520
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000521- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
522
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000523- Enhancements to the csv module:
524
525 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000526 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000527 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000528 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
529 reporting.
530 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
531 dictates.
532 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000533 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000534 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000535 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
536 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000537 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
538 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000539 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000540 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
541 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
542 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
543 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
544 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
545 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
546 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
547 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
548 without first creating a dialect class.
549 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
550 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
551 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000552 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000553 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
554 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000555 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
556 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
557 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
558 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000559 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
560 This has been fixed.
561
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000562- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
563 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
564 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
565 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
566
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000567- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
568
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000569- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
570 (Bug #951915).
571
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000572- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
573 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
574 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000575 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000576
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000577- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
578
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000579- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
580 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
581
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000582- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
583
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000584- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
585
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000586- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
587
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000588- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
589
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000590- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
591
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000592- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
593 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
594 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
595
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000596- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000597 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000598
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000599- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
600 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
601 tokenizer with very long source lines.
602
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000603- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
604 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
605 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000606
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000607- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
608 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000609
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000610- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
611 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
612
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000613- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
614 correctly.
615
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000616- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
617 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
618 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
619 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
620 between two lines.
621
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000622- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
623 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
624 handlers.
625
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000626- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000627 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
628 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000629
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000630- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
631 considering it exactly like a '*'.
632
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000633- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
634 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000635
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000636- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
637
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000638Build
639-----
640
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000641- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
642
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000643- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
644 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
645
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000646- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
647
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000648- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
649 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
650
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000651- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
652 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
653
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000654- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
655 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
656 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000657 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000658
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000659- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
660 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
661 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
662
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000663- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
664
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000665- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
666 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
667
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000668- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
669 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
670 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
671 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
672 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
673 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
674 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
675 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
676
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000677- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
678 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
679 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
680 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
681
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000682C API
683-----
684
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000685- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
686
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000687- Removed PyRange_New().
688
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000689- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
690 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
691 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
692 mappings.
693
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000694
695Tests
696-----
697
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000698- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000699
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000700- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
701 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
702
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000703
704Documentation
705-------------
706
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000707- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
708
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000709- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
710
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000711- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
712
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000713- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
714
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000715- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
716
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000717- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
718
719- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
720
721- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
722
723- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
724
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000725- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
726 Closes bug #1166582.
727
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000728- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
729 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
730 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
731
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000732Mac
733---
734
735
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000736New platforms
737-------------
738
739- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
740
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000741
742Tools/Demos
743-----------
744
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000745- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
746 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
747 source files that need an encoding declaration.
748 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
749
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000750- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
751
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000752- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000753
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000754- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
755 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000756
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000757What's New in Python 2.4 final?
758===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000759
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000760*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000761
762Core and builtins
763-----------------
764
765- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
766 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
767 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
768
769
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000770What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
771==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000772
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000773*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000774
775Core and builtins
776-----------------
777
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000778- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
779 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
780 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
781
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000782
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000783Library
784-------
785
786- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
787 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
788 raised is re-raised.
789
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000790- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
791 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
792
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000793- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
794 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
795 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
796 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
797 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
798 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
799 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
800 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
801 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
802 by the slice are recomputed now.
803
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000804- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000805
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000806Build
807-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000808
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000809- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
810 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
811 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000812
813C API
814-----
815
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000816- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
817
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000818
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000819What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
820================================
821
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000822*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000823
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000824License
825-------
826
827The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
828is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
829changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
830Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
831intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
832durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
833the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
834License::
835
836 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
837
838says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
839to Python 2.1.1.
840
841The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
842License Version 2.
843
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000844Core and builtins
845-----------------
846
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000847- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
848 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
849 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
850 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
851 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
852 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
853 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000854 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000855 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
856 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
857
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000858- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000859
860Extension Modules
861-----------------
862
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000863- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
864 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
865 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
866 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000867
868Library
869-------
870
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000871- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
872 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
873 returned.
874
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000875- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
876
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000877- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
878 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
879
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000880- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
881
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000882- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
883 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000884
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000885- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
886
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000887- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
888
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000889- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000890 the source code is updated and reloaded.
891
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000892Build
893-----
894
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000895- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000896
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000897What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
898================================
899
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000900*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000901
902Core and builtins
903-----------------
904
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000905- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000906 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
907
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000908- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
909 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
910 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
911 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
912
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000913- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
914 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
915
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000916- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
917 constant.
918
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000919- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
920 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
921 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
922 large), and to anomalies such as
923 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
924 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
925 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
926 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000927
928Extension modules
929-----------------
930
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000931- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
932 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000933 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
934 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
935 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000936
937Library
938-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000939
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000940- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000941 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000942 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
943 --swig-cpp.
944
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000945- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
946 it is set.
947
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000948- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000949
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000950- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
951 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
952 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
953 Closes bug #1039270.
954
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000955- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000956
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000957 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000958 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
959 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
960 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
961 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
962 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
963 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
964 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
965 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
966 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
967 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
968 + Updates to documentation.
969
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000970- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
971 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
972 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
973 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
974
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000975- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000976
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000977- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
978 applications should use the getmember function.
979
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000980- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
981
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000982- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
983 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
984 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
985 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
986 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
987 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
988 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
989 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
990 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
991
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000992- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
993 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000994 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000995
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000996- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
997 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
998 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
999 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
1000 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
1001 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
1002 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
1003 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001004
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001005- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1006 the new public features (of which there are many).
1007
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001008- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001009 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1010 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1011 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1012 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001013 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001014
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001015- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1016
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001017- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1018 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1019 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1020 options.
1021
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001022- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1023 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1024 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1025 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1026 conditions under which non-string values work.
1027
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001028Build
1029-----
1030
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001031- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1032 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1033 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1034
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001035- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1036 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1037 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1038 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1039 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001040
1041C API
1042-----
1043
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001044- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1045 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1046
1047- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1048
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001049- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1050 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1051 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1052 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1053 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1054 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1055 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1056 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1057 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1058
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001059- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1060
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001061- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1062 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1063 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001064
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001065Tests
1066-----
1067
1068- test__locale ported to unittest
1069
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001070Mac
1071---
1072
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001073- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1074 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1075 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001076
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001077Tools/Demos
1078-----------
1079
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001080- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1081 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1082 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1083 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1084 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001085
1086
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001087What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1088=================================
1089
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001090*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001091
1092Core and builtins
1093-----------------
1094
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001095- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001096 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1097
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001098- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1099 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1100 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1101 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1102 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1103 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1104 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1105 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001106 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1107 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1108 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1109 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1110 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001111
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001112- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1113 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1114 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1115 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1116 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1117
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001118- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1119
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001120- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1121 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1122
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001123- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1124 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1125 modified the list.
1126
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001127- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1128 functions is now writable.
1129
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001130- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1131 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1132 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1133 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1134
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001135- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1136 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1137 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1138 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1139 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001140
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001141- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1142 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1143
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001144Extension modules
1145-----------------
1146
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001147- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1148
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001149- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1150 data.
1151
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001152- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1153 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1154 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1155 supposed to have been truncated away.
1156
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001157- Added socket.socketpair().
1158
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001159- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1160 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1161
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001162- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001163 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1164
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001165Library
1166-------
1167
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001168- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001169 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001170
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001171- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1172 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1173
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001174- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1175 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1176
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001177- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1178
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001179- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1180 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001181
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001182- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1183 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1184
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001185- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1186
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001187- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1188
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001189- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1190
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001191- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1192 Percivall.
1193
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001194- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1195 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1196
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001197- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1198 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1199 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001200 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001201
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001202- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1203 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1204 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1205 and exponent.
1206
1207- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1208
1209- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001210 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001211 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1212
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001213- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1214 to the readline module.
1215
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001216- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001217 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1218 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001219
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001220- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1221 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1222 contains symlinks.
1223
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001224- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1225 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1226
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001227- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1228 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1229 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1230
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001231- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1232 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1233 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1234 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1235 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1236 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1237 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1238 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1239 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1240 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1241 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1242 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1243 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1244
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001245- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1246
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001247Tools/Demos
1248-----------
1249
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001250- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1251 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1252
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001253- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1254
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001255Build
1256-----
1257
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001258- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1259 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1260 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1261 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1262 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1263 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1264 plans to do so.
1265
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001266- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1267 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1268
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001269- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1270 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1271
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001272- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1273 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1274
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001275- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1276 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1277
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001278- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1279 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1280
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001281C API
1282-----
1283
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001284..
1285
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001286Documentation
1287-------------
1288
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001289- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1290 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1291
1292- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1293 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1294 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001295
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001296New platforms
1297-------------
1298
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001299- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1300
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001301Tests
1302-----
1303
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001304..
1305
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001306Windows
1307-------
1308
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001309- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1310 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1311 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1312 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1313 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1314 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1315 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1316 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1317 the problem.
1318
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001319Mac
1320---
1321
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001322..
1323
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001324
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001325What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1326=================================
1327
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001328*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001329
1330Core and builtins
1331-----------------
1332
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001333- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1334 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1335 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1336 sensitive code.
1337
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001338- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001339 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001340
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001341 @staticmethod
1342 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001343
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001344 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001345
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001346- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1347 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1348 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1349 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1350 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1351 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1352 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1353 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1354 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1355 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1356 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1357
1358 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1359 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1360 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1361 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1362 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1363 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1364 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1365
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001366- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1367 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1368
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001369- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001370 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001371
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001372- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001373 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001374 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1375
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001376- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001377 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1378 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1379
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001380- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1381 types that support garbage collection.
1382
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001383- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1384
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001385- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1386 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1387 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1388 Jython.
1389
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001390- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1391
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001392- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1393 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1394
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001395- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1396 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1397 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001398
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001399- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1400 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1401 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1402
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001403Extension modules
1404-----------------
1405
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001406- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1407
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001408Library
1409-------
1410
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001411- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1412 TIS-620
1413
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001414- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1415 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1416 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1417 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1418 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1419 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1420 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1421 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1422 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1423 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1424
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001425- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1426
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001427- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1428 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1429 same as when the argument is omitted).
1430 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1431
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001432- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1433
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001434- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1435 schemes are offered.
1436
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001437- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1438
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001439- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1440 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1441 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1442
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001443- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1444
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001445- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1446 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1447
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001448- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1449 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1450 when dummy_threading is being used.
1451
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001452- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1453 from a tarfile.
1454
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001455- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001456 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001457
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001458- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1459 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1460 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1461 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1462
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001463- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1464 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1465
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001466- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1467 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1468 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1469 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1470 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1471 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1472 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1473 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1474 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1475 by some other method in progress).
1476
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001477- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1478 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1479 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001480
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001481- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1482
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001483- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1484 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1485 AM Kuchling.
1486
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001487- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1488 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1489 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1490
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001491- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1492 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1493 instead of unsigned.
1494
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001495- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001496 no longer part of the public API.
1497
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001498- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1499 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1500 string methods of the same name).
1501
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001502- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001503 SF patch 945642.
1504
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001505- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1506
1507 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1508
1509 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1510 DocTestSuites.
1511
1512- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1513 that provide thread-local data.
1514
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001515- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1516 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1517
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001518- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1519
1520- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1521 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1522 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1523
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001524- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1525
1526 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1527 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1528 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001529
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001530 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1531 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1532 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1533 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1534
1535 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1536 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1537
1538 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1539 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1540 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1541 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1542
1543 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1544 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1545 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1546 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1547 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1548
1549 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1550 wrapping help output.
1551
1552 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1553 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1554 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001555
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001556C API
1557-----
1558
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001559- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1560 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1561 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1562 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1563 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1564 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1565 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1566 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1567 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1568 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1569 its visible semantics have not changed.
1570
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001571- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1572 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1573
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001574Documentation
1575-------------
1576
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001577- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001578
1579 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001580 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001581
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001582 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001583
1584 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1585
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001586- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001587
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001588Tests
1589-----
1590
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001591- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001592 platforms that use the Makefile.
1593
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001594- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1595 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1596 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1597
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001598
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001599What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1600=================================
1601
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001602*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001603
1604Core and builtins
1605-----------------
1606
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001607- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1608 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1609 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1610 objects now (one object instead of three).
1611
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001612- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1613 Windows DLLs.
1614
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001615- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1616 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001617
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001618- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1619 a new .pyc magic.
1620
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001621- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1622 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1623 be there.
1624
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001625- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1626 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1627 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1628
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001629- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1630 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1631 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1632
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001633- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1634
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001635- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1636 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1637 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001638
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001639- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1640 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1641
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001642- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1643
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001644- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001645 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001646
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001647- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1648
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001649- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1650
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001651- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1652 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1653
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001654- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1655 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1656 Fixes bug #858016 .
1657
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001658- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1659 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1660 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1661
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001662- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1663 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1664 improves their performance (about 35%).
1665
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001666- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1667 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1668 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1669
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001670- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1671 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1672 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1673 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1674
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001675- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1676 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001677 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001678 length is not known).
1679
1680- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1681 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001682 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1683 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001684 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1685
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001686- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1687 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1688
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001689- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1690 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1691 keyword arguments.
1692
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001693- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1694 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1695 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1696
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001697- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1698 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1699 cases.
1700
1701- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1702 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1703 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1704 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1705 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1706 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1707 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1708 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1709 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1710 a release build.
1711
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001712- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1713 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1714
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001715- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001716 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001717
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001718- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1719 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1720 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1721 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1722 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1723 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1724 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1725 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1726 destroyed.
1727
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001728- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1729 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1730 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1731 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1732 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1733 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1734 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1735 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1736
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001737- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1738 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1739 character other than a space.
1740
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001741- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1742 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1743 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1744 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1745 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1746 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1747 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1748 attributes with the same name.
1749
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001750- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1751 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1752 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1753 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1754 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1755 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1756 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1757 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1758 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1759 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1760 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1761 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1762 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1763 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001764
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001765- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1766 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1767 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1768 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1769 This has been repaired.
1770
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001771- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1772
1773- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1774
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001775- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1776 over a sequence.
1777
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001778- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001779 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001780
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001781- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1782
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001783- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1784 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1785 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1786 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1787 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1788 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1789 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1790 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1791
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001792- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1793 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1794 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1795
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001796- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1797 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1798 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1799 freelist.
1800
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001801- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1802 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1803
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001804- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1805 number.
1806
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001807- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1808 a TypeError exception.
1809
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001810- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1811 820195.
1812
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001813- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1814 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1815 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1816
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001817- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001818 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1819 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001820
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001821- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1822 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1823 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1824
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001825- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1826 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001827 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001828
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001829- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001830 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1831 the first call.
1832
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001833
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001834Extension modules
1835-----------------
1836
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001837- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1838 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1839
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001840- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1841 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1842 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1843 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1844 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1845 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1846 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001847
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001848- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1849
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001850- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1851
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001852- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1853 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1854
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001855- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1856 fewer false positives.
1857
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001858- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1859 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1860
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001861- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001862 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1863
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001864- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001865 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001866 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001867 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1868 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001869
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001870- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1871 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1872 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1873 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1874
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001875- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1876 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1877 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1878 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1879 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1880 #897625.
1881
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001882- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1883 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1884
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001885- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1886 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1887 and pops on either side of the deque.
1888
1889- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1890 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1891
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001892- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1893 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1894 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1895 other functions that expect a function argument.
1896
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001897- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1898
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001899- os.getsid was added.
1900
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001901- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1902 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1903 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1904
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001905- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1906
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001907- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1908
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001909- readline.clear_history was added.
1910
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001911- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1912
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001913- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1914
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001915- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1916
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001917- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1918
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001919- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1920
1921- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1922
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001923- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1924
1925- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1926
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001927- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1928 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1929 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1930
1931- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1932 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1933 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1934 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1935 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1936 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1937 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1938
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001939- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1940 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1941 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1942 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001943
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001944- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001945 iterators from a single iterable.
1946
1947- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1948 of raising a TypeError exception.
1949
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001950- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1951 as parameter.
1952
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001953Library
1954-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001955
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001956- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1957
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001958- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1959 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1960 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001961
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001962- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1963 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1964 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001965
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001966- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001967
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001968- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1969 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001970
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001971- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1972 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1973
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001974- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1975
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001976- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001977 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001978
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001979- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001980 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001981
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001982- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1983
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001984- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1985 on cygwin and mingw32.
1986
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001987- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1988
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001989- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1990 module.
1991
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001992- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1993 installation scheme for all platforms.
1994
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001995- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001996 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001997
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001998- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1999 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
2000 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
2001
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00002002- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
2003 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2004 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2005
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002006- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2007
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002008- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2009
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002010- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2011 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2012
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002013- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2014 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2015 type pattern with the same value exists.
2016
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002017- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2018 when run from the command prompt).
2019
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002020- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2021 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2022
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002023- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2024 default sort).
2025
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002026- Added global runctx function to profile module
2027
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002028- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2029
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002030- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2031
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002032- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2033
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002034- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002035 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2036 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2037 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2038 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2039 accordingly.
2040
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002041- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2042 decoding standards.
2043
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002044- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2045 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2046 called for all requests.
2047
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002048- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2049 they are passed to the compiler.
2050
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002051- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2052 indent, width and depth.
2053
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002054- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2055 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2056
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002057- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2058 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2059
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002060- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2061
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002062- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2063
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002064- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2065
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002066- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2067 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2068
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002069- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002070 for better performance.
2071
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002072- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002073
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002074- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2075 a string).
2076
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002077- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2078
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002079- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2080
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002081- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2082
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002083- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2084
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002085- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2086 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2087 list of fieldnames.
2088
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002089- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2090 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2091
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002092- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2093
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002094- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2095 empty lists.
2096
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002097- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2098 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2099 and shelves.
2100
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002101- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2102 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2103
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002104- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002105 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2106 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002107
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002108- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2109 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002110 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002111
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002112- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002113 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2114 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2115
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002116- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2117 and removed in Py2.4.
2118
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002119- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2120
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002121- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2122
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002123Tools/Demos
2124-----------
2125
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002126- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2127 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2128
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002129- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2130
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002131- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2132 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2133 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2134 destination in situations where both files are given.
2135
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002136- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2137 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2138 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2139 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2140
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002141- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2142
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002143- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2144 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2145 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2146 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2147 now.
2148
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002149- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2150 in effect
2151
2152- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2153 C-c C-h
2154
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002155- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2156 -d option was given.
2157
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002158Build
2159-----
2160
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002161- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2162 build under OS X.
2163
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002164- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2165 --enable-profiling.
2166
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002167- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2168 is configured --with-tsc.
2169
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002170- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2171 on AMD64.
2172
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002173- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2174 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2175
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002176- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2177 removed.
2178
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002179- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2180 supported (see PEP 11).
2181
2182- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2183
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002184- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2185
2186- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2187 (see PEP 11).
2188
2189- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2190 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2191
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002192C API
2193-----
2194
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002195- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2196 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2197 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2198
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002199- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2200 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2201 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2202 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2203
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002204- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2205 generator objects.
2206
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002207- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2208 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002209 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2210 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002211
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002212- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2213 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2214
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002215- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2216 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2217 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2218 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2219 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2220
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002221- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2222 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2223 about 10% faster.
2224
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002225- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2226 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2227
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002228- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2229 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2230 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2231 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2232
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002233Windows
2234-------
2235
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002236- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2237 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2238 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2239 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2240
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002241- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2242 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2243 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2244
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002245
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002246What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2247===============================
2248
2249*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2250
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002251IDLE
2252----
2253
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002254- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2255 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2256 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2257 context-menu actions.
2258
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002259- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2260 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2261 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2262 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2263 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2264 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2265 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2266 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2267 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2268
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002269
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002270What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2271=============================================
2272
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002273*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002274
2275Core and builtins
2276-----------------
2277
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002278- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002279 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002280 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2281
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002282Extension modules
2283-----------------
2284
2285- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2286 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2287 than once. This has been fixed.
2288
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002289- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2290 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2291 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2292 call.
2293
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002294- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2295
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002296Library
2297-------
2298
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002299- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2300 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2301
2302- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2303 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2304 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2305 restored.
2306
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002307IDLE
2308----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002309
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002310- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002311
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002312Build
2313-----
2314
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002315- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2316 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2317
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002318C API
2319-----
2320
2321Windows
2322-------
2323
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002324- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2325 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2326
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002327- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2328
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002329Mac
2330---
2331
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002332- Various fixes to pimp.
2333
2334- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2335
2336- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2337 more problems than it solves.
2338
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002339
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002340What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2341=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002342
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002343*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2344
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002345Core and builtins
2346-----------------
2347
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002348- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2349 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2350
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002351- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2352 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002353 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002354
2355- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2356 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2357 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002358 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002359
2360- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2361 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002362
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002363- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2364 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2365 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2366
2367- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002368 770247.
2369
2370- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002371
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002372Extension modules
2373-----------------
2374
2375- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2376 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2377
2378- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2379
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002380- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2381
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002382- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2383 contained within the _strptime module.
2384
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002385- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2386 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2387
2388- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002389 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2390
2391- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2392 the find_class attribute, if present.
2393
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002394- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002395
2396 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2397 (SF bug 763298).
2398
2399 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002400 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2401 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2402 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002403
2404 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2405
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002406Library
2407-------
2408
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002409- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2410
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002411- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2412 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2413 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2414 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2415 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2416 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2417 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2418 or Tester().
2419
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002420- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2421 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2422 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2423 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2424 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2425 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2426 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2427 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2428 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002429
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002430 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002431
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002432- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2433 weren't before was an oversight.
2434
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002435- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2436 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2437
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002438- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2439 when there are no lines.
2440
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002441- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2442 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2443
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002444- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2445 to child processes.
2446
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002447- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2448
2449- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2450
2451- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2452 xmlrpclib.
2453
2454- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2455 responses.
2456
2457- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2458 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2459
2460- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2461 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2462 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2463
2464- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2465 used as patterns.
2466
2467- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2468 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2469 than Tk 8.3.
2470
2471- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2472
2473- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002474
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002475Tools/Demos
2476-----------
2477
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002478- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2479
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002480- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2481
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002482- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002483
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002484Build
2485-----
2486
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002487- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2488
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002489- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2490
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002491- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2492 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002493
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002494- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2495 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2496 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002497
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002498C API
2499-----
2500
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002501- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2502 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2503
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002504Windows
2505-------
2506
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002507- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2508 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2509 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2510 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2511 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2512 Python exception ::
2513
2514 thread.error: can't start new thread
2515
2516 is raised now.
2517
2518- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2519 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2520 instead of from DLL teardown.
2521
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002522Mac
2523---
2524
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002525- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002526 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002527 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2528 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2529 the executable in the bundle.
2530
2531- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002532
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002533- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2534
2535- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2536 on Panther.
2537
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002538What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2539================================
2540
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002541*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002542
2543Core and builtins
2544-----------------
2545
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002546- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2547 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2548 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2549 with the -i option.
2550
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002551- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2552 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2553
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002554- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2555 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2556
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002557- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2558 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2559 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2560 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2561 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2562 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2563 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2564 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2565 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2566 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2567 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2568 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2569 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002570
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002571- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2572 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2573 embedded in a lambda expression.
2574
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002575- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2576 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2577 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2578 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2579 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2580
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002581- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2582 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2583 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2584
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002585- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2586 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2587
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002588- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2589 It's writable again.
2590
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002591- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2592 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2593 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002594 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002595
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002596- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2597 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2598 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2599
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002600Extension modules
2601-----------------
2602
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002603- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2604 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2605
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002606- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2607 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2608 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2609 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2610
2611- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2612 collection.
2613
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002614- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2615 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2616 unique within a single program run.
2617
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002618- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2619 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2620
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002621- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2622 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2623
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002624- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2625 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002626
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002627- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2628
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002629- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2630 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2631
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002632- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2633 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2634 for many BSD-derived systems.
2635
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002636
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002637Library
2638-------
2639
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002640- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2641 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2642 primary ones:
2643
2644 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2645 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2646 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2647
2648 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2649 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2650 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2651 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2652 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2653 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2654
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002655- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2656 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2657 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2658 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2659 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2660 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2661 argument.
2662
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002663- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2664 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2665 in the archive.
2666
2667- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2668 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2669
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002670- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2671 569574).
2672
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002673- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2674 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2675 no more.
2676
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002677- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2678 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2679 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2680 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2681 code coverage.
2682
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002683- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2684 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2685 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002686 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2687 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002688
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002689- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2690 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2691 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002692 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002693
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002694- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2695
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002696- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2697 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2698 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2699 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2700
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002701- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2702 handling.
2703
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002704- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2705 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2706
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002707- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2708 in socket.py.
2709
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002710- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2711
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002712- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2713 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2714 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2715 opener with proxy support.
2716
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002717- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2718
2719- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2720
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002721Tools/Demos
2722-----------
2723
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002724- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2725
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002726- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2727
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002728- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2729 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002730
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002731- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2732 files.
2733
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002734Build
2735-----
2736
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002737- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002738 different root directory.
2739
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002740C API
2741-----
2742
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002743- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2744 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2745 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2746 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2747 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2748 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2749 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2750 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2751 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2752 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2753
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002754- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2755 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2756 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2757 from Python.
2758
2759
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002760New platforms
2761-------------
2762
2763None this time.
2764
2765Tests
2766-----
2767
2768- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2769 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2770
2771Windows
2772-------
2773
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002774- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2775
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002776- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2777 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2778 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2779 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2780 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2781 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2782 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2783 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2784 that's what it's for.
2785
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002786Mac
2787---
2788
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002789- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2790 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2791 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2792 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002793- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2794 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2795- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002796
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002797SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2798------------------------------------
2799
2800430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2801598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2802622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2803661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2804683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2805697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2806713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2807724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2808727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2809729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2810730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2811731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2812732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2813733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2814735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2815740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2816744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2817745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2818747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2819749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2820751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2821753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2822755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2823757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2824760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2825
2826
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002827What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2828================================
2829
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002830*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002831
2832Core and builtins
2833-----------------
2834
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002835- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2836 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2837
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002838- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2839 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2840 and cannot be strings).
2841
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002842- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2843 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2844 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2845 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2846
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002847- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2848 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2849 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2850 Python itself.
2851
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002852- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2853 the referenced object, if it has one.
2854
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002855- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2856 the thread started at
2857 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2858
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002859- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2860 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2861 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2862 placed on a list index.
2863
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002864- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2865 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2866 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2867 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2868
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002869- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2870 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2871 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2872 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2873 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2874 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2875 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2876
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002877- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2878 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2879 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2880 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2881 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2882
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002883- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2884 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002885
2886- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2887 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2888 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2889 #693195.)
2890
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002891- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2892 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002893
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002894- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002895 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002896 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2897 interpreter executions, would fail.
2898
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002899- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002900 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002901 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002902
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002903Extension modules
2904-----------------
2905
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002906- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2907 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2908 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2909 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2910
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002911- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2912 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2913
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002914- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2915 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2916 and Greg Chapman.)
2917
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002918- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2919 recursively.
2920
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002921- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002922 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2923 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2924 leaks.
2925
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002926- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2927
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002928- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2929 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2930 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2931 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2932 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2933 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2934 #705836.
2935
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002936- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002937 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2938
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002939- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2940 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2941 See SF bug #692416.
2942
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002943- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2944 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2945
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002946- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2947 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2948 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002949
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002950- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002951 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2952 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2953
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002954- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2955 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2956 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2957 timeouts to work properly.
2958
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002959Library
2960-------
2961
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002962- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2963 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2964 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2965 future release.
2966
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002967- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2968 for querying platform dependent features.
2969
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002970- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002971
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002972- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2973 pickle protocol versions.
2974
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002975- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2976 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2977 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2978
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002979- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2980
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002981- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2982 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2983 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2984 modules.
2985
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002986- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2987 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2988 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2989
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002990- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2991 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2992
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002993- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2994 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2995 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2996
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002997- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002998 MS Office extensions.
2999
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00003000- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
3001 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
3002
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00003003- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3004 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3005
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003006- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3007 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3008 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3009 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3010 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3011 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3012
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003013- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3014 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3015 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003016
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003017- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3018 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3019 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3020
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003021- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3022
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003023- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3024 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3025 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3026
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003027Tools/Demos
3028-----------
3029
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003030- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3031 See the module docstring for details.
3032
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003033Build
3034-----
3035
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003036- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3037 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003038
3039C API
3040-----
3041
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003042- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3043
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003044- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3045 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3046 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3047
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003048- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3049 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003050
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003051 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3052 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3053 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003054
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003055- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003056 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3057
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003058- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3059 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3060 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003061
3062New platforms
3063-------------
3064
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003065None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003066
3067Tests
3068-----
3069
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003070- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3071 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003072
3073Windows
3074-------
3075
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003076- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3077 function.
3078
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003079- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3080 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003081
3082Mac
3083---
3084
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003085- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3086 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003087
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003088- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3089 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003090
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003091- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3092 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3093 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003094
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003095- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003096 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3097 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003098
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003099- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3100 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003101
3102
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003103What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3104=================================
3105
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003106*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003107
3108Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003109-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003110
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003111- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3112 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3113 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3114
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003115- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3116 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3117 (SF patch #664376.)
3118
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003119- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3120 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3121 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3122 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3123 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3124 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003125 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003126
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003127- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3128 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3129 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3130 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003131 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003132
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003133- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3134 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3135 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3136 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3137 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3138 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3139 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3140 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3141 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3142 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3143 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3144
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003145- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3146 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3147 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3148 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3149 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3150 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3151
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003152- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3153 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3154
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003155- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3156 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3157 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3158 case.)
3159
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003160- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3161 passed as unicode strings.
3162
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003163- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3164 See SF bug #683467.
3165
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003166- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3167 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3168
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003169- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3170
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003171- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3172
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003173- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3174 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3175 arguments.
3176
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003177- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3178 See SF bug #667147.
3179
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003180- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003181 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003182 See SF bug #676155.
3183
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003184- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003185 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003186 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3187 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3188 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3189 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3190 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3191 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003192
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003193Extension modules
3194-----------------
3195
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003196- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3197 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3198 tp_as_number pointer.
3199
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003200- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3201 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3202 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3203 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3204 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3205
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003206- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3207
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003208- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3209
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003210- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003211 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003212 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3213 patch #678531.)
3214
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003215- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3216 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3217
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003218- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3219 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3220
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003221- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3222
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003223- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3224 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3225 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3226
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003227- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3228
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003229- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3230 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3231
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003232- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003233
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003234- datetime changes:
3235
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003236 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3237
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003238 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3239 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3240 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3241 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3242 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3243 now.
3244
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003245 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003246 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3247 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003248
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003249 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003250 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003251 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3252 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3253 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3254 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003255
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003256 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3257 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3258 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003259 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3260
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003261 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3262 by a later example coded by Guido.
3263
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003264 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003265 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3266 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3267 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003268 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3269 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3270
3271 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3272 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3273 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3274 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3275 tzinfo subclass instance.
3276
3277 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3278 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3279 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3280 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3281 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3282 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3283 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3284 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003285
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003286 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3287 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3288 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3289 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3290 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003291 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3292
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003293 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003294
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003295 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3296 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3297 as a naive datetime object.
3298
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003299 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3300 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3301 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3302
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003303 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3304 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3305 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3306 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3307 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3308 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3309 comparison.
3310
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003311 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3312 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3313 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3314 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003315 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003316
3317 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003318
3319 and ::
3320
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003321 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3322
3323 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3324 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3325 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3326 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3327
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003328 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3329 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3330 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3331 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3332 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3333
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003334 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3335 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003336 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3337 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003338
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003339Library
3340-------
3341
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003342- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3343 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3344
3345- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3346 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3347 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3348 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3349 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3350 See PEP 307 for details.
3351
3352- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3353 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3354
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003355- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3356 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003357 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003358 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3359 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003360 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003361
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003362- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3363 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3364
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003365- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3366 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3367 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3368
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003369- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3370
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003371- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3372 exception.
3373
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003374- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3375 class.
3376
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003377- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3378 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3379 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3380
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003381- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3382 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3383
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003384- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003385 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3386 See SF bug #659228.
3387
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003388- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3389 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3390 See SF patch #651082.
3391
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003392- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003393
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003394- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3395 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3396
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003397- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003398 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003399
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003400- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3401 DOS paths from other platforms.
3402
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003403Tools/Demos
3404-----------
3405
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003406- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3407 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3408 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3409 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3410 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3411 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3412 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3413 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3414 example:
3415
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003416 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3417 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003418
3419 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3420
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003421
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003422Build
3423-----
3424
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003425- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3426 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3427 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003428 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3429
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003430 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3431
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003432- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3433 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3434 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3435 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3436 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3437 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3438 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3439 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3440 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3441
3442- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3443 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3444 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3445 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3446
3447- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3448 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3449
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003450C API
3451-----
3452
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003453- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3454 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003455
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003456- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3457 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3458 tp_as_number pointer.
3459
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003460- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3461 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3462 (SF #681367)
3463
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003464- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3465 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3466 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3467 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003468
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003469Tests
3470-----
3471
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003472- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003473 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3474 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3475 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3476 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3477 pydoc.)
3478
3479- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3480
3481- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003482
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003483Windows
3484-------
3485
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003486- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3487 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3488 time).
3489
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003490- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3491 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3492
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003493- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3494 release without strong cryptography.
3495
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003496- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003497 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003498
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003499- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3500 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3501
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003502Mac
3503---
3504
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003505- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3506 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003507
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003508- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3509 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3510 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003511
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003512- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3513 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003514
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003515- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3516 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3517 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3518 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003519
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003520- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003521 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3522 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3523 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003524
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003525
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003526What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003527=================================
3528
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003529*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003530
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003531Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003532--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003533
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003534- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3535
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003536- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3537 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003538 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003539 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003540 a different meaning than before.
3541
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003542- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003543 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003544 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003545
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003546- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003547 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003548 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003549
3550- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3551 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3552 and deallocation.
3553
3554- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3555 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3556
3557- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3558 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3559 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3560 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3561 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3562
3563- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3564 now detected by the garbage collector.
3565
3566- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3567 [SF bug 519621]
3568
3569- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3570 identifier.
3571
3572- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3573 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3574 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3575 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3576 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3577 [SF bug 563060]
3578
3579- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3580 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3581 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3582 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3583 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3584
3585- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3586 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3587 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3588
3589- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3590
3591- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3592 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3593 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3594 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3595 state of the slots would be lost.)
3596
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003597Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003598-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003599
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003600- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003601 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3602 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3603 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3604 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003605 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3606 Jython 2.1.
3607
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003608- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003609 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003610 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3611 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3612 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3613 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3614 these, see PEP 302.
3615
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003616- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3617 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3618 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3619
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003620- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3621 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3622 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3623
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003624- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3625 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3626 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3627
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003628- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3629 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3630 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3631 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3632 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3633 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3634 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3635 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3636 releases or implementations.
3637
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003638- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003639 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3640 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003641
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003642- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3643 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3644
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003645- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3646 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3647 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3648
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003649- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3650 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3651
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003652- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3653 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003654 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3655 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003656
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003657- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3658 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3659 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3660 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3661 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3662
3663 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3664 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3665 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3666 pattern.
3667
3668 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3669 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3670 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3671 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3672
3673 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3674 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3675 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3676 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3677 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3678 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3679
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003680- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3681 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3682 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3683 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3684 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3685 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3686 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3687 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003688
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003689- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3690 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3691 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3692 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3693 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003694 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3695 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3696 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3697 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3698 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3699 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3700 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003701
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003702- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3703 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3704
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003705- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3706 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3707 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3708 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3709 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3710 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3711 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3712 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3713 to Zack Weinberg!
3714
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003715- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3716 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3717 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3718 type. This has been fixed now.
3719
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003720- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3721 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3722 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3723
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003724- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3725 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3726 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3727 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3728 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3729 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3730 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3731 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003732 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003733
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003734- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3735 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3736 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003737
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003738- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3739 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3740 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3741 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3742 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3743 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3744 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3745 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003746 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003747 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3748 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3749
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003750- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3751 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3752 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3753 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3754 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3755 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3756 this.)
3757
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003758- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3759 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003760 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003761 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003762 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3763 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003764 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3765 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003766
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003767- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3768 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3769 currently running.
3770
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003771- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3772 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3773 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3774 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3775
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003776- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3777 as directory names.
3778
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003779- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3780 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3781
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003782- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3783 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3784
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003785- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003786 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3787 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003788
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003789- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3790 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3791 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3792 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3793 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3794
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003795- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3796 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3797 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3798 removed.
3799
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003800- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3801 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3802 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3803
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003804- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3805 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3806 to __debug__.
3807
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003808- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3809 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3810 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3811
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003812- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3813 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3814 deprecated now.
3815
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003816- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3817 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3818 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003819
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003820- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3821 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3822 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3823 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3824 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003825
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003826- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3827 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3828
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003829- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3830 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3831 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003832 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003833 is backward compatible.
3834
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003835- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3836 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3837 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3838 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3839 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3840
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003841- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3842 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3843 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3844 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3845 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3846 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003847
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003848- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3849 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3850
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003851- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3852 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3853
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003854- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3855 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3856 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3857 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3858 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3859
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003860- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3861 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3862 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3863
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003864- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003865 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3866
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003867- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3868 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3869 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003870
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003871- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3872 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3873
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003874- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3875 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3876 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3877
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003878- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3879
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003880Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003881-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003882
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003883- Added three operators to the operator module:
3884 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3885 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3886 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3887
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003888- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3889
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003890- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3891 archives.
3892
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003893- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3894 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3895 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3896
3897 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3898
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003899- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3900 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3901 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003902 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003903
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003904- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3905 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3906 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3907 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003908 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3909 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3910 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3911 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003912
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003913- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3914 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003915
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003916- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3917
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003918- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3919 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3920
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003921- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3922 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3923 supported.
3924
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003925- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3926
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003927- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3928 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003929
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003930- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3931 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3932
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003933- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3934
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003935- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3936 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3937
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003938- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3939 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3940 functions but callable type objects.
3941
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003942- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003943 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003944 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003945
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003946- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3947 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003948
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003949- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3950 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003951
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003952- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3953 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3954 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3955 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3956
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003957- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3958 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003959
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003960- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3961 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3962 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3963 and __imul__.
3964
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003965- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003966 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3967 is called.
3968
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003969- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3970 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3971 interpreter was compiled.
3972
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003973- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3974 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3975 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003976 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003977 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3978 1, not 2.
3979
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003980- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3981 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3982 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3983 limit.
3984
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003985- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3986 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3987 bug #623464.
3988
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003989- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3990 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3991 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3992 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3993
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003994Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003995-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003996
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003997- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3998
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003999- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
4000 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
4001 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
4002 with Python 2.3a2.
4003
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004004- os.path exposes getctime.
4005
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004006- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004007 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004008 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004009 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004010 unit tests of floating point results.
4011
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004012- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4013 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4014 has been increased.
4015
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004016- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4017 executed.
4018
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004019- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4020 postinstallation script.
4021
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004022- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4023 test the current module.
4024
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004025- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004026 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4027 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4028 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4029 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4030
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004031- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004032 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004033 Ward's Optik package.
4034
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004035- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4036 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4037 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4038 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4039
4040- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4041 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004042 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004043
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004044- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4045 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4046 shelf are binary pickles.
4047
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004048- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4049 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4050
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004051- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4052 modules are iterators now.
4053
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004054- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4055 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4056 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4057 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4058 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4059 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004060
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004061- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4062 with their entity value.
4063
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004064- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4065
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004066- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4067 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004068
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004069- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4070 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004071 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004072
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004073- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4074 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4075 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4076 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4077 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4078 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4079 main():
4080
4081 import locale
4082 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4083
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004084- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4085 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4086
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004087- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4088 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4089 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4090 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4091 to the new standard.
4092
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004093- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4094 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4095 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4096 an extension to the database.
4097
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004098- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4099 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4100 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4101 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004102 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004103
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004104- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004105 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004106
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004107- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4108 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4109 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4110 bounded integers.
4111
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004112- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4113 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4114 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4115 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4116 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4117 in existence.
4118
4119 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4120 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4121 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4122 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4123 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4124 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4125
4126 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4127 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4128 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4129 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4130
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004131- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4132 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4133 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4134
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004135- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4136
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004137- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4138 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4139 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4140 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4141
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004142- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4143 argument.
4144
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004145- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4146 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4147 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4148 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4149 [SF patch 560794].
4150
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004151- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4152 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4153 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004154 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4155 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4156 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004157
4158- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4159 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004160
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004161- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4162 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4163 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4164 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004165
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004166- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4167 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4168 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4169 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4170 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4171
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004172- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004173
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004174- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4175
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004176- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4177 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4178 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4179 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4180 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4181 identical to None.
4182
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004183- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4184 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4185 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4186 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4187 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4188 results now.
4189
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004190- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4191 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4192
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004193- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4194 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4195 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4196 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4197 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4198 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4199 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4200 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4201
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004202- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4203
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004204- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4205 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4206
4207- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4208 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4209 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4210 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4211 and other systems.
4212
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004213- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4214 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4215 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4216 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 +00004217 work well with these.
4218
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004219- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4220
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004221- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004222 connections.
4223
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004224- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4225 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4226 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4227
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004228- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4229 sets
4230
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004231- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4232 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4233 name.
4234
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004235- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4236 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4237 passed in.
4238
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004239- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004240 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004241 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4242 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004243
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004244- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4245
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004246- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4247
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004248- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4249 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4250 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4251
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004252- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4253 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4254 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4255 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004256 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004257
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004258- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004259 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004260 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004261
4262- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4263 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4264 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4265
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004266- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004267 the value of its expression argument.
4268
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004269- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4270 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4271 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4272
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004273- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4274 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4275 skipstone browser was included.
4276
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004277- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4278 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4279
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004280Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004281-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004282
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004283- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4284 names in addition to accepting file names.
4285
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004286- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4287 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4288 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4289 still used and useful.)
4290
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004291- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4292 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4293 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4294 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004295
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004296- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4297 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4298 the generated binary.
4299
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004300Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004301-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004302
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004303- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4304
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004305- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4306 except in the hands of experts.
4307
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004308- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004309 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4310 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4311 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004312
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004313- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4314 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4315 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4316 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4317 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4318 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4319 builds.
4320
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004321- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4322 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4323 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4324 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4325 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4326 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4327 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4328 new type.
4329
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004330- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004331
4332 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4333 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4334 positive infinities.
4335
4336 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4337 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4338 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4339 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4340 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4341 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4342 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4343
4344 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4345
4346 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4347
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004348- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4349 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4350 size of the executable.
4351
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004352- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4353 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4354 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4355 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004356
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004357- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4358
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004359- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4360 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4361 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004362
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004363- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4364 well as Unix.
4365
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004366- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4367 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4368 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4369 modules in the README file for details.
4370
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004371C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004372-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004373
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004374- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4375 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004376 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004377 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004378 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004379
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004380- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4381 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4382 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4383 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4384 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4385 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004386 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004387 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4388 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4389 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4390 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4391 aligned.)
4392
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004393- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4394 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4395 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4396
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004397- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4398 level.
4399
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004400- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4401 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4402 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4403 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4404 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4405
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004406- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4407 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4408 code.
4409
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004410- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4411 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4412 adjusting for negative indices.
4413
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004414- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4415 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4416 object.
4417
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004418- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4419 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4420 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4421
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004422- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4423 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004424
4425- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4426
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004427- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4428 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4429 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4430 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4431
4432- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4433
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004434- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004435
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004436- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004437 without going through the buffer API.
4438
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004439- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004440
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004441- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4442 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4443 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4444 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4445
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004446- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4447 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4448
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004449- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004450 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4451
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004452New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004453-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004454
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004455- OpenVMS is now supported.
4456
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004457- AtheOS is now supported.
4458
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004459- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4460
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004461- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4462
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004463Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004464-----
4465
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004466- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4467 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4468 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004469
4470Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004471-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004472
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004473- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4474 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4475 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4476 bugs.
4477 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004478 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004479 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4480 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004481 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004482
4483- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004484 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004485
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004486- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4487 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4488
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004489- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4490 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004491 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004492 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4493
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004494- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4495 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4496 use files" uninstall option).
4497
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004498- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4499
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004500- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4501 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4502
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004503- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4504 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4505 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4506
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004507- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4508 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4509 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4510 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4511 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004512 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4513 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4514 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004515
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004516- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004517 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004518 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4519 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4520 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4521 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4522 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4523 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4524 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4525 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4526 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4527 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4528 work around.
4529
4530- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4531 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4532 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4533 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4534 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4535 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4536 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4537 specified with O_CREAT too).
4538
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004539Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004540----
4541
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004542- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004543
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004544- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4545 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4546 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4547
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004548- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4549 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4550 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4551
4552- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4553 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4554 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4555 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4556 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4557 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4558 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4559 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004560
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004561- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4562 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4563 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004564
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004565- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4566 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4567 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4568 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4569 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004570
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004571- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4572 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4573 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004574
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004575- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4576 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004577
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004578- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4579 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4580 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4581 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4582 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004583
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004584- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4585 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4586 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4587
4588- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4589 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4590 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004591
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004592- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4593 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4594 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4595 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004596 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004597
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004598- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4599 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004600
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004601- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4602 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004603
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004604- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004605 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004606 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4607 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004608
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004609
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004610What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004611===============================
4612
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004613*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4614
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004615Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004616--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004617
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004618- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4619 with a custom metaclass.
4620
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004621Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004622-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004623
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004624- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4625 are proxies.
4626
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004627Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004628-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004629
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004630- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4631 very short strings.
4632
4633- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4634 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4635 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4636 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4637 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4638
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004639Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004640-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004641
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004642- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4643 close or delete time).
4644
4645- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4646 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4647
4648- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4649
4650- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004651 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004652
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004653Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004654-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004655
4656Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004657-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004658
4659C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004660-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004661
4662New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004663-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004664
4665Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004666-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004667
4668Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004669-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004670
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004671- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4672
4673- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4674 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4675
4676- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4677 deleted at process exit time.
4678
4679- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4680 in backslash.
4681
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004682Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004683----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004684
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004685- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4686 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4687 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4688
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004689
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004690What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004691===========================
4692
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004693*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4694
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004695Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004696--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004697
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004698- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4699 been extensively updated. See
4700
4701 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4702
4703 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4704
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004705- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4706 deleted!
4707
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004708- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4709 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4710 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4711 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4712 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4713
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004714- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4715
4716 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4717 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4718
4719 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4720 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4721 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4722 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4723 supported anyway.
4724
4725 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4726 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4727
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004728- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4729 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4730 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4731 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4732 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004733
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004734- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4735 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4736 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4737
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004738Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004739-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004740
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004741- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4742 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4743 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4744 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4745 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4746 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004747 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4748 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4749 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4750 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004751
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004752- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4753 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4754 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4755
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004756Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004757-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004758
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004759- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4760
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004761Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004762-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004763
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004764- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4765 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4766 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4767 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4768 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4769 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4770
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004771- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4772
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004773- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4774
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004775- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4776
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004777- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4778 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4779 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4780
4781- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4782
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004783Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004784-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004785
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004786- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4787 off a search on Google.
4788
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004789Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004790-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004791
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004792- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4793 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4794 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4795 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4796 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4797 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4798 other platforms should do likewise.
4799
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004800- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4801 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4802 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4803
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004804C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004805-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004806
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004807- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4808 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4809 producing key-value pairs.
4810
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004811- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004812 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004813 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4814 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4815 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4816 previously went unchallenged.
4817
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004818New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004819-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004820
4821Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004822-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004823
4824Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004825-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004826
4827Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004828----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004829
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004830- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4831 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004832
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004833- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4834 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4835 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4836 home.
4837
4838
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004839What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004840===========================
4841
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004842*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4843
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004844Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004845--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004846
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004847- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4848 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004849
4850 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004851 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004852
4853 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4854 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004855 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004856 This needs to be documented.
4857
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004858- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4859 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4860
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004861- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4862 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4863 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4864
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004865- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4866 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4867
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004868- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4869 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4870 class forbids it).
4871
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004872- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4873 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4874 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4875
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004876- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4877
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004878Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004879-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004880
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004881- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4882 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004883 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004884
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004885- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4886 (like 1 + '').
4887
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004888Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004889-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004890
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004891- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4892 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4893 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4894 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004895 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004896 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4897
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004898- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4899 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4900 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4901 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4902
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004903- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4904 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004905 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4906 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4907 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004908
4909- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4910 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004911
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004912- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4913 bytes on its input.
4914
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004915Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004916-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004917
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004918- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004919 convenience function.
4920
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004921- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4922 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4923 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004924 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4925 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4926 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4927 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4928 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4929 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004930
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004931- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4932 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4933 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4934 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4935
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004936- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4937 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4938 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4939
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004940- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4941 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4942 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4943 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4944
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004945- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4946 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004947 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004948 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4949 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4950 new -l and -e options.
4951
4952- statcache is now deprecated.
4953
4954- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4955 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004956 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004957 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4958 time properly taken into account.
4959
4960- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4961 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4962 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4963 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4964
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004965Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004966-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004967
4968Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004969-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004970
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004971- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4972 is built with libdb3 if available.
4973
4974- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4975
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004976C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004977-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004978
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004979- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4980 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4981 PySequence_Size().
4982
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004983- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4984
4985- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4986 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4987 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4988
4989- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4990 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4991
4992- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4993 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4994
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004995New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004996-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004997
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004998- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4999 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
5000
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00005001- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
5002 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
5003
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005004- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5005
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005006Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005007-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005008
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005009- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5010 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5011
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005012Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005013-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005014
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005015Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005016----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005017
5018- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5019 removed completely in the next release.
5020
5021- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5022 OSX.
5023
5024- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5025 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5026
5027- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5028
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005029
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005030What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005031===========================
5032
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005033*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5034
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005035Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005036--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005037
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005038- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005039 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005040 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005041 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5042 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005043 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5044 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005045 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5046 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005047
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005048- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5049 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5050
5051- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5052 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5053
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005054Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005055-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005056
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005057- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5058 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5059 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5060 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5061 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5062 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5063 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5064 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5065
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005066- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5067 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5068 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5069 example).
5070
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005071- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005072 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005073 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005074 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005075
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005076- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5077 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5078 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005079 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005080
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005081- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5082 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5083 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5084 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5085 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5086 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5087
5088 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5089
5090 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5091
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005092Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005093-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005094
5095- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5096
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005097- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5098
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005099- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5100 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005101
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005102- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5103 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5104 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5105 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5106 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5107 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005108 attributes.
5109
5110- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5111 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5112 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005113
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005114- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5115 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5116 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005117
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005118- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5119 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5120 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005121 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5122 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5123
5124- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5125 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005126
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005127Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005128-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005129
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005130- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5131 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5132
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005133- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5134 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5135 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5136 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5137
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005138- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5139 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5140 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5141 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5142
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005143 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5144 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5145 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5146 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5147 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5148 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5149 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5150 without losing information).
5151
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005152- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005153 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5154 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5155 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5156 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5157 module).
5158
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005159 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005160 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5161 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5162 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5163 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005164
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005165- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005166 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5167 encoding.
5168
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005169- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5170 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5171
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005172- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005173 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5174
5175- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5176 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5177 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5178 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5179
5180- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5181
5182- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5183 ON, and OFF.
5184
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005185- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5186 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5187
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005188Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005189-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005190
5191- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5192 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5193 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005194
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005195- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5196 been added: -X and -E.
5197
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005198Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005199-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005200
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005201- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5202 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5203
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005204C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005205-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005206
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005207- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5208 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5209 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5210 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5211 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5212
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005213- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5214 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5215 as long) arguments.
5216
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005217- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5218 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5219 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5220 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5221 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5222 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5223
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005224- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5225 input.
5226
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005227New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005228-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005229
5230Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005231-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005232
5233Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005234-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005235
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005236- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5237 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5238 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5239
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005240- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5241 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5242 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005243 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005244
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005245 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5246 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5247 import signal
5248 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005249
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005250 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005251 while 1:
5252 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005253 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005254 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5255 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5256 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5257 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005258
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005259
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005260What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5261===========================
5262
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005263*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5264
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005265Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005266--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005267
5268- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5269 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5270 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5271
5272- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5273 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5274 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5275 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5276 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5277 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5278 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005279
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005280- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005281 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005282 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5283 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5284 associate a docstring with a property.
5285
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005286- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5287 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5288 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5289 other built-in object types.
5290
5291- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5292 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5293 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5294 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5295 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5296
5297- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5298 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5299
5300- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5301 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005302 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005303 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5304 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5305 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5306 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5307 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5308
5309- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5310 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5311 class.
5312
5313- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5314 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5315 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5316 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5317
5318- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5319 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5320 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5321 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5322
5323- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5324 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5325
5326- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5327 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5328 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5329 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5330 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005331 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005332 with the same value as s.
5333
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005334- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5335
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005336Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005337----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005338
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005339- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5340
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005341- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5342 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5343 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5344 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5345 objects.
5346
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005347- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5348 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005349 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5350 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5351
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005352- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5353 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5354 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5355
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005356Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005357-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005358
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005359- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5360 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5361 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5362 by the instances.
5363
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005364- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5365 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5366 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5367
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005368- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5369 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5370 before the entire comparison is complete.
5371
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005372- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5373 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5374 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5375
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005376- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5377 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5378 getwriter().
5379
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005380- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5381 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5382
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005383- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005384 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5385 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5386
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005387- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5388 iterable object.
5389
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005390- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5391 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005392
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005393- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5394 authentication.
5395
5396- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5397 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005398
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005399- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005400 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5401 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5402 a sample driver.)
5403
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005404Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005405-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005406
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005407- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5408 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5409 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5410 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5411 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5412 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5413 kernel has large file support.
5414
5415- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5416 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5417 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5418 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5419 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5420
5421- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5422 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5423 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5424
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005425C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005426-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005427
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005428- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5429 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5430
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005431New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005432-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005433
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005434- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5435 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5436
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005437Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005438-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005439
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005440- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5441 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5442 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5443 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5444 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5445
5446- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5447 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5448 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5449 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5450
5451- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5452 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5453
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005454Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005455-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005456
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005457- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005458 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5459 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005460
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005461
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005462What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5463===========================
5464
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005465*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5466
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005467Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005468----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005469
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005470- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5471 big to represent as a C double.
5472
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005473- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5474 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5475 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5476 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5477 restriction).
5478
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005479- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5480 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5481 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5482 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5483 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5484
5485 >>> dir([])
5486 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5487 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5488 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5489 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5490 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5491 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5492 'reverse', 'sort']
5493
5494 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5495
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005496- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005497 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5498 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5499 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5500 OverflowError exception.
5501
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005502- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005503 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005504 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5505 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5506 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5507 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5508 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005509 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005510 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5511 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5512
5513 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5514 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5515 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5516 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005517
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005518- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005519 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5520 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5521 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5522 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5523 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5524 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5525 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5526 once it is created.
5527
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005528- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5529 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5530 (key, value) pairs.
5531
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005532- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005533 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5534 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5535
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005536- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5537 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5538 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5539 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5540 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005541
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005542- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005543 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5544 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5545
5546 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5547
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005548- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005549 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5550
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005551Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005552-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005553
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005554- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005555 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5556 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005557
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005558- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5559 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5560 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5561 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5562 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5563 in this area anymore).
5564
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005565- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5566 threading.Timer.
5567
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005568- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5569 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5570
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005571- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005572 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5573
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005574- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005575 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5576 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5577 converted to Python longs.
5578
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005579- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005580 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5581
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005582- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5583 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5584 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5585
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005586Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005587-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005588
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005589- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5590 division operators as per PEP 238.
5591
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005592Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005593-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005594
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005595- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5596 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5597 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5598 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5599
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005600C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005601-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005602
5603- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005604
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005605- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5606 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005607 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005608
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005609 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5610 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005611 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005612 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005613
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005614- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005615 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5616 module:
5617
5618 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005619
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005620 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5621 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005622
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005623 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5624 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005625
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005626 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5627
5628 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5629
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005630- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005631 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5632 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5633 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005634
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005635New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005636-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005637
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005638- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5639 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5640 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5641 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5642 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005643
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005644Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005645-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005646
5647Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005648-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005649
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005650- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5651 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5652 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5653 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005654 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5655 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5656 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5657 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5658 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005659
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005660- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005661 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5662
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005663
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005664What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5665===========================
5666
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005667*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5668
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005669Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005670-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005671
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005672- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5673 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5674
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005675- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5676 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5677 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005678
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005679- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5680 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5681 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5682 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005683
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005684- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5685
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005686- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005687
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005688Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005689-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005690
5691- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005692 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005693 the module docstring for details.
5694
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005695Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005696-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005697
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005698- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005699 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5700 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5701 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005702
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005703- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5704 Nick Mathewson.
5705
5706Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005707----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005708
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005709- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5710 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5711 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5712 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5713 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5714 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5715 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5716 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5717
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005718- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5719 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5720 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5721 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5722
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005723- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5724 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5725 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5726 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5727 come a long way).
5728
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005729- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5730 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5731 write filters for these warnings).
5732
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005733- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5734 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5735 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5736 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5737 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5738
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005739- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5740 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5741 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5742 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5743 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5744 older distribution.
5745
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005746Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005747-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005748
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005749- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5750 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005751 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005752
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005753- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5754 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5755 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5756
5757- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5758
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005759- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5760
5761- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5762
5763- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5764
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005765- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005766
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005767- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5768
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005769New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005770-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005771
5772C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005773-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005774
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005775- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5776 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5777 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5778 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5779 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5780 against buffer overruns.
5781
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005782- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005783 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5784 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005785 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5786 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5787 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5788
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005789- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5790 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5791 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5792 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5793 deprecated.
5794
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005795Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005796-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005797
5798- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5799 relevant is found.
5800
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005801
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005802What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005803===========================
5804
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005805*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5806
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005807Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005808----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005809
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005810- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5811 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5812 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5813 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5814 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5815 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5816 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5817 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005818 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005819 repaired.
5820
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005821- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005822 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005823 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5824 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5825 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5826 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5827 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5828 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5829 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5830 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5831
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005832- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5833 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5834 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5835 leading BMO character).
5836
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005837- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5838 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5839 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5840
5841 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5842 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5843 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005844
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005845 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5846 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5847 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5848 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5849 for various simple to use conversions.
5850
5851 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5852 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5853
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005854 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5855 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5856 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5857 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5858 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5859 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5860 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5861 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5862 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5863 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5864 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5865 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5866 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5867 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5868 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005869
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005870- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5871 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5872 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005873 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005874 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005875
5876 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005877 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5878 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5879 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5880 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5881 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005882 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5883 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005884
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005885 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5886 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5887 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005888 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005889
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005890- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5891 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5892 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5893 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5894 floating arithmetic,
5895
5896 x = 9007199254740992.0
5897 print long(x)
5898
5899 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5900 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5901 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5902 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5903 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5904 functions are of good quality).
5905
5906 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5907 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5908 algorithms to break.
5909
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005910- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5911 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5912 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5913 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5914 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5915 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5916 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5917 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5918 order.
5919
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005920- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5921 operation along the most common code paths.
5922
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005923- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5924 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5925
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005926- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5927 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5928 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5929 {}.update(UserDict())
5930
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005931- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5932 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5933 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5934 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5935 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5936 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5937 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5938 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5939
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005940- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005941 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005942
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005943 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005944 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5945 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005946 join() method of strings
5947 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005948 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5949 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005950 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005951 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005952
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005953- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5954 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5955
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005956- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5957 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5958
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005959- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5960 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5961 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5962 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5963
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005964- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5965 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005966 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005967 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5968 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005969
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005970- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5971
5972
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005973Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005974-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005975
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005976- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005977 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005978 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5979 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5980
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005981- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5982 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5983
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005984- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5985 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5986 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5987 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5988
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005989- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5990 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5991 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5992
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005993- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5994
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005995- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5996
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005997- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5998 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5999 that are still imported into string.py).
6000
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006001- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
6002
6003- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6004 Now it does.
6005
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006006- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6007
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006008- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6009 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6010 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6011 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6012 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006013 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6014 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006015
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006016- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6017 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6018 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6019 'help(object)'.
6020
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006021Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006022-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006023
6024- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006025 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006026 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6027 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6028
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006029- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006030 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6031 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006032
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006033C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006034-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006035
6036- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6037 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006038
6039----
6040
6041**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**