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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Georg Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000015- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
16 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
17
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000018- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
19
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000020- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
21
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000022- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
23
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000024- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
25 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
26
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000027- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
28 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number
29 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
30
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000031- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
32 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000033 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000034
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000035- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
36 now encodes backslash correctly.
37
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000038- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
39
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000040- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
41 and long longs.
42
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000043- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
44 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
45 message in this case.
46
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000047- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
48 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
49 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
50 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
51 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
52
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000053- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000054
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000055- Speed up some Unicode operations.
56
57- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
58
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000059- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000060 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
61
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000062- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
63
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000064- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
65 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
66
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000067- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
68
69- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
70
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000071- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
72 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
73 was empty.
74
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000075- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
76 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
77
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000078- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000079 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000080
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000081- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
82 codes.
83
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000084- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
85 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
86 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
87
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000088- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
89 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
90
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000091- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000092 (fixes bug #1119418).
93
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000094- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
95
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000096- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
97 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
98
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000099- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
100 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
101 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
102
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000103- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
104
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000105- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
106 reference counts in some error exit cases.
107
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000108- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
109 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
110 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
111 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
112 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
113 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
114 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
115 realloc.
116
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000117- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
118 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
119
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000120- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
121 like their int counterparts.
122
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000123- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
124 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
125 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
126 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
127 for a longer write-up of the problem).
128
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000129- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
130 serializing floats.
131
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000132- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
133 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
134 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
135
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000136- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
137 278.
138
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000139- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
140 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
141 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
142 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000143 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000144 PyNumber_*().
145 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
146
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000147- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
148 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
149 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
150 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
151
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000152- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
153 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
154 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
155 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
156 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
157
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000158- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
159 disabled caused a crash.
160
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000161- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
162 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
163
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000164- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000165 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
166
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000167- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
168
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000169- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000170 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
171 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
172 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000173
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000174- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
175
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000176- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
177 returning None.
178
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000179- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000180 ('\') with a specific error message.
181
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000182- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
183
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000184- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
185 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
186
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000187- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000188 an ferror() call.
189
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000190- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
191 list.sort().
192
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000193- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
194 (2+3) --> (5).
195
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000196- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
197
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000198- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
199 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000200
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000201- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
202 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
203 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
204
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000205- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
206 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
207 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
208
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000209Extension Modules
210-----------------
211
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000212- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
213
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000214- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
215 problem on AIX.
216
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000217- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
218
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000219- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
220
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000221- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
222
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000223- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
224 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
225
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000226- Get bsddb module to build with BSD DB version 3.2
227
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000228- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
229 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
230
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000231- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
232
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000233- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
234 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
235
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000236- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
237 returns in cStringIO.c.
238
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000239- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
240 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
241
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000242- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
243
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000244- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
245
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000246- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
247 the file system encoding.
248
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000249- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
250 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000251
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000252- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
253
254- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000255 line without newlines.
256
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000257- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
258 on Windows.
259
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000260- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000261 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
262
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000263- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
264 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
265 for large or negative values.
266
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000267- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000268 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000269
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000270- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
271
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000272- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
273 if available on the platform.
274
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000275- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
276 available on the platform.
277
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000278- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
279 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
280
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000281- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
282
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000283- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
284 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
285 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
286
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000287- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
288
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000289- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
290 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
291
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000292- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000293 file size.
294
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000295- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
296
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000297- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
298 {remove_history,replace_history}
299
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000300- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
301 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000302
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000303- stat_float_times is now True.
304
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000305- array.array objects are now picklable.
306
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000307- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
308 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
309
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000310- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
311 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
312 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
313
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000314- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
315 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000316
317Library
318-------
319
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000320- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
321
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000322- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
323 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
324 LoadError subclasses IOError.
325
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000326- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000327 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
328 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
329 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
330 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
331
332 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
333 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
334 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
335 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
336 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000337
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000338- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
339 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
340 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
341
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000342- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
343
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000344- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
345
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000346- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
347 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
348 illegal argument)
349
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000350- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
351 is an error in the format string.
352
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000353- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
354
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000355- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000356 "parent" argument.
357
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000358- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
359 for padding.
360
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000361- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
362 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
363
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000364- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
365 to get the correct encoding.
366
367- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
368 languages.
369
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000370- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
371
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000372- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
373
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000374- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
375
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000376- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
377 functionality.
378
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000379- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
380
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000381- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
382 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
383
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000384- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
385 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
386 match the Content-Length header.
387
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000388- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
389
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000390- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
391 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000392 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000393
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000394- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
395
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000396- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
397
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000398- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
399 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
400
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000401- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
402 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
403 Tkdnd.
404
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000405- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
406 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
407
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000408- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
409 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
410
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000411- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000412 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
413
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000414- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
415 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
416
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000417- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
418 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
419
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000420- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000421 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000422
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000423- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
424
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000425- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
426 error messages.
427
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000428- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
429
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000430- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
431 Bug #1224621.
432
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000433- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
434 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
435 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
436 terminates by raising StopIteration.
437
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000438- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
439
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000440- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
441 component of the path.
442
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000443- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
444 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
445 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
446 class at all.
447
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000448- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
449 files to PyPI.
450
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000451- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
452 them to PyPI.
453
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000454- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
455 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
456 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
457 work as expected.
458
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000459- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
460 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
461
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000462- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000463 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
464
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000465- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
466
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000467- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
468 to build.
469
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000470- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
471 symbolic links on Windows.
472
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000473- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000474 profile.py if available.
475
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000476- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
477
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000478- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
479 in LWPCookieJar.
480
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000481- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
482
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000483- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
484
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000485- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
486
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000487- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
488
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000489- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
490
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000491- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
492
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000493- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
494
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000495- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
496
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000497- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
498 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
499 be exploited in various ways.
500
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000501- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000502 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
503
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000504- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
505 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
506
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000507- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000508 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
509
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000510- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
511
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000512- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
513
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000514- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
515
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000516- Enhancements to the csv module:
517
518 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000519 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000520 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000521 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
522 reporting.
523 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
524 dictates.
525 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000526 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000527 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000528 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
529 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000530 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
531 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000532 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000533 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
534 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
535 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
536 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
537 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
538 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
539 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
540 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
541 without first creating a dialect class.
542 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
543 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
544 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000545 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000546 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
547 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000548 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
549 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
550 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
551 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000552 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
553 This has been fixed.
554
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000555- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
556 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
557 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
558 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
559
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000560- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
561
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000562- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
563 (Bug #951915).
564
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000565- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
566 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
567 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000568 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000569
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000570- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
571
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000572- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
573 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
574
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000575- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
576
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000577- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
578
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000579- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
580
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000581- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
582
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000583- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
584
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000585- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
586 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
587 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
588
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000589- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000590 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000591
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000592- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
593 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
594 tokenizer with very long source lines.
595
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000596- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
597 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
598 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000599
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000600- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
601 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000602
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000603- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
604 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
605
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000606- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
607 correctly.
608
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000609- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
610 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
611 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
612 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
613 between two lines.
614
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000615- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
616 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
617 handlers.
618
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000619- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000620 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
621 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000622
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000623- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
624 considering it exactly like a '*'.
625
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000626- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
627 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000628
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000629- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
630
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000631Build
632-----
633
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000634- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
635 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
636
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000637- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
638
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000639- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
640 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
641
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000642- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
643 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
644
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000645- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
646 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
647 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000648 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000649
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000650- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
651 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
652 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
653
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000654- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
655
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000656- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
657 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
658
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000659- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
660 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
661 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
662 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
663 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
664 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
665 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
666 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
667
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000668- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
669 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
670 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
671 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
672
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000673
674C API
675-----
676
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000677- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
678
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000679- Removed PyRange_New().
680
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000681- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
682 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
683 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
684 mappings.
685
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000686
687Tests
688-----
689
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000690- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000691
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000692- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
693 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
694
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000695
696Documentation
697-------------
698
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000699- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
700
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000701- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
702
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000703- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
704
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000705- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
706
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000707- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
708
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000709- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
710
711- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
712
713- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
714
715- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
716
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000717- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
718 Closes bug #1166582.
719
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000720- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
721 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
722 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
723
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000724Mac
725---
726
727
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000728New platforms
729-------------
730
731- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
732
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000733
734Tools/Demos
735-----------
736
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000737- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
738 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
739 source files that need an encoding declaration.
740 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
741
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000742- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
743
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000744- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000745
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000746- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
747 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000748
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000749What's New in Python 2.4 final?
750===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000751
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000752*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000753
754Core and builtins
755-----------------
756
757- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
758 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
759 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
760
761
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000762What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
763==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000764
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000765*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000766
767Core and builtins
768-----------------
769
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000770- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
771 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
772 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
773
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000774
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000775Library
776-------
777
778- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
779 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
780 raised is re-raised.
781
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000782- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
783 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
784
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000785- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
786 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
787 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
788 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
789 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
790 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
791 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
792 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
793 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
794 by the slice are recomputed now.
795
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000796- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000797
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000798Build
799-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000800
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000801- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
802 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
803 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000804
805C API
806-----
807
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000808- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
809
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000810
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000811What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
812================================
813
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000814*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000815
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000816License
817-------
818
819The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
820is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
821changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
822Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
823intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
824durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
825the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
826License::
827
828 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
829
830says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
831to Python 2.1.1.
832
833The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
834License Version 2.
835
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000836Core and builtins
837-----------------
838
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000839- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
840 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
841 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
842 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
843 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
844 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
845 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000846 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000847 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
848 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
849
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000850- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000851
852Extension Modules
853-----------------
854
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000855- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
856 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
857 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
858 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000859
860Library
861-------
862
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000863- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
864 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
865 returned.
866
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000867- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
868
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000869- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
870 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
871
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000872- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
873
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000874- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
875 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000876
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000877- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
878
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000879- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
880
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000881- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000882 the source code is updated and reloaded.
883
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000884Build
885-----
886
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000887- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000888
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000889What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
890================================
891
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000892*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000893
894Core and builtins
895-----------------
896
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000897- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000898 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
899
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000900- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
901 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
902 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
903 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
904
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000905- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
906 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
907
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000908- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
909 constant.
910
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000911- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
912 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
913 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
914 large), and to anomalies such as
915 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
916 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
917 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
918 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000919
920Extension modules
921-----------------
922
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000923- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
924 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000925 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
926 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
927 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000928
929Library
930-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000931
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000932- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000933 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000934 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
935 --swig-cpp.
936
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000937- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
938 it is set.
939
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000940- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000941
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000942- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
943 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
944 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
945 Closes bug #1039270.
946
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000947- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000948
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000949 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000950 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
951 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
952 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
953 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
954 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
955 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
956 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
957 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
958 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
959 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
960 + Updates to documentation.
961
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000962- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
963 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
964 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
965 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
966
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000967- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000968
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000969- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
970 applications should use the getmember function.
971
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000972- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
973
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000974- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
975 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
976 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
977 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
978 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
979 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
980 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
981 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
982 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
983
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000984- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
985 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000986 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000987
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000988- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
989 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
990 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
991 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
992 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
993 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
994 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
995 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000996
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000997- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
998 the new public features (of which there are many).
999
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001000- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001001 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1002 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1003 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1004 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001005 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001006
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001007- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1008
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001009- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1010 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1011 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1012 options.
1013
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001014- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1015 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1016 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1017 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1018 conditions under which non-string values work.
1019
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001020Build
1021-----
1022
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001023- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1024 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1025 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1026
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001027- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1028 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1029 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1030 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1031 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001032
1033C API
1034-----
1035
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001036- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1037 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1038
1039- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1040
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001041- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1042 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1043 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1044 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1045 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1046 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1047 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1048 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1049 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1050
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001051- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1052
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001053- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1054 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1055 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001056
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001057Tests
1058-----
1059
1060- test__locale ported to unittest
1061
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001062Mac
1063---
1064
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001065- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1066 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1067 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001068
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001069Tools/Demos
1070-----------
1071
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001072- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1073 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1074 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1075 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1076 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001077
1078
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001079What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1080=================================
1081
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001082*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001083
1084Core and builtins
1085-----------------
1086
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001087- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001088 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1089
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001090- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1091 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1092 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1093 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1094 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1095 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1096 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1097 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001098 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1099 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1100 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1101 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1102 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001103
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001104- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1105 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1106 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1107 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1108 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1109
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001110- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1111
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001112- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1113 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1114
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001115- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1116 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1117 modified the list.
1118
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001119- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1120 functions is now writable.
1121
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001122- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1123 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1124 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1125 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1126
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001127- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1128 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1129 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1130 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1131 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001132
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001133- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1134 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1135
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001136Extension modules
1137-----------------
1138
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001139- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1140
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001141- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1142 data.
1143
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001144- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1145 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1146 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1147 supposed to have been truncated away.
1148
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001149- Added socket.socketpair().
1150
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001151- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1152 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1153
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001154- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001155 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1156
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001157Library
1158-------
1159
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001160- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001161 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001162
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001163- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1164 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1165
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001166- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1167 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1168
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001169- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1170
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001171- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1172 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001173
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001174- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1175 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1176
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001177- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1178
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001179- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1180
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001181- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1182
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001183- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1184 Percivall.
1185
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001186- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1187 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1188
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001189- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1190 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1191 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001192 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001193
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001194- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1195 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1196 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1197 and exponent.
1198
1199- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1200
1201- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001202 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001203 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1204
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001205- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1206 to the readline module.
1207
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001208- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001209 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1210 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001211
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001212- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1213 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1214 contains symlinks.
1215
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001216- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1217 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1218
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001219- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1220 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1221 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1222
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001223- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1224 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1225 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1226 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1227 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1228 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1229 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1230 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1231 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1232 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1233 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1234 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1235 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1236
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001237- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1238
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001239Tools/Demos
1240-----------
1241
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001242- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1243 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1244
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001245- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1246
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001247Build
1248-----
1249
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001250- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1251 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1252 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1253 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1254 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1255 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1256 plans to do so.
1257
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001258- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1259 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1260
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001261- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1262 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1263
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001264- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1265 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1266
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001267- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1268 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1269
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001270- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1271 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1272
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001273C API
1274-----
1275
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001276..
1277
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001278Documentation
1279-------------
1280
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001281- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1282 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1283
1284- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1285 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1286 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001287
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001288New platforms
1289-------------
1290
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001291- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1292
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001293Tests
1294-----
1295
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001296..
1297
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001298Windows
1299-------
1300
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001301- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1302 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1303 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1304 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1305 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1306 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1307 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1308 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1309 the problem.
1310
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001311Mac
1312---
1313
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001314..
1315
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001316
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001317What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1318=================================
1319
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001320*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001321
1322Core and builtins
1323-----------------
1324
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001325- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1326 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1327 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1328 sensitive code.
1329
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001330- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001331 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001332
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001333 @staticmethod
1334 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001335
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001336 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001337
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001338- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1339 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1340 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1341 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1342 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1343 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1344 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1345 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1346 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1347 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1348 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1349
1350 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1351 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1352 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1353 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1354 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1355 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1356 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1357
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001358- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1359 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1360
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001361- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001362 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001363
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001364- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001365 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001366 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1367
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001368- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001369 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1370 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1371
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001372- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1373 types that support garbage collection.
1374
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001375- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1376
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001377- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1378 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1379 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1380 Jython.
1381
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001382- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1383
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001384- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1385 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1386
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001387- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1388 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1389 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001390
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001391- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1392 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1393 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1394
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001395Extension modules
1396-----------------
1397
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001398- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1399
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001400Library
1401-------
1402
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001403- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1404 TIS-620
1405
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001406- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1407 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1408 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1409 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1410 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1411 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1412 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1413 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1414 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1415 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1416
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001417- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1418
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001419- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1420 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1421 same as when the argument is omitted).
1422 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1423
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001424- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1425
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001426- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1427 schemes are offered.
1428
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001429- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1430
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001431- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1432 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1433 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1434
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001435- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1436
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001437- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1438 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1439
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001440- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1441 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1442 when dummy_threading is being used.
1443
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001444- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1445 from a tarfile.
1446
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001447- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001448 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001449
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001450- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1451 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1452 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1453 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1454
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001455- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1456 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1457
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001458- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1459 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1460 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1461 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1462 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1463 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1464 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1465 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1466 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1467 by some other method in progress).
1468
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001469- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1470 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1471 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001472
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001473- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1474
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001475- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1476 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1477 AM Kuchling.
1478
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001479- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1480 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1481 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1482
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001483- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1484 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1485 instead of unsigned.
1486
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001487- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001488 no longer part of the public API.
1489
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001490- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1491 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1492 string methods of the same name).
1493
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001494- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001495 SF patch 945642.
1496
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001497- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1498
1499 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1500
1501 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1502 DocTestSuites.
1503
1504- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1505 that provide thread-local data.
1506
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001507- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1508 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1509
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001510- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1511
1512- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1513 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1514 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1515
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001516- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1517
1518 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1519 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1520 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001521
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001522 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1523 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1524 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1525 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1526
1527 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1528 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1529
1530 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1531 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1532 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1533 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1534
1535 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1536 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1537 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1538 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1539 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1540
1541 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1542 wrapping help output.
1543
1544 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1545 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1546 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001547
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001548C API
1549-----
1550
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001551- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1552 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1553 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1554 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1555 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1556 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1557 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1558 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1559 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1560 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1561 its visible semantics have not changed.
1562
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001563- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1564 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1565
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001566Documentation
1567-------------
1568
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001569- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001570
1571 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001572 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001573
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001574 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001575
1576 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1577
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001578- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001579
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001580Tests
1581-----
1582
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001583- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001584 platforms that use the Makefile.
1585
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001586- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1587 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1588 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1589
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001590
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001591What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1592=================================
1593
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001594*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001595
1596Core and builtins
1597-----------------
1598
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001599- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1600 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1601 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1602 objects now (one object instead of three).
1603
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001604- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1605 Windows DLLs.
1606
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001607- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1608 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001609
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001610- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1611 a new .pyc magic.
1612
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001613- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1614 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1615 be there.
1616
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001617- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1618 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1619 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1620
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001621- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1622 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1623 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1624
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001625- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1626
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001627- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1628 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1629 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001630
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001631- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1632 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1633
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001634- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1635
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001636- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001637 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001638
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001639- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1640
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001641- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1642
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001643- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1644 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1645
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001646- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1647 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1648 Fixes bug #858016 .
1649
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001650- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1651 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1652 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1653
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001654- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1655 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1656 improves their performance (about 35%).
1657
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001658- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1659 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1660 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1661
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001662- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1663 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1664 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1665 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1666
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001667- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1668 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001669 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001670 length is not known).
1671
1672- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1673 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001674 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1675 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001676 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1677
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001678- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1679 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1680
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001681- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1682 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1683 keyword arguments.
1684
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001685- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1686 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1687 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1688
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001689- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1690 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1691 cases.
1692
1693- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1694 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1695 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1696 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1697 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1698 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1699 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1700 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1701 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1702 a release build.
1703
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001704- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1705 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1706
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001707- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001708 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001709
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001710- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1711 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1712 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1713 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1714 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1715 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1716 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1717 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1718 destroyed.
1719
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001720- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1721 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1722 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1723 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1724 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1725 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1726 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1727 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1728
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001729- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1730 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1731 character other than a space.
1732
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001733- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1734 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1735 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1736 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1737 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1738 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1739 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1740 attributes with the same name.
1741
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001742- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1743 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1744 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1745 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1746 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1747 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1748 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1749 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1750 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1751 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1752 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1753 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1754 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1755 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001756
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001757- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1758 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1759 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1760 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1761 This has been repaired.
1762
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001763- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1764
1765- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1766
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001767- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1768 over a sequence.
1769
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001770- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001771 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001772
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001773- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1774
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001775- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1776 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1777 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1778 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1779 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1780 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1781 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1782 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1783
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001784- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1785 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1786 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1787
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001788- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1789 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1790 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1791 freelist.
1792
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001793- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1794 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1795
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001796- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1797 number.
1798
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001799- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1800 a TypeError exception.
1801
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001802- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1803 820195.
1804
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001805- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1806 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1807 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1808
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001809- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001810 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1811 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001812
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001813- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1814 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1815 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1816
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001817- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1818 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001819 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001820
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001821- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001822 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1823 the first call.
1824
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001825
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001826Extension modules
1827-----------------
1828
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001829- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1830 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1831
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001832- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1833 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1834 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1835 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1836 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1837 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1838 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001839
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001840- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1841
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001842- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1843
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001844- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1845 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1846
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001847- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1848 fewer false positives.
1849
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001850- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1851 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1852
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001853- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001854 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1855
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001856- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001857 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001858 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001859 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1860 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001861
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001862- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1863 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1864 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1865 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1866
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001867- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1868 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1869 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1870 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1871 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1872 #897625.
1873
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001874- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1875 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1876
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001877- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1878 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1879 and pops on either side of the deque.
1880
1881- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1882 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1883
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001884- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1885 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1886 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1887 other functions that expect a function argument.
1888
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001889- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1890
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001891- os.getsid was added.
1892
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001893- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1894 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1895 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1896
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001897- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1898
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001899- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1900
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001901- readline.clear_history was added.
1902
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001903- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1904
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001905- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1906
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001907- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1908
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001909- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1910
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001911- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1912
1913- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1914
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001915- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1916
1917- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1918
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001919- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1920 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1921 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1922
1923- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1924 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1925 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1926 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1927 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1928 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1929 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1930
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001931- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1932 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1933 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1934 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001935
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001936- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001937 iterators from a single iterable.
1938
1939- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1940 of raising a TypeError exception.
1941
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001942- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1943 as parameter.
1944
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001945Library
1946-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001947
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001948- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1949
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001950- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1951 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1952 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001953
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001954- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1955 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1956 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001957
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001958- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001959
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001960- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1961 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001962
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001963- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1964 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1965
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001966- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1967
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001968- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001969 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001970
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001971- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001972 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001973
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001974- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1975
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001976- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1977 on cygwin and mingw32.
1978
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001979- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1980
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001981- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1982 module.
1983
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001984- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1985 installation scheme for all platforms.
1986
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001987- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001988 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001989
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001990- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1991 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1992 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1993
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001994- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1995 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1996 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1997
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001998- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1999
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002000- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2001
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002002- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2003 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2004
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002005- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2006 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2007 type pattern with the same value exists.
2008
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002009- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2010 when run from the command prompt).
2011
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002012- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2013 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2014
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002015- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2016 default sort).
2017
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002018- Added global runctx function to profile module
2019
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002020- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2021
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002022- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2023
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002024- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2025
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002026- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002027 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2028 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2029 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2030 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2031 accordingly.
2032
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002033- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2034 decoding standards.
2035
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002036- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2037 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2038 called for all requests.
2039
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002040- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2041 they are passed to the compiler.
2042
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002043- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2044 indent, width and depth.
2045
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002046- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2047 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2048
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002049- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2050 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2051
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002052- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2053
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002054- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2055
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002056- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2057
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002058- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2059 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2060
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002061- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002062 for better performance.
2063
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002064- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002065
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002066- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2067 a string).
2068
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002069- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2070
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002071- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2072
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002073- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2074
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002075- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2076
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002077- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2078 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2079 list of fieldnames.
2080
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002081- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2082 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2083
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002084- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2085
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002086- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2087 empty lists.
2088
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002089- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2090 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2091 and shelves.
2092
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002093- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2094 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2095
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002096- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002097 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2098 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002099
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002100- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2101 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002102 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002103
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002104- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002105 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2106 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2107
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002108- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2109 and removed in Py2.4.
2110
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002111- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2112
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002113- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2114
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002115Tools/Demos
2116-----------
2117
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002118- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2119 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2120
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002121- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2122
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002123- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2124 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2125 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2126 destination in situations where both files are given.
2127
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002128- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2129 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2130 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2131 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2132
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002133- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2134
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002135- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2136 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2137 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2138 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2139 now.
2140
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002141- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2142 in effect
2143
2144- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2145 C-c C-h
2146
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002147- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2148 -d option was given.
2149
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002150Build
2151-----
2152
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002153- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2154 build under OS X.
2155
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002156- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2157 --enable-profiling.
2158
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002159- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2160 is configured --with-tsc.
2161
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002162- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2163 on AMD64.
2164
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002165- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2166 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2167
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002168- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2169 removed.
2170
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002171- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2172 supported (see PEP 11).
2173
2174- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2175
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002176- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2177
2178- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2179 (see PEP 11).
2180
2181- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2182 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2183
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002184C API
2185-----
2186
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002187- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2188 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2189 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2190
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002191- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2192 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2193 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2194 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2195
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002196- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2197 generator objects.
2198
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002199- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2200 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002201 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2202 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002203
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002204- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2205 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2206
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002207- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2208 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2209 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2210 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2211 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2212
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002213- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2214 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2215 about 10% faster.
2216
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002217- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2218 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2219
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002220- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2221 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2222 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2223 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2224
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002225Windows
2226-------
2227
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002228- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2229 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2230 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2231 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2232
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002233- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2234 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2235 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2236
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002237
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002238What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2239===============================
2240
2241*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2242
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002243IDLE
2244----
2245
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002246- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2247 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2248 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2249 context-menu actions.
2250
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002251- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2252 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2253 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2254 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2255 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2256 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2257 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2258 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2259 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2260
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002261
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002262What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2263=============================================
2264
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002265*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002266
2267Core and builtins
2268-----------------
2269
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002270- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002271 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002272 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2273
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002274Extension modules
2275-----------------
2276
2277- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2278 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2279 than once. This has been fixed.
2280
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002281- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2282 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2283 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2284 call.
2285
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002286- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2287
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002288Library
2289-------
2290
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002291- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2292 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2293
2294- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2295 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2296 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2297 restored.
2298
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002299IDLE
2300----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002301
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002302- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002303
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002304Build
2305-----
2306
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002307- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2308 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2309
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002310C API
2311-----
2312
2313Windows
2314-------
2315
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002316- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2317 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2318
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002319- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2320
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002321Mac
2322---
2323
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002324- Various fixes to pimp.
2325
2326- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2327
2328- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2329 more problems than it solves.
2330
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002331
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002332What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2333=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002334
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002335*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2336
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002337Core and builtins
2338-----------------
2339
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002340- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2341 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2342
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002343- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2344 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002345 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002346
2347- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2348 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2349 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002350 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002351
2352- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2353 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002354
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002355- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2356 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2357 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2358
2359- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002360 770247.
2361
2362- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002363
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002364Extension modules
2365-----------------
2366
2367- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2368 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2369
2370- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2371
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002372- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2373
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002374- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2375 contained within the _strptime module.
2376
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002377- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2378 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2379
2380- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002381 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2382
2383- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2384 the find_class attribute, if present.
2385
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002386- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002387
2388 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2389 (SF bug 763298).
2390
2391 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002392 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2393 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2394 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002395
2396 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2397
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002398Library
2399-------
2400
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002401- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2402
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002403- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2404 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2405 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2406 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2407 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2408 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2409 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2410 or Tester().
2411
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002412- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2413 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2414 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2415 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2416 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2417 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2418 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2419 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2420 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002421
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002422 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002423
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002424- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2425 weren't before was an oversight.
2426
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002427- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2428 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2429
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002430- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2431 when there are no lines.
2432
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002433- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2434 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2435
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002436- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2437 to child processes.
2438
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002439- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2440
2441- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2442
2443- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2444 xmlrpclib.
2445
2446- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2447 responses.
2448
2449- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2450 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2451
2452- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2453 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2454 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2455
2456- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2457 used as patterns.
2458
2459- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2460 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2461 than Tk 8.3.
2462
2463- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2464
2465- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002466
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002467Tools/Demos
2468-----------
2469
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002470- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2471
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002472- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2473
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002474- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002475
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002476Build
2477-----
2478
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002479- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2480
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002481- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2482
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002483- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2484 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002485
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002486- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2487 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2488 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002489
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002490C API
2491-----
2492
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002493- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2494 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2495
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002496Windows
2497-------
2498
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002499- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2500 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2501 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2502 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2503 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2504 Python exception ::
2505
2506 thread.error: can't start new thread
2507
2508 is raised now.
2509
2510- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2511 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2512 instead of from DLL teardown.
2513
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002514Mac
2515---
2516
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002517- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002518 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002519 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2520 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2521 the executable in the bundle.
2522
2523- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002524
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002525- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2526
2527- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2528 on Panther.
2529
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002530What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2531================================
2532
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002533*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002534
2535Core and builtins
2536-----------------
2537
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002538- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2539 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2540 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2541 with the -i option.
2542
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002543- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2544 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2545
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002546- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2547 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2548
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002549- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2550 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2551 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2552 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2553 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2554 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2555 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2556 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2557 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2558 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2559 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2560 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2561 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002562
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002563- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2564 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2565 embedded in a lambda expression.
2566
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002567- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2568 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2569 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2570 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2571 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2572
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002573- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2574 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2575 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2576
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002577- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2578 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2579
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002580- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2581 It's writable again.
2582
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002583- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2584 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2585 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002586 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002587
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002588- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2589 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2590 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2591
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002592Extension modules
2593-----------------
2594
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002595- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2596 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2597
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002598- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2599 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2600 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2601 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2602
2603- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2604 collection.
2605
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002606- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2607 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2608 unique within a single program run.
2609
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002610- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2611 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2612
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002613- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2614 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2615
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002616- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2617 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002618
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002619- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2620
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002621- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2622 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2623
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002624- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2625 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2626 for many BSD-derived systems.
2627
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002628
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002629Library
2630-------
2631
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002632- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2633 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2634 primary ones:
2635
2636 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2637 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2638 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2639
2640 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2641 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2642 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2643 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2644 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2645 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2646
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002647- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2648 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2649 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2650 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2651 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2652 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2653 argument.
2654
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002655- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2656 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2657 in the archive.
2658
2659- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2660 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2661
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002662- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2663 569574).
2664
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002665- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2666 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2667 no more.
2668
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002669- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2670 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2671 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2672 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2673 code coverage.
2674
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002675- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2676 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2677 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002678 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2679 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002680
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002681- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2682 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2683 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002684 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002685
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002686- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2687
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002688- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2689 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2690 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2691 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2692
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002693- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2694 handling.
2695
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002696- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2697 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2698
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002699- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2700 in socket.py.
2701
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002702- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2703
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002704- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2705 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2706 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2707 opener with proxy support.
2708
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002709- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2710
2711- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2712
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002713Tools/Demos
2714-----------
2715
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002716- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2717
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002718- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2719
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002720- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2721 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002722
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002723- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2724 files.
2725
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002726Build
2727-----
2728
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002729- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002730 different root directory.
2731
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002732C API
2733-----
2734
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002735- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2736 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2737 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2738 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2739 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2740 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2741 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2742 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2743 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2744 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2745
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002746- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2747 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2748 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2749 from Python.
2750
2751
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002752New platforms
2753-------------
2754
2755None this time.
2756
2757Tests
2758-----
2759
2760- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2761 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2762
2763Windows
2764-------
2765
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002766- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2767
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002768- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2769 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2770 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2771 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2772 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2773 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2774 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2775 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2776 that's what it's for.
2777
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002778Mac
2779---
2780
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002781- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2782 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2783 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2784 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002785- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2786 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2787- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002788
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002789SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2790------------------------------------
2791
2792430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2793598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2794622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2795661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2796683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2797697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2798713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2799724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2800727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2801729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2802730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2803731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2804732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2805733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2806735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2807740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2808744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2809745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2810747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2811749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2812751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2813753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2814755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2815757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2816760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2817
2818
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002819What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2820================================
2821
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002822*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002823
2824Core and builtins
2825-----------------
2826
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002827- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2828 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2829
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002830- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2831 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2832 and cannot be strings).
2833
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002834- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2835 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2836 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2837 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2838
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002839- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2840 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2841 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2842 Python itself.
2843
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002844- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2845 the referenced object, if it has one.
2846
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002847- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2848 the thread started at
2849 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2850
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002851- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2852 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2853 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2854 placed on a list index.
2855
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002856- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2857 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2858 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2859 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2860
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002861- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2862 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2863 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2864 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2865 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2866 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2867 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2868
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002869- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2870 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2871 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2872 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2873 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2874
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002875- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2876 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002877
2878- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2879 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2880 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2881 #693195.)
2882
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002883- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2884 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002885
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002886- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002887 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002888 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2889 interpreter executions, would fail.
2890
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002891- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002892 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002893 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002894
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002895Extension modules
2896-----------------
2897
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002898- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2899 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2900 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2901 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2902
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002903- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2904 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2905
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002906- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2907 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2908 and Greg Chapman.)
2909
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002910- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2911 recursively.
2912
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002913- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002914 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2915 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2916 leaks.
2917
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002918- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2919
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002920- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2921 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2922 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2923 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2924 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2925 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2926 #705836.
2927
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002928- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002929 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2930
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002931- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2932 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2933 See SF bug #692416.
2934
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002935- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2936 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2937
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002938- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2939 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2940 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002941
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002942- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002943 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2944 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2945
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002946- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2947 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2948 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2949 timeouts to work properly.
2950
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002951Library
2952-------
2953
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002954- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2955 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2956 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2957 future release.
2958
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002959- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2960 for querying platform dependent features.
2961
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002962- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002963
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002964- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2965 pickle protocol versions.
2966
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002967- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2968 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2969 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2970
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002971- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2972
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002973- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2974 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2975 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2976 modules.
2977
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002978- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2979 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2980 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2981
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002982- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2983 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2984
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002985- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2986 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2987 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2988
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002989- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002990 MS Office extensions.
2991
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002992- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2993 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2994
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002995- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2996 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2997
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002998- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2999 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3000 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3001 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3002 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3003 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3004
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003005- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3006 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3007 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003008
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003009- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3010 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3011 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3012
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003013- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3014
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003015- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3016 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3017 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3018
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003019Tools/Demos
3020-----------
3021
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003022- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3023 See the module docstring for details.
3024
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003025Build
3026-----
3027
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003028- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3029 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003030
3031C API
3032-----
3033
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003034- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3035
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003036- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3037 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3038 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3039
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003040- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3041 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003042
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003043 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3044 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3045 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003046
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003047- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003048 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3049
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003050- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3051 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3052 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003053
3054New platforms
3055-------------
3056
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003057None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003058
3059Tests
3060-----
3061
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003062- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3063 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003064
3065Windows
3066-------
3067
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003068- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3069 function.
3070
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003071- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3072 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003073
3074Mac
3075---
3076
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003077- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3078 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003079
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003080- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3081 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003082
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003083- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3084 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3085 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003086
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003087- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003088 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3089 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003090
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003091- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3092 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003093
3094
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003095What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3096=================================
3097
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003098*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003099
3100Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003101-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003102
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003103- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3104 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3105 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3106
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003107- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3108 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3109 (SF patch #664376.)
3110
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003111- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3112 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3113 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3114 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3115 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3116 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003117 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003118
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003119- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3120 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3121 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3122 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003123 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003124
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003125- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3126 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3127 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3128 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3129 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3130 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3131 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3132 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3133 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3134 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3135 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3136
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003137- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3138 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3139 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3140 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3141 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3142 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3143
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003144- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3145 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3146
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003147- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3148 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3149 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3150 case.)
3151
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003152- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3153 passed as unicode strings.
3154
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003155- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3156 See SF bug #683467.
3157
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003158- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3159 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3160
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003161- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3162
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003163- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3164
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003165- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3166 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3167 arguments.
3168
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003169- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3170 See SF bug #667147.
3171
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003172- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003173 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003174 See SF bug #676155.
3175
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003176- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003177 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003178 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3179 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3180 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3181 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3182 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3183 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003184
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003185Extension modules
3186-----------------
3187
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003188- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3189 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3190 tp_as_number pointer.
3191
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003192- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3193 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3194 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3195 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3196 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3197
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003198- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3199
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003200- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3201
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003202- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003203 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003204 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3205 patch #678531.)
3206
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003207- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3208 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3209
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003210- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3211 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3212
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003213- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3214
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003215- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3216 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3217 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3218
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003219- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3220
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003221- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3222 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3223
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003224- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003225
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003226- datetime changes:
3227
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003228 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3229
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003230 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3231 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3232 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3233 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3234 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3235 now.
3236
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003237 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003238 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3239 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003240
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003241 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003242 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003243 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3244 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3245 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3246 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003247
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003248 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3249 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3250 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003251 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3252
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003253 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3254 by a later example coded by Guido.
3255
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003256 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003257 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3258 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3259 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003260 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3261 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3262
3263 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3264 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3265 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3266 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3267 tzinfo subclass instance.
3268
3269 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3270 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3271 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3272 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3273 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3274 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3275 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3276 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003277
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003278 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3279 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3280 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3281 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3282 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003283 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3284
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003285 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003286
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003287 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3288 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3289 as a naive datetime object.
3290
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003291 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3292 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3293 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3294
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003295 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3296 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3297 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3298 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3299 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3300 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3301 comparison.
3302
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003303 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3304 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3305 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3306 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003307 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003308
3309 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003310
3311 and ::
3312
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003313 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3314
3315 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3316 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3317 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3318 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3319
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003320 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3321 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3322 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3323 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3324 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3325
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003326 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3327 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003328 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3329 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003330
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003331Library
3332-------
3333
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003334- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3335 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3336
3337- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3338 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3339 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3340 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3341 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3342 See PEP 307 for details.
3343
3344- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3345 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3346
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003347- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3348 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003349 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003350 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3351 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003352 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003353
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003354- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3355 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3356
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003357- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3358 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3359 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3360
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003361- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3362
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003363- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3364 exception.
3365
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003366- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3367 class.
3368
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003369- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3370 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3371 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3372
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003373- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3374 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3375
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003376- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003377 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3378 See SF bug #659228.
3379
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003380- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3381 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3382 See SF patch #651082.
3383
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003384- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003385
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003386- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3387 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3388
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003389- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003390 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003391
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003392- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3393 DOS paths from other platforms.
3394
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003395Tools/Demos
3396-----------
3397
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003398- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3399 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3400 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3401 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3402 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3403 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3404 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3405 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3406 example:
3407
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003408 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3409 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003410
3411 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3412
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003413
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003414Build
3415-----
3416
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003417- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3418 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3419 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003420 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3421
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003422 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3423
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003424- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3425 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3426 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3427 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3428 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3429 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3430 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3431 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3432 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3433
3434- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3435 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3436 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3437 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3438
3439- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3440 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3441
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003442C API
3443-----
3444
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003445- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3446 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003447
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003448- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3449 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3450 tp_as_number pointer.
3451
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003452- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3453 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3454 (SF #681367)
3455
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003456- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3457 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3458 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3459 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003460
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003461Tests
3462-----
3463
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003464- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003465 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3466 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3467 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3468 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3469 pydoc.)
3470
3471- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3472
3473- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003474
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003475Windows
3476-------
3477
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003478- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3479 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3480 time).
3481
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003482- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3483 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3484
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003485- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3486 release without strong cryptography.
3487
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003488- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003489 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003490
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003491- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3492 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3493
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003494Mac
3495---
3496
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003497- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3498 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003499
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003500- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3501 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3502 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003503
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003504- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3505 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003506
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003507- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3508 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3509 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3510 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003511
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003512- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003513 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3514 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3515 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003516
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003517
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003518What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003519=================================
3520
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003521*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003522
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003523Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003524--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003525
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003526- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3527
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003528- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3529 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003530 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003531 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003532 a different meaning than before.
3533
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003534- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003535 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003536 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003537
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003538- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003539 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003540 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003541
3542- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3543 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3544 and deallocation.
3545
3546- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3547 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3548
3549- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3550 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3551 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3552 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3553 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3554
3555- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3556 now detected by the garbage collector.
3557
3558- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3559 [SF bug 519621]
3560
3561- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3562 identifier.
3563
3564- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3565 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3566 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3567 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3568 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3569 [SF bug 563060]
3570
3571- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3572 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3573 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3574 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3575 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3576
3577- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3578 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3579 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3580
3581- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3582
3583- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3584 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3585 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3586 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3587 state of the slots would be lost.)
3588
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003589Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003590-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003591
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003592- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003593 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3594 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3595 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3596 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003597 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3598 Jython 2.1.
3599
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003600- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003601 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003602 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3603 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3604 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3605 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3606 these, see PEP 302.
3607
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003608- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3609 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3610 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3611
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003612- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3613 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3614 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3615
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003616- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3617 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3618 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3619
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003620- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3621 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3622 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3623 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3624 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3625 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3626 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3627 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3628 releases or implementations.
3629
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003630- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003631 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3632 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003633
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003634- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3635 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3636
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003637- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3638 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3639 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3640
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003641- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3642 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3643
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003644- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3645 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003646 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3647 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003648
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003649- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3650 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3651 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3652 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3653 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3654
3655 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3656 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3657 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3658 pattern.
3659
3660 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3661 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3662 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3663 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3664
3665 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3666 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3667 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3668 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3669 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3670 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3671
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003672- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3673 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3674 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3675 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3676 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3677 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3678 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3679 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003680
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003681- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3682 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3683 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3684 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3685 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003686 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3687 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3688 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3689 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3690 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3691 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3692 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003693
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003694- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3695 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3696
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003697- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3698 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3699 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3700 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3701 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3702 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3703 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3704 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3705 to Zack Weinberg!
3706
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003707- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3708 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3709 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3710 type. This has been fixed now.
3711
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003712- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3713 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3714 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3715
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003716- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3717 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3718 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3719 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3720 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3721 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3722 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3723 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003724 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003725
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003726- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3727 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3728 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003729
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003730- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3731 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3732 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3733 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3734 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3735 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3736 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3737 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003738 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003739 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3740 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3741
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003742- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3743 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3744 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3745 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3746 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3747 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3748 this.)
3749
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003750- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3751 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003752 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003753 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003754 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3755 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003756 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3757 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003758
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003759- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3760 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3761 currently running.
3762
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003763- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3764 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3765 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3766 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3767
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003768- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3769 as directory names.
3770
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003771- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3772 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3773
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003774- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3775 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3776
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003777- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003778 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3779 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003780
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003781- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3782 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3783 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3784 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3785 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3786
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003787- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3788 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3789 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3790 removed.
3791
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003792- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3793 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3794 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3795
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003796- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3797 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3798 to __debug__.
3799
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003800- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3801 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3802 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3803
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003804- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3805 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3806 deprecated now.
3807
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003808- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3809 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3810 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003811
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003812- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3813 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3814 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3815 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3816 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003817
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003818- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3819 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3820
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003821- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3822 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3823 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003824 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003825 is backward compatible.
3826
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003827- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3828 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3829 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3830 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3831 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3832
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003833- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3834 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3835 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3836 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3837 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3838 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003839
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003840- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3841 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3842
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003843- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3844 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3845
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003846- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3847 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3848 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3849 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3850 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3851
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003852- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3853 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3854 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3855
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003856- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003857 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3858
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003859- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3860 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3861 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003862
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003863- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3864 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3865
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003866- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3867 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3868 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3869
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003870- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3871
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003872Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003873-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003874
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003875- Added three operators to the operator module:
3876 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3877 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3878 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3879
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003880- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3881
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003882- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3883 archives.
3884
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003885- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3886 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3887 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3888
3889 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3890
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003891- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3892 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3893 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003894 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003895
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003896- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3897 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3898 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3899 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003900 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3901 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3902 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3903 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003904
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003905- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3906 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003907
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003908- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3909
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003910- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3911 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3912
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003913- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3914 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3915 supported.
3916
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003917- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3918
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003919- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3920 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003921
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003922- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3923 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3924
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003925- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3926
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003927- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3928 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3929
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003930- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3931 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3932 functions but callable type objects.
3933
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003934- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003935 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003936 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003937
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003938- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3939 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003940
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003941- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3942 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003943
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003944- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3945 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3946 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3947 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3948
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003949- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3950 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003951
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003952- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3953 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3954 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3955 and __imul__.
3956
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003957- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003958 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3959 is called.
3960
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003961- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3962 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3963 interpreter was compiled.
3964
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003965- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3966 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3967 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003968 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003969 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3970 1, not 2.
3971
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003972- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3973 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3974 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3975 limit.
3976
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003977- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3978 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3979 bug #623464.
3980
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003981- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3982 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3983 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3984 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3985
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003986Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003987-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003988
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003989- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3990
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003991- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3992 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3993 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3994 with Python 2.3a2.
3995
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003996- os.path exposes getctime.
3997
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003998- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003999 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004000 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004001 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004002 unit tests of floating point results.
4003
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004004- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4005 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4006 has been increased.
4007
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004008- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4009 executed.
4010
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004011- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4012 postinstallation script.
4013
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004014- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4015 test the current module.
4016
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004017- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004018 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4019 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4020 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4021 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4022
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004023- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004024 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004025 Ward's Optik package.
4026
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004027- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4028 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4029 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4030 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4031
4032- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4033 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004034 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004035
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004036- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4037 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4038 shelf are binary pickles.
4039
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004040- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4041 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4042
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004043- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4044 modules are iterators now.
4045
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004046- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4047 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4048 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4049 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4050 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4051 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004052
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004053- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4054 with their entity value.
4055
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004056- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4057
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004058- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4059 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004060
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004061- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4062 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004063 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004064
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004065- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4066 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4067 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4068 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4069 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4070 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4071 main():
4072
4073 import locale
4074 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4075
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004076- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4077 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4078
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004079- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4080 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4081 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4082 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4083 to the new standard.
4084
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004085- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4086 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4087 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4088 an extension to the database.
4089
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004090- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4091 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4092 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4093 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004094 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004095
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004096- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004097 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004098
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004099- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4100 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4101 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4102 bounded integers.
4103
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004104- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4105 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4106 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4107 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4108 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4109 in existence.
4110
4111 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4112 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4113 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4114 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4115 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4116 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4117
4118 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4119 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4120 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4121 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4122
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004123- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4124 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4125 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4126
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004127- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4128
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004129- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4130 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4131 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4132 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4133
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004134- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4135 argument.
4136
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004137- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4138 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4139 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4140 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4141 [SF patch 560794].
4142
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004143- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4144 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4145 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004146 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4147 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4148 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004149
4150- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4151 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004152
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004153- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4154 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4155 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4156 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004157
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004158- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4159 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4160 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4161 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4162 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4163
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004164- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004165
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004166- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4167
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004168- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4169 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4170 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4171 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4172 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4173 identical to None.
4174
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004175- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4176 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4177 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4178 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4179 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4180 results now.
4181
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004182- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4183 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4184
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004185- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4186 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4187 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4188 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4189 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4190 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4191 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4192 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4193
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004194- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4195
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004196- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4197 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4198
4199- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4200 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4201 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4202 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4203 and other systems.
4204
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004205- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4206 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4207 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4208 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 +00004209 work well with these.
4210
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004211- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4212
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004213- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004214 connections.
4215
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004216- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4217 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4218 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4219
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004220- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4221 sets
4222
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004223- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4224 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4225 name.
4226
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004227- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4228 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4229 passed in.
4230
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004231- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004232 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004233 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4234 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004235
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004236- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4237
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004238- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4239
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004240- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4241 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4242 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4243
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004244- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4245 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4246 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4247 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004248 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004249
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004250- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004251 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004252 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004253
4254- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4255 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4256 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4257
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004258- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004259 the value of its expression argument.
4260
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004261- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4262 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4263 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4264
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004265- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4266 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4267 skipstone browser was included.
4268
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004269- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4270 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4271
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004272Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004273-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004274
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004275- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4276 names in addition to accepting file names.
4277
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004278- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4279 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4280 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4281 still used and useful.)
4282
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004283- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4284 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4285 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4286 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004287
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004288- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4289 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4290 the generated binary.
4291
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004292Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004293-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004294
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004295- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4296
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004297- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4298 except in the hands of experts.
4299
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004300- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004301 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4302 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4303 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004304
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004305- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4306 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4307 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4308 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4309 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4310 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4311 builds.
4312
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004313- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4314 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4315 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4316 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4317 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4318 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4319 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4320 new type.
4321
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004322- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004323
4324 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4325 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4326 positive infinities.
4327
4328 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4329 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4330 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4331 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4332 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4333 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4334 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4335
4336 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4337
4338 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4339
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004340- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4341 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4342 size of the executable.
4343
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004344- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4345 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4346 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4347 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004348
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004349- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4350
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004351- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4352 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4353 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004354
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004355- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4356 well as Unix.
4357
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004358- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4359 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4360 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4361 modules in the README file for details.
4362
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004363C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004364-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004365
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004366- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4367 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004368 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004369 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004370 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004371
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004372- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4373 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4374 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4375 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4376 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4377 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004378 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004379 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4380 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4381 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4382 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4383 aligned.)
4384
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004385- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4386 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4387 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4388
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004389- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4390 level.
4391
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004392- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4393 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4394 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4395 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4396 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4397
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004398- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4399 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4400 code.
4401
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004402- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4403 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4404 adjusting for negative indices.
4405
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004406- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4407 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4408 object.
4409
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004410- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4411 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4412 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4413
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004414- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4415 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004416
4417- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4418
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004419- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4420 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4421 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4422 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4423
4424- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4425
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004426- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004427
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004428- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004429 without going through the buffer API.
4430
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004431- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004432
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004433- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4434 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4435 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4436 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4437
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004438- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4439 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4440
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004441- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004442 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4443
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004444New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004445-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004446
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004447- OpenVMS is now supported.
4448
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004449- AtheOS is now supported.
4450
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004451- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4452
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004453- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4454
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004455Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004456-----
4457
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004458- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4459 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4460 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004461
4462Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004463-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004464
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004465- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4466 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4467 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4468 bugs.
4469 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004470 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004471 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4472 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004473 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004474
4475- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004476 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004477
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004478- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4479 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4480
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004481- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4482 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004483 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004484 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4485
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004486- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4487 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4488 use files" uninstall option).
4489
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004490- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4491
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004492- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4493 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4494
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004495- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4496 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4497 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4498
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004499- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4500 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4501 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4502 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4503 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004504 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4505 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4506 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004507
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004508- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004509 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004510 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4511 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4512 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4513 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4514 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4515 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4516 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4517 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4518 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4519 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4520 work around.
4521
4522- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4523 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4524 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4525 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4526 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4527 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4528 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4529 specified with O_CREAT too).
4530
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004531Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004532----
4533
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004534- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004535
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004536- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4537 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4538 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4539
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004540- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4541 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4542 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4543
4544- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4545 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4546 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4547 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4548 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4549 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4550 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4551 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004552
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004553- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4554 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4555 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004556
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004557- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4558 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4559 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4560 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4561 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004562
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004563- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4564 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4565 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004566
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004567- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4568 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004569
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004570- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4571 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4572 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4573 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4574 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004575
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004576- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4577 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4578 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4579
4580- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4581 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4582 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004583
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004584- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4585 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4586 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4587 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004588 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004589
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004590- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4591 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004592
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004593- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4594 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004595
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004596- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004597 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004598 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4599 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004600
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004601
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004602What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004603===============================
4604
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004605*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4606
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004607Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004608--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004609
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004610- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4611 with a custom metaclass.
4612
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004613Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004614-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004615
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004616- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4617 are proxies.
4618
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004619Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004620-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004621
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004622- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4623 very short strings.
4624
4625- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4626 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4627 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4628 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4629 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4630
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004631Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004632-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004633
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004634- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4635 close or delete time).
4636
4637- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4638 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4639
4640- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4641
4642- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004643 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004644
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004645Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004646-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004647
4648Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004649-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004650
4651C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004652-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004653
4654New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004655-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004656
4657Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004658-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004659
4660Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004661-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004662
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004663- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4664
4665- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4666 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4667
4668- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4669 deleted at process exit time.
4670
4671- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4672 in backslash.
4673
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004674Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004675----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004676
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004677- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4678 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4679 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4680
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004681
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004682What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004683===========================
4684
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004685*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4686
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004687Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004688--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004689
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004690- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4691 been extensively updated. See
4692
4693 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4694
4695 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4696
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004697- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4698 deleted!
4699
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004700- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4701 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4702 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4703 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4704 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4705
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004706- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4707
4708 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4709 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4710
4711 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4712 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4713 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4714 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4715 supported anyway.
4716
4717 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4718 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4719
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004720- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4721 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4722 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4723 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4724 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004725
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004726- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4727 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4728 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4729
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004730Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004731-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004732
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004733- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4734 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4735 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4736 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4737 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4738 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004739 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4740 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4741 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4742 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004743
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004744- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4745 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4746 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4747
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004748Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004749-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004750
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004751- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4752
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004753Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004754-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004755
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004756- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4757 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4758 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4759 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4760 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4761 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4762
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004763- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4764
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004765- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4766
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004767- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4768
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004769- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4770 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4771 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4772
4773- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4774
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004775Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004776-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004777
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004778- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4779 off a search on Google.
4780
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004781Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004782-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004783
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004784- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4785 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4786 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4787 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4788 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4789 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4790 other platforms should do likewise.
4791
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004792- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4793 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4794 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4795
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004796C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004797-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004798
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004799- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4800 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4801 producing key-value pairs.
4802
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004803- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004804 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004805 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4806 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4807 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4808 previously went unchallenged.
4809
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004810New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004811-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004812
4813Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004814-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004815
4816Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004817-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004818
4819Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004820----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004821
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004822- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4823 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004824
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004825- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4826 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4827 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4828 home.
4829
4830
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004831What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004832===========================
4833
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004834*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4835
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004836Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004837--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004838
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004839- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4840 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004841
4842 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004843 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004844
4845 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4846 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004847 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004848 This needs to be documented.
4849
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004850- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4851 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4852
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004853- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4854 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4855 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4856
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004857- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4858 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4859
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004860- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4861 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4862 class forbids it).
4863
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004864- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4865 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4866 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4867
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004868- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4869
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004870Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004871-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004872
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004873- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4874 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004875 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004876
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004877- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4878 (like 1 + '').
4879
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004880Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004881-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004882
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004883- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4884 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4885 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4886 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004887 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004888 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4889
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004890- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4891 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4892 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4893 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4894
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004895- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4896 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004897 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4898 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4899 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004900
4901- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4902 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004903
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004904- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4905 bytes on its input.
4906
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004907Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004908-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004909
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004910- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004911 convenience function.
4912
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004913- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4914 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4915 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004916 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4917 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4918 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4919 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4920 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4921 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004922
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004923- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4924 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4925 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4926 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4927
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004928- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4929 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4930 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4931
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004932- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4933 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4934 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4935 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4936
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004937- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4938 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004939 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004940 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4941 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4942 new -l and -e options.
4943
4944- statcache is now deprecated.
4945
4946- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4947 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004948 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004949 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4950 time properly taken into account.
4951
4952- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4953 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4954 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4955 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4956
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004957Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004958-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004959
4960Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004961-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004962
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004963- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4964 is built with libdb3 if available.
4965
4966- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4967
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004968C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004969-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004970
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004971- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4972 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4973 PySequence_Size().
4974
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004975- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4976
4977- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4978 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4979 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4980
4981- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4982 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4983
4984- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4985 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4986
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004987New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004988-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004989
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004990- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4991 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4992
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004993- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4994 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4995
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004996- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4997
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004998Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004999-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005000
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005001- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5002 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5003
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005004Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005005-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005006
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005007Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005008----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005009
5010- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5011 removed completely in the next release.
5012
5013- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5014 OSX.
5015
5016- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5017 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5018
5019- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5020
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005021
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005022What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005023===========================
5024
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005025*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5026
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005027Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005028--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005029
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005030- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005031 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005032 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005033 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5034 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005035 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5036 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005037 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5038 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005039
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005040- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5041 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5042
5043- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5044 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5045
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005046Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005047-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005048
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005049- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5050 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5051 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5052 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5053 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5054 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5055 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5056 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5057
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005058- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5059 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5060 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5061 example).
5062
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005063- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005064 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005065 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005066 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005067
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005068- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5069 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5070 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005071 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005072
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005073- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5074 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5075 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5076 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5077 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5078 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5079
5080 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5081
5082 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5083
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005084Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005085-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005086
5087- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5088
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005089- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5090
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005091- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5092 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005093
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005094- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5095 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5096 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5097 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5098 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5099 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005100 attributes.
5101
5102- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5103 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5104 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005105
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005106- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5107 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5108 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005109
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005110- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5111 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5112 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005113 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5114 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5115
5116- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5117 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005118
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005119Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005120-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005121
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005122- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5123 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5124
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005125- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5126 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5127 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5128 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5129
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005130- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5131 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5132 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5133 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5134
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005135 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5136 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5137 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5138 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5139 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5140 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5141 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5142 without losing information).
5143
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005144- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005145 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5146 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5147 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5148 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5149 module).
5150
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005151 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005152 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5153 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5154 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5155 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005156
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005157- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005158 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5159 encoding.
5160
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005161- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5162 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5163
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005164- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005165 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5166
5167- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5168 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5169 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5170 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5171
5172- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5173
5174- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5175 ON, and OFF.
5176
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005177- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5178 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5179
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005180Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005181-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005182
5183- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5184 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5185 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005186
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005187- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5188 been added: -X and -E.
5189
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005190Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005191-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005192
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005193- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5194 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5195
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005196C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005197-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005198
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005199- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5200 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5201 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5202 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5203 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5204
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005205- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5206 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5207 as long) arguments.
5208
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005209- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5210 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5211 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5212 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5213 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5214 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5215
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005216- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5217 input.
5218
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005219New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005220-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005221
5222Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005223-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005224
5225Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005226-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005227
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005228- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5229 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5230 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5231
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005232- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5233 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5234 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005235 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005236
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005237 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5238 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5239 import signal
5240 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005241
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005242 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005243 while 1:
5244 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005245 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005246 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5247 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5248 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5249 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005250
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005251
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005252What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5253===========================
5254
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005255*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5256
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005257Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005258--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005259
5260- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5261 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5262 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5263
5264- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5265 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5266 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5267 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5268 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5269 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5270 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005271
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005272- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005273 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005274 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5275 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5276 associate a docstring with a property.
5277
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005278- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5279 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5280 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5281 other built-in object types.
5282
5283- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5284 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5285 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5286 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5287 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5288
5289- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5290 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5291
5292- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5293 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005294 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005295 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5296 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5297 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5298 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5299 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5300
5301- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5302 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5303 class.
5304
5305- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5306 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5307 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5308 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5309
5310- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5311 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5312 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5313 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5314
5315- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5316 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5317
5318- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5319 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5320 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5321 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5322 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005323 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005324 with the same value as s.
5325
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005326- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5327
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005328Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005329----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005330
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005331- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5332
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005333- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5334 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5335 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5336 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5337 objects.
5338
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005339- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5340 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005341 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5342 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5343
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005344- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5345 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5346 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5347
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005348Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005349-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005350
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005351- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5352 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5353 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5354 by the instances.
5355
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005356- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5357 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5358 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5359
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005360- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5361 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5362 before the entire comparison is complete.
5363
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005364- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5365 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5366 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5367
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005368- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5369 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5370 getwriter().
5371
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005372- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5373 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5374
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005375- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005376 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5377 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5378
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005379- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5380 iterable object.
5381
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005382- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5383 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005384
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005385- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5386 authentication.
5387
5388- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5389 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005390
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005391- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005392 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5393 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5394 a sample driver.)
5395
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005396Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005397-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005398
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005399- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5400 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5401 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5402 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5403 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5404 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5405 kernel has large file support.
5406
5407- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5408 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5409 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5410 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5411 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5412
5413- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5414 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5415 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5416
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005417C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005418-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005419
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005420- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5421 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5422
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005423New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005424-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005425
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005426- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5427 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5428
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005429Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005430-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005431
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005432- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5433 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5434 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5435 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5436 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5437
5438- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5439 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5440 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5441 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5442
5443- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5444 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5445
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005446Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005447-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005448
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005449- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005450 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5451 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005452
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005453
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005454What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5455===========================
5456
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005457*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5458
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005459Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005460----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005461
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005462- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5463 big to represent as a C double.
5464
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005465- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5466 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5467 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5468 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5469 restriction).
5470
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005471- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5472 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5473 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5474 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5475 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5476
5477 >>> dir([])
5478 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5479 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5480 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5481 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5482 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5483 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5484 'reverse', 'sort']
5485
5486 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5487
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005488- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005489 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5490 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5491 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5492 OverflowError exception.
5493
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005494- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005495 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005496 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5497 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5498 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5499 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5500 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005501 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005502 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5503 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5504
5505 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5506 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5507 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5508 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005509
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005510- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005511 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5512 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5513 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5514 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5515 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5516 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5517 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5518 once it is created.
5519
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005520- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5521 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5522 (key, value) pairs.
5523
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005524- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005525 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5526 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5527
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005528- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5529 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5530 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5531 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5532 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005533
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005534- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005535 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5536 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5537
5538 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5539
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005540- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005541 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5542
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005543Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005544-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005545
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005546- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005547 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5548 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005549
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005550- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5551 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5552 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5553 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5554 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5555 in this area anymore).
5556
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005557- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5558 threading.Timer.
5559
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005560- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5561 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5562
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005563- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005564 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5565
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005566- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005567 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5568 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5569 converted to Python longs.
5570
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005571- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005572 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5573
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005574- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5575 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5576 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5577
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005578Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005579-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005580
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005581- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5582 division operators as per PEP 238.
5583
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005584Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005585-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005586
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005587- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5588 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5589 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5590 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5591
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005592C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005593-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005594
5595- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005596
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005597- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5598 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005599 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005600
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005601 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5602 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005603 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005604 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005605
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005606- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005607 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5608 module:
5609
5610 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005611
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005612 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5613 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005614
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005615 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5616 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005617
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005618 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5619
5620 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5621
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005622- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005623 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5624 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5625 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005626
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005627New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005628-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005629
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005630- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5631 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5632 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5633 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5634 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005635
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005636Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005637-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005638
5639Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005640-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005641
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005642- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5643 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5644 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5645 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005646 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5647 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5648 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5649 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5650 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005651
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005652- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005653 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5654
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005655
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005656What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5657===========================
5658
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005659*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5660
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005661Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005662-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005663
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005664- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5665 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5666
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005667- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5668 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5669 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005670
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005671- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5672 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5673 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5674 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005675
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005676- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5677
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005678- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005679
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005680Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005681-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005682
5683- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005684 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005685 the module docstring for details.
5686
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005687Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005688-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005689
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005690- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005691 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5692 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5693 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005694
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005695- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5696 Nick Mathewson.
5697
5698Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005699----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005700
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005701- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5702 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5703 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5704 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5705 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5706 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5707 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5708 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5709
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005710- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5711 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5712 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5713 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5714
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005715- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5716 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5717 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5718 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5719 come a long way).
5720
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005721- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5722 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5723 write filters for these warnings).
5724
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005725- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5726 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5727 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5728 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5729 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5730
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005731- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5732 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5733 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5734 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5735 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5736 older distribution.
5737
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005738Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005739-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005740
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005741- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5742 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005743 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005744
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005745- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5746 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5747 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5748
5749- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5750
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005751- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5752
5753- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5754
5755- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5756
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005757- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005758
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005759- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5760
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005761New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005762-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005763
5764C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005765-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005766
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005767- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5768 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5769 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5770 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5771 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5772 against buffer overruns.
5773
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005774- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005775 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5776 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005777 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5778 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5779 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5780
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005781- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5782 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5783 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5784 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5785 deprecated.
5786
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005787Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005788-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005789
5790- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5791 relevant is found.
5792
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005793
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005794What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005795===========================
5796
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005797*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5798
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005799Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005800----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005801
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005802- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5803 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5804 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5805 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5806 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5807 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5808 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5809 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005810 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005811 repaired.
5812
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005813- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005814 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005815 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5816 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5817 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5818 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5819 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5820 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5821 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5822 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5823
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005824- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5825 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5826 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5827 leading BMO character).
5828
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005829- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5830 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5831 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5832
5833 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5834 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5835 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005836
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005837 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5838 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5839 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5840 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5841 for various simple to use conversions.
5842
5843 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5844 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5845
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005846 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5847 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5848 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5849 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5850 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5851 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5852 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5853 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5854 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5855 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5856 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5857 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5858 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5859 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5860 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005861
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005862- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5863 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5864 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005865 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005866 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005867
5868 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005869 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5870 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5871 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5872 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5873 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005874 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5875 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005876
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005877 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5878 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5879 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005880 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005881
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005882- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5883 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5884 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5885 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5886 floating arithmetic,
5887
5888 x = 9007199254740992.0
5889 print long(x)
5890
5891 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5892 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5893 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5894 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5895 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5896 functions are of good quality).
5897
5898 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5899 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5900 algorithms to break.
5901
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005902- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5903 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5904 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5905 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5906 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5907 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5908 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5909 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5910 order.
5911
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005912- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5913 operation along the most common code paths.
5914
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005915- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5916 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5917
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005918- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5919 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5920 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5921 {}.update(UserDict())
5922
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005923- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5924 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5925 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5926 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5927 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5928 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5929 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5930 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5931
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005932- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005933 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005934
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005935 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005936 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5937 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005938 join() method of strings
5939 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005940 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5941 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005942 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005943 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005944
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005945- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5946 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5947
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005948- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5949 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5950
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005951- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5952 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5953 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5954 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5955
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005956- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5957 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005958 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005959 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5960 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005961
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005962- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5963
5964
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005965Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005966-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005967
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005968- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005969 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005970 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5971 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5972
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005973- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5974 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5975
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005976- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5977 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5978 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5979 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5980
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005981- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5982 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5983 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5984
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005985- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5986
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005987- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5988
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005989- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5990 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5991 that are still imported into string.py).
5992
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005993- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5994
5995- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5996 Now it does.
5997
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005998- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5999
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006000- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6001 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6002 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6003 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6004 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006005 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6006 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006007
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006008- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6009 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6010 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6011 'help(object)'.
6012
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006013Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006014-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006015
6016- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006017 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006018 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6019 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6020
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006021- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006022 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6023 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006024
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006025C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006026-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006027
6028- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6029 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006030
6031----
6032
6033**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**