blob: b59c7dd7762d963c917e7493690e80cd87e6bcf2 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000015- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
16 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
17
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000018- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
19 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
20 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
21
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000022- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
23
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000024- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
25 reference counts in some error exit cases.
26
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000027- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
28 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
29 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
30 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
31 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
32 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
33 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
34 realloc.
35
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000036- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
37 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
38
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000039- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
40 like their int counterparts.
41
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000042- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
43 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
44 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
45 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
46 for a longer write-up of the problem).
47
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000048- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
49 serializing floats.
50
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000051- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
52 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
53 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
54
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000055- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
56 278.
57
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000058- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
59 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
60 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
61 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
62 to the base class has been moved the prroper nb_* magic slot and out of
63 PyNumber_*().
64 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
65
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000066- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
67 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
68 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
69 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
70
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000071- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
72 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
73 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
74 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
75 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
76
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000077- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
78 disabled caused a crash.
79
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000080- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
81 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
82
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000083- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000084 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
85
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000086- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
87
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000088- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000089 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
90 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
91 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000092
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000093- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
94
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000095- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
96 returning None.
97
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000098- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000099 ('\') with a specific error message.
100
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000101- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
102
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000103- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
104 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
105
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000106- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000107 an ferror() call.
108
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000109- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
110 list.sort().
111
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000112- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
113 (2+3) --> (5).
114
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000115- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
116
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000117- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
118 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000119
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000120- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
121 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
122 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
123
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000124- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
125 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
126 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
127
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000128Extension Modules
129-----------------
130
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000131- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
132 on Windows.
133
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000134- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
135 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
136
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000137- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
138 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
139 for large or negative values.
140
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000141- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000142 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000143
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000144- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
145
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000146- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
147 if available on the platform.
148
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000149- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
150 available on the platform.
151
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000152- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
153 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
154
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000155- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
156
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000157- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
158 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
159 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
160
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000161- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
162
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000163- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
164 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
165
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000166- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000167 file size.
168
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000169- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
170
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000171- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
172 {remove_history,replace_history}
173
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000174- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
175 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000176
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000177- stat_float_times is now True.
178
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000179- array.array objects are now picklable.
180
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000181- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
182 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
183
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000184- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
185 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
186 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
187
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000188- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
189 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000190
191Library
192-------
193
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000194- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
195
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000196- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
197 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
198
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000199- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
200 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
201 Tkdnd.
202
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000203- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
204 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
205
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000206- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
207 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
208
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000209- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000210 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
211
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000212- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
213 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
214
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000215- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
216 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
217
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000218- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000219 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000220
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000221- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
222
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000223- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
224 error messages.
225
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000226- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
227
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000228- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
229 Bug #1224621.
230
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000231- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
232 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
233 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
234 terminates by raising StopIteration.
235
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000236- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
237
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000238- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
239 component of the path.
240
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000241- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
242 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
243 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
244 class at all.
245
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000246- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
247 files to PyPI.
248
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000249- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
250 them to PyPI.
251
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000252- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
253 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
254 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
255 work as expected.
256
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000257- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
258 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
259
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000260- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000261 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
262
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000263- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
264
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000265- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
266 to build.
267
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000268- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
269 symbolic links on Windows.
270
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000271- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000272 profile.py if available.
273
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000274- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
275
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000276- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
277 in LWPCookieJar.
278
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000279- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
280
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000281- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
282
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000283- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
284
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000285- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
286
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000287- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
288
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000289- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
290
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000291- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
292
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000293- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
294
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000295- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
296 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
297 be exploited in various ways.
298
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000299- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
300
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000301- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
302
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000303- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
304
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000305- Enhancements to the csv module:
306
307 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000308 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000309 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000310 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
311 reporting.
312 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
313 dictates.
314 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000315 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000316 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000317 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
318 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000319 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
320 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000321 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000322 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
323 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
324 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
325 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
326 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
327 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
328 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
329 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
330 without first creating a dialect class.
331 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
332 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
333 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000334 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000335 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
336 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000337 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
338 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
339 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
340 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000341 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
342 This has been fixed.
343
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000344- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
345 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
346 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
347 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
348
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000349- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
350
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000351- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
352 (Bug #951915).
353
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000354- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
355 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
356 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000357 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000358
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000359- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
360
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000361- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
362 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
363
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000364- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
365
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000366- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
367
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000368- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
369
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000370- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
371
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000372- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
373
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000374- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
375 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
376 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
377
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000378- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000379 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000380
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000381- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
382 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
383 tokenizer with very long source lines.
384
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000385- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
386 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
387
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000388- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
389 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000390
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000391- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
392 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
393
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000394- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
395 correctly.
396
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000397- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
398 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
399 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
400 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
401 between two lines.
402
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000403
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000404Build
405-----
406
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000407- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
408 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
409
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000410- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
411 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
412
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000413- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
414 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
415 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000416 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000417
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000418- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
419 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
420 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
421
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000422- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
423
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000424- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
425 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
426
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000427- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
428 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
429 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
430 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
431 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
432 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
433 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
434 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
435
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000436- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
437 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
438 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
439 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
440
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000441
442C API
443-----
444
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000445- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
446
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000447- Removed PyRange_New().
448
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000449
450Tests
451-----
452
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000453- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000454
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000455
456Documentation
457-------------
458
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000459- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
460
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000461- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
462
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000463- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
464
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000465- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
466
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000467- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
468
469- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
470
471- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
472
473- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
474
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000475- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
476 Closes bug #1166582.
477
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000478- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
479 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
480 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
481
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000482Mac
483---
484
485
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000486New platforms
487-------------
488
489- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
490
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000491
492Tools/Demos
493-----------
494
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000495- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
496
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000497- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000498
499
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000500What's New in Python 2.4 final?
501===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000502
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000503*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000504
505Core and builtins
506-----------------
507
508- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
509 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
510 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
511
512
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000513What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
514==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000515
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000516*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000517
518Core and builtins
519-----------------
520
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000521- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
522 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
523 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
524
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000525
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000526Library
527-------
528
529- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
530 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
531 raised is re-raised.
532
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000533- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
534 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
535
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000536- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
537 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
538 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
539 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
540 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
541 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
542 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
543 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
544 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
545 by the slice are recomputed now.
546
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000547- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000548
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000549Build
550-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000551
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000552- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
553 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
554 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000555
556C API
557-----
558
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000559- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
560
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000561
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000562What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
563================================
564
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000565*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000566
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000567License
568-------
569
570The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
571is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
572changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
573Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
574intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
575durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
576the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
577License::
578
579 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
580
581says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
582to Python 2.1.1.
583
584The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
585License Version 2.
586
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000587Core and builtins
588-----------------
589
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000590- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
591 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
592 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
593 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
594 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
595 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
596 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
597 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
598 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
599 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
600
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000601- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000602
603Extension Modules
604-----------------
605
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000606- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
607 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
608 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
609 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000610
611Library
612-------
613
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000614- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
615 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
616 returned.
617
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000618- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
619
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000620- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
621 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
622
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000623- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
624
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000625- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
626 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000627
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000628- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
629
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000630- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
631
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000632- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000633 the source code is updated and reloaded.
634
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000635Build
636-----
637
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000638- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000639
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000640What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
641================================
642
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000643*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000644
645Core and builtins
646-----------------
647
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000648- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000649 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
650
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000651- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
652 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
653 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
654 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
655
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000656- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
657 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
658
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000659- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
660 constant.
661
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000662- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
663 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
664 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
665 large), and to anomalies such as
666 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
667 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
668 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
669 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000670
671Extension modules
672-----------------
673
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000674- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
675 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000676 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
677 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
678 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000679
680Library
681-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000682
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000683- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000684 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000685 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
686 --swig-cpp.
687
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000688- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
689 it is set.
690
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000691- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000692
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000693- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
694 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
695 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
696 Closes bug #1039270.
697
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000698- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000699
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000700 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000701 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
702 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
703 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
704 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
705 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
706 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
707 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
708 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
709 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
710 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
711 + Updates to documentation.
712
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000713- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
714 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
715 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
716 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
717
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000718- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000719
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000720- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
721 applications should use the getmember function.
722
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000723- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
724
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000725- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
726 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
727 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
728 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
729 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
730 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
731 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
732 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
733 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
734
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000735- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
736 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000737 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000738
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000739- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
740 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
741 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
742 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
743 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
744 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
745 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
746 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000747
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000748- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
749 the new public features (of which there are many).
750
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000751- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000752 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
753 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
754 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
755 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000756 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000757
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000758- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
759
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000760- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
761 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
762 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
763 options.
764
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000765- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
766 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
767 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
768 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
769 conditions under which non-string values work.
770
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000771Build
772-----
773
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000774- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
775 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
776 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
777
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000778- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
779 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
780 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
781 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
782 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000783
784C API
785-----
786
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000787- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
788 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
789
790- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
791
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000792- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
793 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
794 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
795 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
796 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
797 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
798 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
799 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
800 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
801
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000802- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
803
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000804- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
805 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
806 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000807
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000808Tests
809-----
810
811- test__locale ported to unittest
812
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000813Mac
814---
815
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000816- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
817 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
818 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000819
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000820Tools/Demos
821-----------
822
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000823- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
824 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
825 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
826 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
827 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000828
829
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000830What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
831=================================
832
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000833*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000834
835Core and builtins
836-----------------
837
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000838- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000839 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
840
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000841- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
842 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
843 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
844 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
845 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
846 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
847 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
848 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000849 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
850 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
851 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
852 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
853 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000854
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000855- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
856 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
857 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
858 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
859 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
860
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000861- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
862
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000863- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
864 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
865
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000866- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
867 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
868 modified the list.
869
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000870- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
871 functions is now writable.
872
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000873- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
874 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
875 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
876 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
877
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000878- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
879 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
880 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
881 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
882 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000883
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000884- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
885 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
886
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000887Extension modules
888-----------------
889
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000890- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
891
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000892- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
893 data.
894
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000895- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
896 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
897 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
898 supposed to have been truncated away.
899
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000900- Added socket.socketpair().
901
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000902- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
903 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
904
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000905- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000906 versions of Python, have now been removed.
907
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000908Library
909-------
910
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000911- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000912 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000913
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000914- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
915 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
916
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000917- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
918 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
919
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000920- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
921
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000922- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
923 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000924
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000925- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
926 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
927
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000928- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
929
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000930- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
931
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000932- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
933
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000934- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
935 Percivall.
936
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000937- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
938 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
939
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000940- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
941 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
942 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000943 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000944
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000945- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
946 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
947 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
948 and exponent.
949
950- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
951
952- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +0000953 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000954 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
955
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000956- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
957 to the readline module.
958
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000959- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000960 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
961 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000962
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000963- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
964 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
965 contains symlinks.
966
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000967- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
968 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
969
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000970- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
971 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
972 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
973
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000974- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
975 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
976 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
977 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
978 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
979 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
980 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
981 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
982 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
983 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
984 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
985 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
986 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
987
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000988- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
989
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000990Tools/Demos
991-----------
992
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000993- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
994 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
995
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000996- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
997
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000998Build
999-----
1000
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001001- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1002 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1003 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1004 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1005 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1006 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1007 plans to do so.
1008
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001009- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1010 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1011
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001012- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1013 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1014
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001015- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1016 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1017
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001018- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1019 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1020
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001021- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1022 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1023
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001024C API
1025-----
1026
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001027..
1028
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001029Documentation
1030-------------
1031
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001032- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1033 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1034
1035- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1036 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1037 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001038
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001039New platforms
1040-------------
1041
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001042- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1043
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001044Tests
1045-----
1046
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001047..
1048
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001049Windows
1050-------
1051
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001052- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1053 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1054 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1055 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1056 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1057 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1058 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1059 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1060 the problem.
1061
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001062Mac
1063---
1064
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001065..
1066
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001067
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001068What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1069=================================
1070
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001071*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001072
1073Core and builtins
1074-----------------
1075
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001076- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1077 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1078 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1079 sensitive code.
1080
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001081- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001082 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001083
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001084 @staticmethod
1085 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001086
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001087 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001088
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001089- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1090 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1091 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1092 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1093 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1094 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1095 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1096 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1097 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1098 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1099 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1100
1101 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1102 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1103 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1104 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1105 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1106 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1107 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1108
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001109- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1110 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1111
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001112- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001113 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001114
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001115- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001116 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001117 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1118
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001119- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001120 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1121 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1122
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001123- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1124 types that support garbage collection.
1125
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001126- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1127
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001128- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1129 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1130 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1131 Jython.
1132
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001133- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1134
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001135- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1136 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1137
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001138- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1139 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1140 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001141
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001142- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1143 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1144 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1145
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001146Extension modules
1147-----------------
1148
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001149- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1150
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001151Library
1152-------
1153
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001154- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1155 TIS-620
1156
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001157- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1158 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1159 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1160 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1161 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1162 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1163 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1164 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1165 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1166 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1167
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001168- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1169
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001170- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1171 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1172 same as when the argument is omitted).
1173 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1174
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001175- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1176
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001177- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1178 schemes are offered.
1179
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001180- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1181
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001182- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1183 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1184 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1185
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001186- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1187
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001188- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1189 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1190
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001191- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1192 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1193 when dummy_threading is being used.
1194
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001195- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1196 from a tarfile.
1197
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001198- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001199 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001200
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001201- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1202 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1203 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1204 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1205
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001206- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1207 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1208
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001209- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1210 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1211 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1212 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1213 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1214 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1215 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1216 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1217 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1218 by some other method in progress).
1219
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001220- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1221 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1222 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001223
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001224- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1225
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001226- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1227 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1228 AM Kuchling.
1229
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001230- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1231 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1232 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1233
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001234- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1235 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1236 instead of unsigned.
1237
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001238- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001239 no longer part of the public API.
1240
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001241- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1242 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1243 string methods of the same name).
1244
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001245- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001246 SF patch 945642.
1247
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001248- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1249
1250 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1251
1252 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1253 DocTestSuites.
1254
1255- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1256 that provide thread-local data.
1257
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001258- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1259 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1260
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001261- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1262
1263- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1264 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1265 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1266
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001267- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1268
1269 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1270 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1271 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001272
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001273 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1274 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1275 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1276 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1277
1278 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1279 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1280
1281 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1282 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1283 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1284 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1285
1286 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1287 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1288 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1289 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1290 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1291
1292 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1293 wrapping help output.
1294
1295 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1296 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1297 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001298
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001299C API
1300-----
1301
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001302- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1303 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1304 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1305 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1306 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1307 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1308 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1309 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1310 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1311 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1312 its visible semantics have not changed.
1313
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001314- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1315 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1316
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001317Documentation
1318-------------
1319
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001320- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001321
1322 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001323 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001324
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001325 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001326
1327 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1328
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001329- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001330
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001331Tests
1332-----
1333
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001334- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001335 platforms that use the Makefile.
1336
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001337- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1338 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1339 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1340
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001341
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001342What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1343=================================
1344
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001345*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001346
1347Core and builtins
1348-----------------
1349
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001350- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1351 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1352 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1353 objects now (one object instead of three).
1354
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001355- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1356 Windows DLLs.
1357
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001358- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1359 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001360
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001361- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1362 a new .pyc magic.
1363
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001364- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1365 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1366 be there.
1367
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001368- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1369 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1370 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1371
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001372- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1373 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1374 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1375
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001376- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1377
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001378- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1379 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1380 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001381
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001382- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1383 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1384
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001385- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1386
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001387- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001388 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001389
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001390- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1391
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001392- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1393
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001394- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1395 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1396
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001397- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1398 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1399 Fixes bug #858016 .
1400
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001401- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1402 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1403 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1404
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001405- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1406 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1407 improves their performance (about 35%).
1408
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001409- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1410 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1411 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1412
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001413- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1414 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1415 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1416 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1417
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001418- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1419 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001420 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001421 length is not known).
1422
1423- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1424 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001425 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1426 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001427 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1428
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001429- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1430 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1431
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001432- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1433 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1434 keyword arguments.
1435
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001436- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1437 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1438 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1439
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001440- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1441 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1442 cases.
1443
1444- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1445 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1446 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1447 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1448 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1449 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1450 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1451 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1452 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1453 a release build.
1454
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001455- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1456 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1457
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001458- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001459 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001460
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001461- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1462 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1463 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1464 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1465 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1466 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1467 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1468 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1469 destroyed.
1470
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001471- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1472 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1473 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1474 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1475 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1476 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1477 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1478 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1479
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001480- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1481 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1482 character other than a space.
1483
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001484- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1485 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1486 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1487 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1488 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1489 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1490 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1491 attributes with the same name.
1492
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001493- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1494 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1495 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1496 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1497 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1498 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1499 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1500 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1501 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1502 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1503 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1504 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1505 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1506 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001507
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001508- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1509 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1510 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1511 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1512 This has been repaired.
1513
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001514- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1515
1516- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1517
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001518- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1519 over a sequence.
1520
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001521- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001522 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001523
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001524- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1525
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001526- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1527 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1528 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1529 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1530 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1531 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1532 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1533 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1534
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001535- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1536 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1537 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1538
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001539- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1540 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1541 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1542 freelist.
1543
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001544- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1545 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1546
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001547- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1548 number.
1549
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001550- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1551 a TypeError exception.
1552
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001553- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1554 820195.
1555
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001556- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1557 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1558 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1559
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001560- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001561 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1562 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001563
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001564- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1565 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1566 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1567
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001568- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1569 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001570 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001571
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001572- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001573 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1574 the first call.
1575
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001576
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001577Extension modules
1578-----------------
1579
Georg Brandl33a5f2a2005-08-21 14:16:04 +00001580- Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines() for files containing one line without
1581 newlines.
1582
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001583- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1584 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1585
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001586- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1587 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1588 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1589 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1590 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1591 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1592 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001593
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001594- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1595
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001596- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1597
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001598- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1599 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1600
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001601- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1602 fewer false positives.
1603
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001604- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1605 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1606
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001607- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001608 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1609
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001610- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001611 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001612 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001613 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1614 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001615
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001616- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1617 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1618 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1619 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1620
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001621- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1622 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1623 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1624 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1625 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1626 #897625.
1627
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001628- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1629 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1630
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001631- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1632 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1633 and pops on either side of the deque.
1634
1635- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1636 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1637
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001638- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1639 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1640 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1641 other functions that expect a function argument.
1642
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001643- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1644
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001645- os.getsid was added.
1646
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001647- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1648 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1649 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1650
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001651- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1652
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001653- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1654
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001655- readline.clear_history was added.
1656
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001657- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1658
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001659- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1660
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001661- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1662
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001663- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1664
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001665- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1666
1667- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1668
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001669- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1670
1671- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1672
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001673- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1674 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1675 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1676
1677- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1678 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1679 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1680 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1681 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1682 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1683 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1684
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001685- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1686 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1687 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1688 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001689
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001690- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001691 iterators from a single iterable.
1692
1693- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1694 of raising a TypeError exception.
1695
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001696- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1697 as parameter.
1698
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001699Library
1700-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001701
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001702- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1703
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001704- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1705 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1706 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001707
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001708- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1709 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1710 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001711
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001712- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001713
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001714- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1715 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001716
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001717- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1718 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1719
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001720- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1721
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001722- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001723 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001724
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001725- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001726 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001727
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001728- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1729
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001730- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1731 on cygwin and mingw32.
1732
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001733- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1734
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001735- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1736 module.
1737
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001738- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1739 installation scheme for all platforms.
1740
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001741- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001742 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001743
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001744- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1745 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1746 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1747
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001748- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1749 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1750 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1751
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001752- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1753
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001754- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1755
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001756- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1757 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1758
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001759- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1760 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1761 type pattern with the same value exists.
1762
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001763- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1764 when run from the command prompt).
1765
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001766- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1767 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1768
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001769- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1770 default sort).
1771
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001772- Added global runctx function to profile module
1773
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001774- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1775
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001776- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1777
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001778- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1779
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001780- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001781 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1782 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1783 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1784 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1785 accordingly.
1786
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001787- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1788 decoding standards.
1789
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001790- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1791 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1792 called for all requests.
1793
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001794- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1795 they are passed to the compiler.
1796
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001797- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1798 indent, width and depth.
1799
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001800- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1801 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1802
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001803- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1804 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1805
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001806- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1807
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001808- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1809
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001810- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1811
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001812- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1813 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1814
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001815- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001816 for better performance.
1817
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001818- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001819
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001820- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1821 a string).
1822
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001823- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1824
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001825- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1826
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001827- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1828
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001829- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1830
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001831- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1832 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1833 list of fieldnames.
1834
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001835- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1836 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1837
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001838- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1839
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001840- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1841 empty lists.
1842
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001843- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1844 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1845 and shelves.
1846
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001847- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1848 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1849
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001850- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001851 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1852 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001853
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001854- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1855 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001856 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001857
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001858- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001859 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1860 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1861
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001862- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1863 and removed in Py2.4.
1864
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001865- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1866
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001867- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1868
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001869Tools/Demos
1870-----------
1871
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001872- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1873 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1874
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001875- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1876
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001877- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1878 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1879 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1880 destination in situations where both files are given.
1881
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001882- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1883 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1884 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1885 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1886
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001887- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1888
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001889- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1890 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1891 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1892 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1893 now.
1894
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001895- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1896 in effect
1897
1898- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1899 C-c C-h
1900
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001901- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1902 -d option was given.
1903
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001904Build
1905-----
1906
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001907- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1908 build under OS X.
1909
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001910- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1911 --enable-profiling.
1912
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001913- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1914 is configured --with-tsc.
1915
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001916- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1917 on AMD64.
1918
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001919- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1920 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1921
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001922- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1923 removed.
1924
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001925- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1926 supported (see PEP 11).
1927
1928- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1929
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001930- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1931
1932- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1933 (see PEP 11).
1934
1935- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1936 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1937
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001938C API
1939-----
1940
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001941- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1942 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1943 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1944
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001945- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1946 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1947 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1948 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1949
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001950- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1951 generator objects.
1952
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001953- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1954 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001955 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1956 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001957
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001958- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1959 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1960
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001961- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1962 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1963 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1964 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1965 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1966
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001967- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1968 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1969 about 10% faster.
1970
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001971- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1972 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1973
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001974- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1975 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1976 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1977 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1978
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001979Windows
1980-------
1981
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001982- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1983 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1984 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1985 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1986
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001987- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1988 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1989 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1990
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001991
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001992What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1993===============================
1994
1995*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1996
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001997IDLE
1998----
1999
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002000- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2001 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2002 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2003 context-menu actions.
2004
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002005- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2006 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2007 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2008 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2009 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2010 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2011 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2012 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2013 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2014
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002015
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002016What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2017=============================================
2018
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002019*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002020
2021Core and builtins
2022-----------------
2023
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002024- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002025 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002026 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2027
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002028Extension modules
2029-----------------
2030
2031- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2032 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2033 than once. This has been fixed.
2034
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002035- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2036 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2037 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2038 call.
2039
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002040- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2041
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002042Library
2043-------
2044
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002045- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2046 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2047
2048- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2049 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2050 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2051 restored.
2052
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002053IDLE
2054----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002055
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002056- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002057
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002058Build
2059-----
2060
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002061- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2062 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2063
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002064C API
2065-----
2066
2067Windows
2068-------
2069
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002070- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2071 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2072
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002073- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2074
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002075Mac
2076---
2077
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002078- Various fixes to pimp.
2079
2080- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2081
2082- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2083 more problems than it solves.
2084
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002085
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002086What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2087=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002088
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002089*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2090
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002091Core and builtins
2092-----------------
2093
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002094- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2095 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2096
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002097- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2098 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002099 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002100
2101- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2102 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2103 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002104 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002105
2106- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2107 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002108
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002109- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2110 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2111 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2112
2113- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002114 770247.
2115
2116- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002117
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002118Extension modules
2119-----------------
2120
2121- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2122 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2123
2124- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2125
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002126- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2127
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002128- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2129 contained within the _strptime module.
2130
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002131- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2132 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2133
2134- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002135 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2136
2137- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2138 the find_class attribute, if present.
2139
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002140- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002141
2142 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2143 (SF bug 763298).
2144
2145 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002146 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2147 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2148 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002149
2150 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2151
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002152Library
2153-------
2154
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002155- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2156
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002157- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2158 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2159 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2160 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2161 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2162 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2163 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2164 or Tester().
2165
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002166- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2167 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2168 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2169 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2170 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2171 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2172 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2173 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2174 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002175
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002176 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002177
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002178- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2179 weren't before was an oversight.
2180
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002181- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2182 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2183
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002184- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2185 when there are no lines.
2186
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002187- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2188 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2189
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002190- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2191 to child processes.
2192
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002193- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2194
2195- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2196
2197- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2198 xmlrpclib.
2199
2200- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2201 responses.
2202
2203- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2204 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2205
2206- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2207 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2208 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2209
2210- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2211 used as patterns.
2212
2213- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2214 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2215 than Tk 8.3.
2216
2217- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2218
2219- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002220
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002221Tools/Demos
2222-----------
2223
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002224- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2225
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002226- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2227
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002228- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002229
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002230Build
2231-----
2232
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002233- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2234
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002235- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2236
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002237- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2238 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002239
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002240- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2241 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2242 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002243
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002244C API
2245-----
2246
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002247- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2248 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2249
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002250Windows
2251-------
2252
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002253- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2254 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2255 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2256 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2257 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2258 Python exception ::
2259
2260 thread.error: can't start new thread
2261
2262 is raised now.
2263
2264- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2265 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2266 instead of from DLL teardown.
2267
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002268Mac
2269---
2270
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002271- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002272 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002273 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2274 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2275 the executable in the bundle.
2276
2277- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002278
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002279- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2280
2281- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2282 on Panther.
2283
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002284What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2285================================
2286
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002287*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002288
2289Core and builtins
2290-----------------
2291
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002292- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2293 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2294 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2295 with the -i option.
2296
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002297- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2298 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2299
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002300- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2301 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2302
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002303- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2304 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2305 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2306 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2307 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2308 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2309 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2310 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2311 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2312 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2313 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2314 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2315 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002316
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002317- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2318 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2319 embedded in a lambda expression.
2320
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002321- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2322 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2323 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2324 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2325 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2326
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002327- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2328 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2329 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2330
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002331- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2332 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2333
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002334- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2335 It's writable again.
2336
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002337- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2338 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2339 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002340 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002341
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002342- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2343 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2344 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2345
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002346Extension modules
2347-----------------
2348
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002349- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2350 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2351
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002352- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2353 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2354 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2355 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2356
2357- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2358 collection.
2359
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002360- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2361 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2362 unique within a single program run.
2363
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002364- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2365 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2366
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002367- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2368 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2369
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002370- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2371 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002372
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002373- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2374
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002375- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2376 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2377
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002378- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2379 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2380 for many BSD-derived systems.
2381
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002382
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002383Library
2384-------
2385
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002386- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2387 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2388 primary ones:
2389
2390 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2391 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2392 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2393
2394 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2395 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2396 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2397 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2398 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2399 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2400
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002401- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2402 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2403 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2404 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2405 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2406 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2407 argument.
2408
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002409- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2410 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2411 in the archive.
2412
2413- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2414 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2415
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002416- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2417 569574).
2418
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002419- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2420 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2421 no more.
2422
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002423- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2424 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2425 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2426 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2427 code coverage.
2428
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002429- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2430 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2431 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002432 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2433 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002434
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002435- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2436 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2437 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002438 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002439
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002440- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2441
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002442- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2443 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2444 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2445 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2446
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002447- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2448 handling.
2449
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002450- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2451 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2452
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002453- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2454 in socket.py.
2455
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002456- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2457
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002458- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2459 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2460 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2461 opener with proxy support.
2462
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002463- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2464
2465- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2466
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002467Tools/Demos
2468-----------
2469
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002470- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2471
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002472- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2473
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002474- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2475 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002476
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002477- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2478 files.
2479
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002480Build
2481-----
2482
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002483- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002484 different root directory.
2485
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002486C API
2487-----
2488
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002489- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2490 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2491 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2492 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2493 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2494 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2495 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2496 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2497 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2498 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2499
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002500- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2501 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2502 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2503 from Python.
2504
2505
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002506New platforms
2507-------------
2508
2509None this time.
2510
2511Tests
2512-----
2513
2514- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2515 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2516
2517Windows
2518-------
2519
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002520- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2521
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002522- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2523 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2524 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2525 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2526 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2527 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2528 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2529 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2530 that's what it's for.
2531
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002532Mac
2533---
2534
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002535- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2536 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2537 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2538 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002539- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2540 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2541- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002542
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002543SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2544------------------------------------
2545
2546430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2547598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2548622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2549661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2550683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2551697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2552713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2553724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2554727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2555729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2556730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2557731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2558732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2559733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2560735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2561740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2562744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2563745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2564747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2565749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2566751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2567753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2568755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2569757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2570760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2571
2572
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002573What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2574================================
2575
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002576*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002577
2578Core and builtins
2579-----------------
2580
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002581- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2582 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2583
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002584- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2585 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2586 and cannot be strings).
2587
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002588- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2589 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2590 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2591 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2592
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002593- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2594 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2595 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2596 Python itself.
2597
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002598- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2599 the referenced object, if it has one.
2600
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002601- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2602 the thread started at
2603 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2604
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002605- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2606 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2607 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2608 placed on a list index.
2609
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002610- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2611 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2612 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2613 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2614
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002615- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2616 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2617 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2618 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2619 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2620 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2621 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2622
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002623- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2624 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2625 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2626 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2627 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2628
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002629- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2630 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002631
2632- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2633 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2634 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2635 #693195.)
2636
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002637- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2638 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002639
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002640- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002641 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002642 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2643 interpreter executions, would fail.
2644
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002645- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002646 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002647 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002648
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002649Extension modules
2650-----------------
2651
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002652- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2653 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2654 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2655 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2656
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002657- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2658 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2659
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002660- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2661 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2662 and Greg Chapman.)
2663
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002664- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2665 recursively.
2666
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002667- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002668 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2669 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2670 leaks.
2671
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002672- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2673
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002674- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2675 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2676 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2677 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2678 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2679 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2680 #705836.
2681
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002682- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002683 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2684
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002685- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2686 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2687 See SF bug #692416.
2688
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002689- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2690 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2691
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002692- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2693 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2694 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002695
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002696- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002697 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2698 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2699
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002700- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2701 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2702 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2703 timeouts to work properly.
2704
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002705Library
2706-------
2707
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002708- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2709 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2710 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2711 future release.
2712
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002713- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2714 for querying platform dependent features.
2715
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002716- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002717
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002718- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2719 pickle protocol versions.
2720
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002721- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2722 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2723 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2724
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002725- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2726
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002727- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2728 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2729 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2730 modules.
2731
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002732- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2733 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2734 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2735
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002736- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2737 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2738
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002739- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2740 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2741 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2742
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002743- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002744 MS Office extensions.
2745
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002746- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2747 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2748
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002749- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2750 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2751
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002752- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2753 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2754 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2755 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2756 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2757 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2758
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002759- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2760 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2761 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002762
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002763- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2764 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2765 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2766
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002767- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2768
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002769- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2770 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2771 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2772
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002773Tools/Demos
2774-----------
2775
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002776- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2777 See the module docstring for details.
2778
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002779Build
2780-----
2781
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002782- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2783 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002784
2785C API
2786-----
2787
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002788- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2789
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002790- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2791 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2792 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2793
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002794- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2795 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002796
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002797 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2798 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2799 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002800
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002801- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002802 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2803
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002804- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2805 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2806 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002807
2808New platforms
2809-------------
2810
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002811None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002812
2813Tests
2814-----
2815
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002816- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2817 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002818
2819Windows
2820-------
2821
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002822- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2823 function.
2824
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002825- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2826 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002827
2828Mac
2829---
2830
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002831- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2832 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002833
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002834- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2835 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002836
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002837- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2838 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2839 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002840
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002841- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002842 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2843 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002844
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002845- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2846 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002847
2848
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002849What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2850=================================
2851
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002852*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002853
2854Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002855-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002856
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002857- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2858 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2859 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2860
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002861- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2862 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2863 (SF patch #664376.)
2864
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002865- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2866 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2867 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2868 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2869 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2870 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002871 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002872
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002873- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2874 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2875 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2876 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002877 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002878
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002879- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2880 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2881 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2882 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2883 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2884 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2885 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2886 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2887 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2888 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2889 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2890
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002891- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2892 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2893 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2894 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2895 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2896 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2897
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002898- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2899 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2900
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002901- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2902 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2903 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2904 case.)
2905
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002906- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2907 passed as unicode strings.
2908
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002909- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2910 See SF bug #683467.
2911
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002912- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2913 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2914
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002915- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2916
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002917- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2918
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002919- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2920 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2921 arguments.
2922
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002923- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2924 See SF bug #667147.
2925
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002926- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002927 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002928 See SF bug #676155.
2929
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002930- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002931 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002932 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2933 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2934 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2935 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2936 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2937 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002938
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002939Extension modules
2940-----------------
2941
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002942- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2943 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2944 tp_as_number pointer.
2945
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002946- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2947 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2948 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2949 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2950 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2951
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002952- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2953
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002954- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2955
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002956- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002957 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002958 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2959 patch #678531.)
2960
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002961- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2962 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2963
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002964- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2965 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2966
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002967- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2968
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002969- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2970 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2971 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2972
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002973- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2974
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002975- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2976 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2977
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002978- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002979
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002980- datetime changes:
2981
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002982 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2983
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002984 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2985 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2986 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2987 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2988 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2989 now.
2990
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002991 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002992 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2993 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002994
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002995 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002996 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002997 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2998 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2999 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3000 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003001
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003002 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3003 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3004 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003005 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3006
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003007 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3008 by a later example coded by Guido.
3009
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003010 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003011 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3012 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3013 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003014 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3015 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3016
3017 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3018 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3019 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3020 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3021 tzinfo subclass instance.
3022
3023 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3024 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3025 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3026 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3027 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3028 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3029 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3030 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003031
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003032 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3033 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3034 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3035 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3036 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003037 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3038
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003039 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003040
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003041 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3042 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3043 as a naive datetime object.
3044
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003045 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3046 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3047 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3048
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003049 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3050 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3051 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3052 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3053 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3054 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3055 comparison.
3056
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003057 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3058 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3059 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3060 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003061 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003062
3063 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003064
3065 and ::
3066
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003067 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3068
3069 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3070 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3071 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3072 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3073
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003074 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3075 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3076 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3077 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3078 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3079
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003080 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3081 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003082 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3083 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003084
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003085Library
3086-------
3087
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003088- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3089 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3090
3091- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3092 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3093 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3094 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3095 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3096 See PEP 307 for details.
3097
3098- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3099 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3100
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003101- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3102 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003103 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003104 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3105 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003106 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003107
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003108- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3109 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3110
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003111- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3112 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3113 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3114
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003115- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3116
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003117- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3118 exception.
3119
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003120- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3121 class.
3122
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003123- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3124 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3125 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3126
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003127- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3128 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3129
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003130- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003131 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3132 See SF bug #659228.
3133
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003134- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3135 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3136 See SF patch #651082.
3137
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003138- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003139
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003140- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3141 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3142
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003143- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003144 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003145
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003146- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3147 DOS paths from other platforms.
3148
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003149Tools/Demos
3150-----------
3151
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003152- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3153 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3154 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3155 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3156 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3157 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3158 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3159 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3160 example:
3161
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003162 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3163 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003164
3165 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3166
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003167
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003168Build
3169-----
3170
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003171- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3172 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3173 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003174 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3175
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003176 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3177
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003178- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3179 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3180 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3181 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3182 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3183 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3184 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3185 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3186 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3187
3188- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3189 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3190 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3191 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3192
3193- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3194 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3195
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003196C API
3197-----
3198
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003199- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3200 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003201
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003202- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3203 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3204 tp_as_number pointer.
3205
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003206- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3207 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3208 (SF #681367)
3209
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003210- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3211 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3212 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3213 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003214
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003215Tests
3216-----
3217
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003218- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003219 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3220 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3221 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3222 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3223 pydoc.)
3224
3225- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3226
3227- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003228
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003229Windows
3230-------
3231
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003232- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3233 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3234 time).
3235
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003236- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3237 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3238
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003239- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3240 release without strong cryptography.
3241
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003242- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003243 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003244
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003245- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3246 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3247
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003248Mac
3249---
3250
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003251- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3252 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003253
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003254- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3255 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3256 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003257
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003258- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3259 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003260
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003261- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3262 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3263 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3264 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003265
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003266- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003267 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3268 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3269 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003270
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003271
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003272What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003273=================================
3274
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003275*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003276
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003277Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003278--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003279
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003280- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3281
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003282- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3283 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003284 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003285 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003286 a different meaning than before.
3287
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003288- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003289 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003290 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003291
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003292- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003293 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003294 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003295
3296- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3297 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3298 and deallocation.
3299
3300- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3301 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3302
3303- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3304 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3305 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3306 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3307 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3308
3309- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3310 now detected by the garbage collector.
3311
3312- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3313 [SF bug 519621]
3314
3315- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3316 identifier.
3317
3318- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3319 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3320 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3321 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3322 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3323 [SF bug 563060]
3324
3325- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3326 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3327 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3328 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3329 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3330
3331- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3332 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3333 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3334
3335- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3336
3337- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3338 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3339 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3340 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3341 state of the slots would be lost.)
3342
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003343Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003344-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003345
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003346- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003347 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3348 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3349 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3350 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003351 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3352 Jython 2.1.
3353
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003354- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003355 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003356 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3357 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3358 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3359 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3360 these, see PEP 302.
3361
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003362- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3363 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3364 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3365
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003366- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3367 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3368 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3369
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003370- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3371 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3372 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3373
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003374- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3375 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3376 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3377 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3378 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3379 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3380 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3381 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3382 releases or implementations.
3383
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003384- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003385 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3386 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003387
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003388- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3389 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3390
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003391- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3392 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3393 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3394
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003395- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3396 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3397
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003398- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3399 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003400 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3401 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003402
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003403- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3404 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3405 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3406 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3407 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3408
3409 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3410 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3411 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3412 pattern.
3413
3414 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3415 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3416 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3417 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3418
3419 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3420 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3421 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3422 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3423 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3424 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3425
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003426- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3427 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3428 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3429 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3430 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3431 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3432 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3433 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003434
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003435- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3436 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3437 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3438 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3439 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003440 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3441 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3442 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3443 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3444 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3445 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3446 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003447
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003448- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3449 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3450
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003451- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3452 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3453 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3454 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3455 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3456 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3457 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3458 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3459 to Zack Weinberg!
3460
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003461- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3462 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3463 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3464 type. This has been fixed now.
3465
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003466- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3467 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3468 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3469
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003470- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3471 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3472 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3473 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3474 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3475 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3476 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3477 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003478 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003479
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003480- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3481 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3482 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003483
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003484- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3485 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3486 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3487 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3488 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3489 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3490 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3491 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003492 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003493 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3494 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3495
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003496- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3497 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3498 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3499 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3500 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3501 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3502 this.)
3503
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003504- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3505 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003506 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003507 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003508 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3509 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003510 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3511 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003512
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003513- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3514 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3515 currently running.
3516
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003517- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3518 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3519 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3520 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3521
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003522- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3523 as directory names.
3524
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003525- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3526 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3527
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003528- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3529 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3530
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003531- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003532 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3533 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003534
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003535- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3536 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3537 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3538 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3539 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3540
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003541- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3542 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3543 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3544 removed.
3545
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003546- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3547 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3548 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3549
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003550- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3551 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3552 to __debug__.
3553
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003554- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3555 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3556 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3557
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003558- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3559 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3560 deprecated now.
3561
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003562- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3563 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3564 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003565
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003566- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3567 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3568 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3569 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3570 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003571
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003572- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3573 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3574
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003575- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3576 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3577 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003578 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003579 is backward compatible.
3580
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003581- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3582 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3583 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3584 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3585 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3586
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003587- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3588 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3589 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3590 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3591 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3592 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003593
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003594- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3595 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3596
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003597- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3598 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3599
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003600- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3601 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3602 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3603 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3604 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3605
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003606- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3607 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3608 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3609
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003610- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003611 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3612
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003613- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3614 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3615 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003616
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003617- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3618 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3619
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003620- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3621 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3622 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3623
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003624- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3625
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003626Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003627-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003628
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003629- Added three operators to the operator module:
3630 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3631 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3632 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3633
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003634- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3635
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003636- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3637 archives.
3638
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003639- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3640 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3641 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3642
3643 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3644
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003645- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3646 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3647 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003648 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003649
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003650- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3651 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3652 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3653 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003654 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3655 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3656 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3657 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003658
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003659- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3660 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003661
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003662- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3663
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003664- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3665 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3666
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003667- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3668 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3669 supported.
3670
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003671- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3672
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003673- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3674 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003675
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003676- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3677 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3678
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003679- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3680
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003681- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3682 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3683
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003684- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3685 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3686 functions but callable type objects.
3687
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003688- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003689 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003690 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003691
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003692- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3693 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003694
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003695- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3696 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003697
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003698- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3699 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3700 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3701 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3702
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003703- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3704 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003705
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003706- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3707 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3708 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3709 and __imul__.
3710
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003711- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003712 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3713 is called.
3714
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003715- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3716 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3717 interpreter was compiled.
3718
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003719- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3720 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3721 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003722 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003723 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3724 1, not 2.
3725
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003726- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3727 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3728 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3729 limit.
3730
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003731- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3732 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3733 bug #623464.
3734
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003735- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3736 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3737 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3738 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3739
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003740Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003741-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003742
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003743- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3744
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003745- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3746 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3747 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3748 with Python 2.3a2.
3749
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003750- os.path exposes getctime.
3751
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003752- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003753 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003754 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003755 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003756 unit tests of floating point results.
3757
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003758- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3759 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3760 has been increased.
3761
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003762- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3763 executed.
3764
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003765- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3766 postinstallation script.
3767
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003768- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3769 test the current module.
3770
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003771- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003772 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3773 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3774 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3775 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3776
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003777- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003778 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003779 Ward's Optik package.
3780
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003781- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3782 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3783 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3784 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3785
3786- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3787 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003788 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003789
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003790- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3791 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3792 shelf are binary pickles.
3793
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003794- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3795 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3796
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003797- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3798 modules are iterators now.
3799
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003800- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3801 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3802 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3803 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3804 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3805 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003806
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003807- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3808 with their entity value.
3809
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003810- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3811
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003812- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3813 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003814
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003815- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3816 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003817 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003818
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003819- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3820 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3821 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3822 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3823 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3824 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3825 main():
3826
3827 import locale
3828 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3829
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003830- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3831 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3832
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003833- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3834 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3835 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3836 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3837 to the new standard.
3838
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003839- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3840 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3841 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3842 an extension to the database.
3843
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003844- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3845 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3846 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3847 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003848 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003849
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003850- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003851 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003852
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003853- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3854 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3855 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3856 bounded integers.
3857
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003858- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3859 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3860 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3861 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3862 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3863 in existence.
3864
3865 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3866 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3867 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3868 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3869 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3870 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3871
3872 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3873 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3874 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3875 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3876
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003877- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3878 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3879 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3880
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003881- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3882
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003883- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3884 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3885 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3886 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3887
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003888- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3889 argument.
3890
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003891- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3892 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3893 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3894 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3895 [SF patch 560794].
3896
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003897- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3898 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3899 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003900 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3901 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3902 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003903
3904- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3905 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003906
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003907- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3908 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3909 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3910 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003911
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003912- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3913 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3914 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3915 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3916 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3917
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003918- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003919
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003920- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3921
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003922- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3923 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3924 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3925 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3926 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3927 identical to None.
3928
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003929- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3930 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3931 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3932 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3933 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3934 results now.
3935
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003936- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3937 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3938
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003939- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3940 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3941 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3942 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3943 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3944 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3945 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3946 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3947
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003948- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3949
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003950- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3951 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3952
3953- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3954 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3955 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3956 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3957 and other systems.
3958
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003959- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3960 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3961 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3962 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 +00003963 work well with these.
3964
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003965- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3966
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003967- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003968 connections.
3969
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003970- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3971 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3972 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3973
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003974- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3975 sets
3976
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003977- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3978 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3979 name.
3980
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003981- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3982 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3983 passed in.
3984
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003985- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003986 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003987 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3988 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003989
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003990- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3991
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003992- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3993
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003994- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3995 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3996 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3997
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003998- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3999 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4000 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4001 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004002 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004003
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004004- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004005 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004006 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004007
4008- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4009 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4010 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4011
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004012- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004013 the value of its expression argument.
4014
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004015- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4016 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4017 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4018
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004019- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4020 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4021 skipstone browser was included.
4022
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004023- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4024 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4025
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004026Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004027-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004028
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004029- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4030 names in addition to accepting file names.
4031
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004032- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4033 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4034 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4035 still used and useful.)
4036
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004037- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4038 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4039 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4040 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004041
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004042- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4043 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4044 the generated binary.
4045
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004046Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004047-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004048
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004049- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4050
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004051- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4052 except in the hands of experts.
4053
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004054- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004055 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4056 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4057 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004058
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004059- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4060 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4061 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4062 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4063 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4064 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4065 builds.
4066
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004067- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4068 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4069 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4070 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4071 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4072 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4073 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4074 new type.
4075
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004076- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004077
4078 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4079 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4080 positive infinities.
4081
4082 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4083 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4084 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4085 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4086 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4087 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4088 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4089
4090 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4091
4092 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4093
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004094- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4095 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4096 size of the executable.
4097
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004098- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4099 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4100 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4101 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004102
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004103- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4104
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004105- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4106 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4107 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004108
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004109- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4110 well as Unix.
4111
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004112- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4113 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4114 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4115 modules in the README file for details.
4116
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004117C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004118-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004119
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004120- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4121 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004122 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004123 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004124 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004125
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004126- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4127 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4128 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4129 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4130 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4131 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004132 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004133 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4134 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4135 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4136 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4137 aligned.)
4138
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004139- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4140 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4141 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4142
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004143- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4144 level.
4145
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004146- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4147 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4148 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4149 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4150 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4151
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004152- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4153 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4154 code.
4155
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004156- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4157 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4158 adjusting for negative indices.
4159
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004160- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4161 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4162 object.
4163
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004164- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4165 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4166 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4167
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004168- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4169 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004170
4171- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4172
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004173- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4174 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4175 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4176 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4177
4178- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4179
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004180- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004181
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004182- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004183 without going through the buffer API.
4184
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004185- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004186
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004187- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4188 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4189 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4190 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4191
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004192- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4193 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4194
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004195- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004196 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4197
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004198New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004199-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004200
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004201- OpenVMS is now supported.
4202
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004203- AtheOS is now supported.
4204
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004205- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4206
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004207- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4208
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004209Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004210-----
4211
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004212- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4213 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4214 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004215
4216Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004217-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004218
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004219- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4220 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4221 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4222 bugs.
4223 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004224 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004225 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4226 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004227 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004228
4229- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004230 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004231
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004232- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4233 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4234
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004235- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4236 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004237 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004238 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4239
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004240- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4241 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4242 use files" uninstall option).
4243
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004244- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4245
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004246- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4247 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4248
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004249- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4250 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4251 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4252
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004253- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4254 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4255 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4256 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4257 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004258 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4259 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4260 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004261
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004262- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004263 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004264 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4265 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4266 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4267 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4268 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4269 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4270 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4271 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4272 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4273 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4274 work around.
4275
4276- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4277 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4278 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4279 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4280 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4281 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4282 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4283 specified with O_CREAT too).
4284
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004285Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004286----
4287
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004288- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004289
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004290- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4291 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4292 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4293
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004294- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4295 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4296 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4297
4298- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4299 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4300 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4301 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4302 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4303 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4304 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4305 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004306
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004307- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4308 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4309 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004310
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004311- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4312 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4313 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4314 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4315 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004316
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004317- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4318 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4319 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004320
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004321- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4322 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004323
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004324- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4325 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4326 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4327 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4328 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004329
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004330- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4331 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4332 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4333
4334- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4335 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4336 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004337
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004338- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4339 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4340 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4341 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004342 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004343
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004344- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4345 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004346
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004347- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4348 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004349
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004350- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004351 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004352 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4353 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004354
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004355
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004356What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004357===============================
4358
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004359*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4360
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004361Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004362--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004363
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004364- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4365 with a custom metaclass.
4366
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004367Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004368-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004369
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004370- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4371 are proxies.
4372
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004373Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004374-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004375
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004376- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4377 very short strings.
4378
4379- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4380 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4381 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4382 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4383 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4384
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004385Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004386-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004387
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004388- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4389 close or delete time).
4390
4391- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4392 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4393
4394- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4395
4396- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004397 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004398
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004399Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004400-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004401
4402Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004403-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004404
4405C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004406-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004407
4408New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004409-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004410
4411Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004412-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004413
4414Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004415-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004416
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004417- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4418
4419- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4420 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4421
4422- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4423 deleted at process exit time.
4424
4425- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4426 in backslash.
4427
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004428Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004429----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004430
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004431- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4432 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4433 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4434
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004435
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004436What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004437===========================
4438
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004439*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4440
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004441Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004442--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004443
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004444- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4445 been extensively updated. See
4446
4447 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4448
4449 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4450
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004451- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4452 deleted!
4453
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004454- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4455 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4456 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4457 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4458 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4459
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004460- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4461
4462 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4463 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4464
4465 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4466 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4467 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4468 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4469 supported anyway.
4470
4471 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4472 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4473
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004474- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4475 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4476 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4477 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4478 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004479
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004480- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4481 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4482 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4483
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004484Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004485-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004486
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004487- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4488 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4489 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4490 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4491 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4492 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004493 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4494 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4495 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4496 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004497
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004498- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4499 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4500 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4501
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004502Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004503-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004504
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004505- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4506
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004507Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004508-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004509
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004510- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4511 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4512 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4513 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4514 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4515 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4516
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004517- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4518
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004519- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4520
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004521- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4522
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004523- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4524 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4525 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4526
4527- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4528
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004529Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004530-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004531
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004532- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4533 off a search on Google.
4534
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004535Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004536-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004537
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004538- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4539 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4540 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4541 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4542 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4543 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4544 other platforms should do likewise.
4545
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004546- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4547 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4548 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4549
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004550C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004551-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004552
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004553- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4554 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4555 producing key-value pairs.
4556
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004557- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004558 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004559 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4560 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4561 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4562 previously went unchallenged.
4563
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004564New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004565-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004566
4567Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004568-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004569
4570Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004571-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004572
4573Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004574----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004575
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004576- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4577 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004578
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004579- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4580 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4581 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4582 home.
4583
4584
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004585What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004586===========================
4587
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004588*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4589
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004590Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004591--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004592
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004593- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4594 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004595
4596 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004597 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004598
4599 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4600 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004601 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004602 This needs to be documented.
4603
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004604- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4605 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4606
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004607- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4608 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4609 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4610
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004611- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4612 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4613
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004614- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4615 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4616 class forbids it).
4617
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004618- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4619 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4620 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4621
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004622- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4623
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004624Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004625-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004626
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004627- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4628 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004629 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004630
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004631- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4632 (like 1 + '').
4633
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004634Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004635-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004636
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004637- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4638 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4639 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4640 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004641 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004642 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4643
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004644- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4645 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4646 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4647 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4648
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004649- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4650 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004651 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4652 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4653 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004654
4655- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4656 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004657
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004658- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4659 bytes on its input.
4660
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004661Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004662-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004663
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004664- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004665 convenience function.
4666
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004667- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4668 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4669 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004670 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4671 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4672 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4673 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4674 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4675 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004676
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004677- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4678 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4679 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4680 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4681
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004682- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4683 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4684 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4685
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004686- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4687 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4688 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4689 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4690
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004691- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4692 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004693 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004694 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4695 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4696 new -l and -e options.
4697
4698- statcache is now deprecated.
4699
4700- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4701 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004702 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004703 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4704 time properly taken into account.
4705
4706- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4707 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4708 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4709 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4710
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004711Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004712-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004713
4714Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004715-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004716
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004717- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4718 is built with libdb3 if available.
4719
4720- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4721
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004722C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004723-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004724
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004725- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4726 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4727 PySequence_Size().
4728
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004729- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4730
4731- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4732 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4733 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4734
4735- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4736 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4737
4738- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4739 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4740
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004741New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004742-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004743
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004744- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4745 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4746
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004747- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4748 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4749
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004750- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4751
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004752Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004753-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004754
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004755- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4756 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4757
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004758Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004759-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004760
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004761Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004762----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004763
4764- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4765 removed completely in the next release.
4766
4767- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4768 OSX.
4769
4770- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4771 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4772
4773- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4774
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004775
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004776What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004777===========================
4778
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004779*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4780
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004781Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004782--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004783
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004784- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004785 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004786 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004787 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4788 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004789 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4790 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004791 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4792 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004793
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004794- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4795 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4796
4797- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4798 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4799
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004800Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004801-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004802
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004803- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4804 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4805 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4806 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4807 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4808 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4809 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4810 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4811
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004812- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4813 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4814 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4815 example).
4816
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004817- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004818 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004819 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004820 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004821
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004822- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4823 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4824 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004825 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004826
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004827- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4828 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4829 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4830 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4831 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4832 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4833
4834 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4835
4836 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4837
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004838Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004839-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004840
4841- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4842
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004843- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4844
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004845- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4846 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004847
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004848- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4849 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4850 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4851 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4852 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4853 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004854 attributes.
4855
4856- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4857 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4858 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004859
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004860- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4861 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4862 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004863
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004864- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4865 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4866 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004867 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4868 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4869
4870- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4871 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004872
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004873Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004874-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004875
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004876- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4877 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4878
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004879- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4880 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4881 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4882 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4883
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004884- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4885 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4886 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4887 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4888
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004889 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4890 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4891 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4892 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4893 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4894 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4895 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4896 without losing information).
4897
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004898- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004899 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4900 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4901 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4902 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4903 module).
4904
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004905 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004906 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4907 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4908 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4909 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004910
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004911- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004912 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4913 encoding.
4914
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004915- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4916 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4917
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004918- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004919 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4920
4921- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4922 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4923 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4924 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4925
4926- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4927
4928- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4929 ON, and OFF.
4930
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004931- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4932 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4933
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004934Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004935-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004936
4937- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4938 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4939 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004940
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004941- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4942 been added: -X and -E.
4943
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004944Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004945-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004946
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004947- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4948 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4949
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004950C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004951-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004952
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004953- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4954 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4955 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4956 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4957 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4958
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004959- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4960 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4961 as long) arguments.
4962
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004963- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4964 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4965 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4966 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4967 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4968 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4969
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004970- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4971 input.
4972
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004973New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004974-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004975
4976Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004977-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004978
4979Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004980-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004981
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004982- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4983 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4984 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4985
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004986- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4987 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4988 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004989 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004990
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004991 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4992 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4993 import signal
4994 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004995
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004996 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004997 while 1:
4998 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004999 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005000 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5001 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5002 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5003 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005004
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005005
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005006What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5007===========================
5008
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005009*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5010
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005011Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005012--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005013
5014- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5015 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5016 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5017
5018- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5019 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5020 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5021 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5022 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5023 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5024 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005025
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005026- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005027 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005028 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5029 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5030 associate a docstring with a property.
5031
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005032- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5033 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5034 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5035 other built-in object types.
5036
5037- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5038 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5039 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5040 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5041 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5042
5043- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5044 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5045
5046- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5047 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005048 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005049 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5050 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5051 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5052 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5053 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5054
5055- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5056 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5057 class.
5058
5059- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5060 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5061 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5062 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5063
5064- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5065 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5066 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5067 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5068
5069- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5070 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5071
5072- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5073 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5074 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5075 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5076 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005077 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005078 with the same value as s.
5079
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005080- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5081
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005082Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005083----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005084
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005085- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5086
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005087- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5088 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5089 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5090 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5091 objects.
5092
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005093- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5094 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005095 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5096 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5097
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005098- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5099 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5100 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5101
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005102Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005103-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005104
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005105- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5106 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5107 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5108 by the instances.
5109
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005110- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5111 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5112 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5113
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005114- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5115 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5116 before the entire comparison is complete.
5117
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005118- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5119 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5120 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5121
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005122- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5123 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5124 getwriter().
5125
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005126- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5127 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5128
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005129- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005130 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5131 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5132
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005133- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5134 iterable object.
5135
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005136- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5137 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005138
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005139- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5140 authentication.
5141
5142- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5143 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005144
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005145- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005146 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5147 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5148 a sample driver.)
5149
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005150Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005151-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005152
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005153- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5154 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5155 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5156 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5157 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5158 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5159 kernel has large file support.
5160
5161- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5162 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5163 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5164 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5165 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5166
5167- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5168 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5169 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5170
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005171C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005172-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005173
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005174- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5175 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5176
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005177New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005178-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005179
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005180- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5181 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5182
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005183Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005184-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005185
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005186- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5187 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5188 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5189 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5190 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5191
5192- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5193 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5194 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5195 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5196
5197- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5198 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5199
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005200Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005201-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005202
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005203- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005204 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5205 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005206
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005207
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005208What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5209===========================
5210
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005211*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5212
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005213Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005214----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005215
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005216- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5217 big to represent as a C double.
5218
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005219- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5220 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5221 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5222 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5223 restriction).
5224
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005225- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5226 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5227 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5228 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5229 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5230
5231 >>> dir([])
5232 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5233 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5234 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5235 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5236 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5237 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5238 'reverse', 'sort']
5239
5240 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5241
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005242- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005243 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5244 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5245 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5246 OverflowError exception.
5247
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005248- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005249 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005250 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5251 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5252 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5253 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5254 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005255 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005256 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5257 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5258
5259 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5260 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5261 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5262 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005263
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005264- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005265 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5266 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5267 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5268 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5269 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5270 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5271 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5272 once it is created.
5273
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005274- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5275 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5276 (key, value) pairs.
5277
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005278- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005279 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5280 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5281
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005282- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5283 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5284 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5285 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5286 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005287
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005288- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005289 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5290 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5291
5292 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5293
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005294- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005295 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5296
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005297Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005298-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005299
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005300- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005301 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5302 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005303
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005304- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5305 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5306 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5307 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5308 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5309 in this area anymore).
5310
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005311- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5312 threading.Timer.
5313
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005314- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5315 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5316
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005317- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005318 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5319
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005320- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005321 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5322 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5323 converted to Python longs.
5324
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005325- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005326 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5327
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005328- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5329 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5330 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5331
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005332Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005333-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005334
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005335- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5336 division operators as per PEP 238.
5337
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005338Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005339-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005340
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005341- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5342 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5343 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5344 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5345
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005346C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005347-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005348
5349- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005350
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005351- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5352 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005353 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005354
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005355 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5356 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005357 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005358 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005359
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005360- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005361 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5362 module:
5363
5364 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005365
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005366 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5367 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005368
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005369 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5370 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005371
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005372 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5373
5374 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5375
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005376- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005377 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5378 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5379 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005380
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005381New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005382-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005383
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005384- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5385 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5386 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5387 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5388 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005389
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005390Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005391-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005392
5393Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005394-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005395
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005396- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5397 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5398 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5399 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005400 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5401 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5402 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5403 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5404 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005405
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005406- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005407 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5408
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005409
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005410What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5411===========================
5412
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005413*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5414
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005415Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005416-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005417
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005418- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5419 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5420
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005421- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5422 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5423 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005424
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005425- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5426 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5427 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5428 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005429
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005430- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5431
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005432- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005433
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005434Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005435-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005436
5437- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005438 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005439 the module docstring for details.
5440
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005441Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005442-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005443
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005444- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005445 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5446 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5447 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005448
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005449- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5450 Nick Mathewson.
5451
5452Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005453----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005454
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005455- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5456 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5457 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5458 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5459 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5460 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5461 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5462 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5463
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005464- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5465 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5466 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5467 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5468
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005469- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5470 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5471 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5472 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5473 come a long way).
5474
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005475- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5476 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5477 write filters for these warnings).
5478
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005479- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5480 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5481 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5482 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5483 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5484
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005485- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5486 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5487 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5488 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5489 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5490 older distribution.
5491
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005492Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005493-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005494
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005495- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5496 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005497 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005498
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005499- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5500 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5501 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5502
5503- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5504
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005505- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5506
5507- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5508
5509- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5510
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005511- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005512
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005513- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5514
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005515New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005516-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005517
5518C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005519-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005520
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005521- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5522 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5523 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5524 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5525 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5526 against buffer overruns.
5527
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005528- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005529 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5530 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005531 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5532 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5533 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5534
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005535- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5536 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5537 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5538 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5539 deprecated.
5540
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005541Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005542-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005543
5544- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5545 relevant is found.
5546
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005547
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005548What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005549===========================
5550
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005551*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5552
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005553Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005554----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005555
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005556- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5557 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5558 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5559 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5560 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5561 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5562 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5563 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005564 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005565 repaired.
5566
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005567- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005568 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005569 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5570 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5571 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5572 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5573 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5574 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5575 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5576 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5577
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005578- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5579 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5580 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5581 leading BMO character).
5582
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005583- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5584 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5585 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5586
5587 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5588 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5589 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005590
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005591 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5592 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5593 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5594 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5595 for various simple to use conversions.
5596
5597 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5598 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5599
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005600 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5601 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5602 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5603 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5604 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5605 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5606 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5607 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5608 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5609 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5610 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5611 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5612 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5613 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5614 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005615
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005616- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5617 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5618 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005619 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005620 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005621
5622 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005623 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5624 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5625 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5626 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5627 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005628 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5629 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005630
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005631 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5632 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5633 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005634 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005635
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005636- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5637 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5638 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5639 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5640 floating arithmetic,
5641
5642 x = 9007199254740992.0
5643 print long(x)
5644
5645 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5646 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5647 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5648 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5649 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5650 functions are of good quality).
5651
5652 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5653 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5654 algorithms to break.
5655
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005656- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5657 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5658 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5659 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5660 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5661 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5662 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5663 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5664 order.
5665
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005666- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5667 operation along the most common code paths.
5668
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005669- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5670 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5671
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005672- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5673 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5674 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5675 {}.update(UserDict())
5676
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005677- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5678 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5679 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5680 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5681 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5682 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5683 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5684 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5685
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005686- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005687 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005688
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005689 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005690 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5691 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005692 join() method of strings
5693 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005694 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5695 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005696 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005697 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005698
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005699- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5700 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5701
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005702- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5703 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5704
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005705- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5706 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5707 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5708 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5709
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005710- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5711 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005712 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005713 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5714 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005715
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005716- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5717
5718
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005719Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005720-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005721
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005722- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005723 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005724 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5725 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5726
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005727- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5728 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5729
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005730- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5731 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5732 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5733 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5734
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005735- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5736 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5737 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5738
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005739- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5740
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005741- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5742
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005743- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5744 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5745 that are still imported into string.py).
5746
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005747- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5748
5749- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5750 Now it does.
5751
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005752- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5753
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005754- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5755 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5756 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5757 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5758 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005759 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5760 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005761
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005762- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5763 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5764 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5765 'help(object)'.
5766
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005767Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005768-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005769
5770- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005771 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005772 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5773 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5774
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005775- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005776 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5777 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005778
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005779C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005780-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005781
5782- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5783 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005784
5785----
5786
5787**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**