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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
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 Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000459- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
460
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000461- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
462
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000463- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
464
465- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
466
467- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
468
469- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
470
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000471- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
472 Closes bug #1166582.
473
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000474- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
475 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
476 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
477
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000478Mac
479---
480
481
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000482New platforms
483-------------
484
485- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
486
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000487
488Tools/Demos
489-----------
490
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000491- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
492
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000493- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000494
495
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000496What's New in Python 2.4 final?
497===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000498
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000499*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000500
501Core and builtins
502-----------------
503
504- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
505 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
506 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
507
508
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000509What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
510==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000511
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000512*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000513
514Core and builtins
515-----------------
516
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000517- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
518 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
519 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
520
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000521
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000522Library
523-------
524
525- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
526 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
527 raised is re-raised.
528
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000529- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
530 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
531
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000532- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
533 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
534 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
535 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
536 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
537 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
538 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
539 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
540 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
541 by the slice are recomputed now.
542
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000543- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000544
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000545Build
546-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000547
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000548- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
549 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
550 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000551
552C API
553-----
554
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000555- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
556
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000557
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000558What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
559================================
560
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000561*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000562
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000563License
564-------
565
566The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
567is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
568changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
569Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
570intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
571durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
572the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
573License::
574
575 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
576
577says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
578to Python 2.1.1.
579
580The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
581License Version 2.
582
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000583Core and builtins
584-----------------
585
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000586- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
587 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
588 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
589 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
590 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
591 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
592 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
593 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
594 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
595 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
596
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000597- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000598
599Extension Modules
600-----------------
601
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000602- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
603 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
604 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
605 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000606
607Library
608-------
609
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000610- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
611 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
612 returned.
613
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000614- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
615
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000616- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
617 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
618
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000619- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
620
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000621- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
622 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000623
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000624- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
625
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000626- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
627
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000628- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000629 the source code is updated and reloaded.
630
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000631Build
632-----
633
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000634- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000635
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000636What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
637================================
638
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000639*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000640
641Core and builtins
642-----------------
643
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000644- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000645 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
646
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000647- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
648 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
649 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
650 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
651
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000652- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
653 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
654
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000655- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
656 constant.
657
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000658- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
659 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
660 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
661 large), and to anomalies such as
662 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
663 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
664 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
665 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000666
667Extension modules
668-----------------
669
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000670- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
671 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000672 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
673 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
674 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000675
676Library
677-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000678
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000679- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000680 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000681 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
682 --swig-cpp.
683
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000684- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
685 it is set.
686
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000687- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000688
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000689- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
690 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
691 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
692 Closes bug #1039270.
693
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000694- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000695
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000696 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000697 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
698 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
699 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
700 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
701 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
702 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
703 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
704 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
705 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
706 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
707 + Updates to documentation.
708
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000709- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
710 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
711 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
712 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
713
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000714- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000715
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000716- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
717 applications should use the getmember function.
718
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000719- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
720
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000721- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
722 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
723 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
724 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
725 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
726 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
727 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
728 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
729 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
730
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000731- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
732 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000733 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000734
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000735- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
736 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
737 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
738 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
739 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
740 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
741 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
742 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000743
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000744- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
745 the new public features (of which there are many).
746
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000747- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000748 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
749 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
750 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
751 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000752 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000753
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000754- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
755
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000756- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
757 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
758 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
759 options.
760
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000761- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
762 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
763 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
764 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
765 conditions under which non-string values work.
766
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000767Build
768-----
769
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000770- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
771 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
772 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
773
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000774- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
775 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
776 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
777 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
778 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000779
780C API
781-----
782
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000783- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
784 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
785
786- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
787
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000788- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
789 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
790 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
791 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
792 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
793 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
794 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
795 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
796 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
797
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000798- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
799
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000800- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
801 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
802 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000803
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000804Tests
805-----
806
807- test__locale ported to unittest
808
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000809Mac
810---
811
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000812- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
813 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
814 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000815
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000816Tools/Demos
817-----------
818
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000819- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
820 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
821 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
822 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
823 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000824
825
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000826What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
827=================================
828
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000829*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000830
831Core and builtins
832-----------------
833
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000834- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000835 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
836
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000837- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
838 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
839 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
840 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
841 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
842 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
843 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
844 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000845 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
846 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
847 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
848 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
849 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000850
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000851- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
852 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
853 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
854 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
855 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
856
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000857- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
858
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000859- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
860 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
861
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000862- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
863 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
864 modified the list.
865
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000866- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
867 functions is now writable.
868
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000869- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
870 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
871 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
872 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
873
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000874- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
875 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
876 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
877 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
878 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000879
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000880- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
881 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
882
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000883Extension modules
884-----------------
885
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000886- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
887
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000888- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
889 data.
890
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000891- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
892 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
893 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
894 supposed to have been truncated away.
895
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000896- Added socket.socketpair().
897
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000898- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
899 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
900
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000901- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000902 versions of Python, have now been removed.
903
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000904Library
905-------
906
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000907- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000908 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000909
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000910- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
911 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
912
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000913- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
914 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
915
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000916- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
917
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000918- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
919 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000920
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000921- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
922 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
923
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000924- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
925
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000926- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
927
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000928- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
929
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000930- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
931 Percivall.
932
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000933- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
934 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
935
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000936- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
937 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
938 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000939 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000940
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000941- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
942 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
943 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
944 and exponent.
945
946- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
947
948- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +0000949 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000950 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
951
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000952- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
953 to the readline module.
954
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000955- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000956 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
957 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000958
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000959- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
960 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
961 contains symlinks.
962
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000963- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
964 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
965
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000966- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
967 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
968 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
969
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000970- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
971 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
972 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
973 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
974 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
975 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
976 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
977 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
978 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
979 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
980 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
981 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
982 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
983
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000984- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
985
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000986Tools/Demos
987-----------
988
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000989- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
990 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
991
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000992- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
993
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000994Build
995-----
996
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000997- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
998 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
999 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1000 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1001 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1002 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1003 plans to do so.
1004
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001005- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1006 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1007
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001008- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1009 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1010
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001011- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1012 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1013
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001014- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1015 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1016
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001017- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1018 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1019
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001020C API
1021-----
1022
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001023..
1024
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001025Documentation
1026-------------
1027
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001028- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1029 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1030
1031- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1032 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1033 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001034
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001035New platforms
1036-------------
1037
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001038- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1039
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001040Tests
1041-----
1042
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001043..
1044
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001045Windows
1046-------
1047
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001048- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1049 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1050 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1051 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1052 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1053 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1054 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1055 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1056 the problem.
1057
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001058Mac
1059---
1060
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001061..
1062
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001063
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001064What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1065=================================
1066
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001067*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001068
1069Core and builtins
1070-----------------
1071
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001072- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1073 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1074 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1075 sensitive code.
1076
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001077- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001078 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001079
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001080 @staticmethod
1081 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001082
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001083 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001084
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001085- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1086 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1087 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1088 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1089 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1090 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1091 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1092 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1093 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1094 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1095 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1096
1097 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1098 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1099 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1100 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1101 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1102 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1103 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1104
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001105- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1106 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1107
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001108- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001109 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001110
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001111- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001112 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001113 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1114
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001115- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001116 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1117 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1118
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001119- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1120 types that support garbage collection.
1121
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001122- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1123
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001124- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1125 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1126 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1127 Jython.
1128
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001129- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1130
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001131- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1132 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1133
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001134- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1135 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1136 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001137
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001138- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1139 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1140 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1141
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001142Extension modules
1143-----------------
1144
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001145- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1146
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001147Library
1148-------
1149
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001150- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1151 TIS-620
1152
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001153- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1154 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1155 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1156 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1157 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1158 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1159 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1160 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1161 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1162 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1163
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001164- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1165
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001166- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1167 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1168 same as when the argument is omitted).
1169 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1170
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001171- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1172
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001173- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1174 schemes are offered.
1175
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001176- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1177
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001178- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1179 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1180 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1181
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001182- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1183
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001184- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1185 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1186
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001187- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1188 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1189 when dummy_threading is being used.
1190
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001191- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1192 from a tarfile.
1193
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001194- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001195 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001196
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001197- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1198 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1199 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1200 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1201
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001202- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1203 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1204
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001205- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1206 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1207 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1208 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1209 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1210 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1211 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1212 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1213 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1214 by some other method in progress).
1215
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001216- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1217 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1218 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001219
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001220- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1221
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001222- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1223 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1224 AM Kuchling.
1225
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001226- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1227 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1228 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1229
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001230- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1231 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1232 instead of unsigned.
1233
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001234- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001235 no longer part of the public API.
1236
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001237- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1238 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1239 string methods of the same name).
1240
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001241- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001242 SF patch 945642.
1243
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001244- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1245
1246 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1247
1248 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1249 DocTestSuites.
1250
1251- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1252 that provide thread-local data.
1253
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001254- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1255 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1256
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001257- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1258
1259- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1260 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1261 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1262
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001263- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1264
1265 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1266 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1267 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001268
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001269 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1270 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1271 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1272 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1273
1274 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1275 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1276
1277 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1278 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1279 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1280 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1281
1282 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1283 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1284 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1285 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1286 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1287
1288 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1289 wrapping help output.
1290
1291 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1292 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1293 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001294
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001295C API
1296-----
1297
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001298- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1299 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1300 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1301 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1302 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1303 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1304 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1305 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1306 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1307 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1308 its visible semantics have not changed.
1309
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001310- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1311 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1312
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001313Documentation
1314-------------
1315
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001316- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001317
1318 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001319 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001320
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001321 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001322
1323 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1324
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001325- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001326
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001327Tests
1328-----
1329
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001330- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001331 platforms that use the Makefile.
1332
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001333- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1334 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1335 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1336
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001337
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001338What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1339=================================
1340
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001341*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001342
1343Core and builtins
1344-----------------
1345
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001346- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1347 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1348 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1349 objects now (one object instead of three).
1350
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001351- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1352 Windows DLLs.
1353
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001354- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1355 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001356
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001357- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1358 a new .pyc magic.
1359
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001360- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1361 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1362 be there.
1363
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001364- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1365 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1366 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1367
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001368- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1369 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1370 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1371
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001372- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1373
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001374- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1375 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1376 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001377
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001378- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1379 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1380
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001381- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1382
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001383- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001384 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001385
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001386- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1387
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001388- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1389
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001390- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1391 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1392
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001393- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1394 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1395 Fixes bug #858016 .
1396
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001397- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1398 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1399 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1400
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001401- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1402 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1403 improves their performance (about 35%).
1404
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001405- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1406 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1407 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1408
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001409- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1410 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1411 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1412 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1413
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001414- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1415 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001416 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001417 length is not known).
1418
1419- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1420 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001421 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1422 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001423 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1424
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001425- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1426 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1427
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001428- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1429 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1430 keyword arguments.
1431
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001432- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1433 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1434 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1435
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001436- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1437 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1438 cases.
1439
1440- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1441 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1442 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1443 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1444 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1445 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1446 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1447 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1448 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1449 a release build.
1450
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001451- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1452 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1453
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001454- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001455 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001456
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001457- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1458 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1459 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1460 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1461 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1462 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1463 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1464 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1465 destroyed.
1466
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001467- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1468 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1469 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1470 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1471 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1472 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1473 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1474 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1475
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001476- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1477 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1478 character other than a space.
1479
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001480- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1481 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1482 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1483 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1484 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1485 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1486 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1487 attributes with the same name.
1488
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001489- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1490 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1491 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1492 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1493 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1494 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1495 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1496 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1497 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1498 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1499 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1500 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1501 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1502 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001503
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001504- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1505 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1506 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1507 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1508 This has been repaired.
1509
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001510- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1511
1512- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1513
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001514- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1515 over a sequence.
1516
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001517- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001518 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001519
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001520- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1521
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001522- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1523 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1524 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1525 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1526 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1527 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1528 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1529 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1530
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001531- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1532 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1533 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1534
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001535- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1536 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1537 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1538 freelist.
1539
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001540- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1541 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1542
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001543- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1544 number.
1545
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001546- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1547 a TypeError exception.
1548
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001549- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1550 820195.
1551
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001552- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1553 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1554 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1555
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001556- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001557 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1558 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001559
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001560- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1561 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1562 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1563
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001564- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1565 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001566 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001567
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001568- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001569 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1570 the first call.
1571
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001572
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001573Extension modules
1574-----------------
1575
Georg Brandl33a5f2a2005-08-21 14:16:04 +00001576- Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines() for files containing one line without
1577 newlines.
1578
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001579- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1580 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1581
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001582- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1583 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1584 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1585 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1586 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1587 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1588 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001589
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001590- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1591
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001592- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1593
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001594- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1595 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1596
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001597- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1598 fewer false positives.
1599
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001600- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1601 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1602
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001603- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001604 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1605
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001606- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001607 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001608 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001609 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1610 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001611
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001612- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1613 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1614 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1615 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1616
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001617- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1618 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1619 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1620 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1621 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1622 #897625.
1623
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001624- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1625 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1626
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001627- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1628 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1629 and pops on either side of the deque.
1630
1631- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1632 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1633
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001634- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1635 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1636 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1637 other functions that expect a function argument.
1638
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001639- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1640
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001641- os.getsid was added.
1642
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001643- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1644 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1645 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1646
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001647- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1648
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001649- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1650
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001651- readline.clear_history was added.
1652
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001653- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1654
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001655- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1656
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001657- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1658
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001659- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1660
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001661- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1662
1663- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1664
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001665- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1666
1667- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1668
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001669- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1670 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1671 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1672
1673- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1674 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1675 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1676 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1677 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1678 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1679 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1680
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001681- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1682 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1683 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1684 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001685
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001686- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001687 iterators from a single iterable.
1688
1689- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1690 of raising a TypeError exception.
1691
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001692- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1693 as parameter.
1694
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001695Library
1696-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001697
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001698- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1699
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001700- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1701 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1702 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001703
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001704- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1705 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1706 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001707
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001708- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001709
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001710- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1711 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001712
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001713- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1714 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1715
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001716- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1717
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001718- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001719 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001720
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001721- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001722 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001723
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001724- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1725
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001726- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1727 on cygwin and mingw32.
1728
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001729- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1730
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001731- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1732 module.
1733
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001734- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1735 installation scheme for all platforms.
1736
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001737- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001738 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001739
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001740- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1741 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1742 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1743
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001744- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1745 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1746 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1747
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001748- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1749
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001750- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1751
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001752- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1753 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1754
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001755- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1756 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1757 type pattern with the same value exists.
1758
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001759- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1760 when run from the command prompt).
1761
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001762- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1763 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1764
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001765- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1766 default sort).
1767
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001768- Added global runctx function to profile module
1769
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001770- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1771
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001772- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1773
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001774- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1775
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001776- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001777 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1778 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1779 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1780 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1781 accordingly.
1782
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001783- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1784 decoding standards.
1785
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001786- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1787 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1788 called for all requests.
1789
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001790- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1791 they are passed to the compiler.
1792
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001793- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1794 indent, width and depth.
1795
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001796- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1797 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1798
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001799- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1800 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1801
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001802- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1803
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001804- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1805
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001806- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1807
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001808- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1809 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1810
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001811- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001812 for better performance.
1813
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001814- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001815
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001816- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1817 a string).
1818
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001819- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1820
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001821- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1822
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001823- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1824
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001825- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1826
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001827- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1828 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1829 list of fieldnames.
1830
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001831- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1832 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1833
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001834- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1835
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001836- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1837 empty lists.
1838
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001839- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1840 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1841 and shelves.
1842
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001843- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1844 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1845
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001846- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001847 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1848 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001849
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001850- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1851 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001852 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001853
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001854- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001855 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1856 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1857
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001858- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1859 and removed in Py2.4.
1860
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001861- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1862
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001863- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1864
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001865Tools/Demos
1866-----------
1867
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001868- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1869 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1870
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001871- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1872
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001873- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1874 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1875 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1876 destination in situations where both files are given.
1877
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001878- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1879 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1880 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1881 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1882
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001883- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1884
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001885- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1886 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1887 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1888 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1889 now.
1890
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001891- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1892 in effect
1893
1894- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1895 C-c C-h
1896
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001897- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1898 -d option was given.
1899
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001900Build
1901-----
1902
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001903- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1904 build under OS X.
1905
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001906- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1907 --enable-profiling.
1908
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001909- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1910 is configured --with-tsc.
1911
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001912- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1913 on AMD64.
1914
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001915- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1916 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1917
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001918- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1919 removed.
1920
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001921- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1922 supported (see PEP 11).
1923
1924- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1925
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001926- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1927
1928- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1929 (see PEP 11).
1930
1931- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1932 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1933
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001934C API
1935-----
1936
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001937- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1938 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1939 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1940
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001941- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1942 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1943 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1944 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1945
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001946- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1947 generator objects.
1948
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001949- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1950 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001951 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1952 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001953
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001954- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1955 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1956
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001957- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1958 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1959 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1960 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1961 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1962
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001963- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1964 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1965 about 10% faster.
1966
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001967- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1968 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1969
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001970- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1971 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1972 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1973 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1974
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001975Windows
1976-------
1977
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001978- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1979 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1980 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1981 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1982
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001983- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1984 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1985 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1986
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001987
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001988What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1989===============================
1990
1991*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1992
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001993IDLE
1994----
1995
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001996- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1997 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1998 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1999 context-menu actions.
2000
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002001- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2002 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2003 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2004 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2005 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2006 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2007 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2008 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2009 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2010
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002011
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002012What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2013=============================================
2014
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002015*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002016
2017Core and builtins
2018-----------------
2019
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002020- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002021 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002022 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2023
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002024Extension modules
2025-----------------
2026
2027- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2028 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2029 than once. This has been fixed.
2030
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002031- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2032 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2033 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2034 call.
2035
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002036- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2037
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002038Library
2039-------
2040
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002041- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2042 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2043
2044- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2045 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2046 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2047 restored.
2048
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002049IDLE
2050----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002051
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002052- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002053
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002054Build
2055-----
2056
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002057- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2058 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2059
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002060C API
2061-----
2062
2063Windows
2064-------
2065
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002066- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2067 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2068
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002069- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2070
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002071Mac
2072---
2073
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002074- Various fixes to pimp.
2075
2076- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2077
2078- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2079 more problems than it solves.
2080
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002081
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002082What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2083=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002084
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002085*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2086
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002087Core and builtins
2088-----------------
2089
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002090- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2091 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2092
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002093- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2094 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002095 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002096
2097- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2098 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2099 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002100 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002101
2102- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2103 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002104
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002105- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2106 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2107 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2108
2109- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002110 770247.
2111
2112- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002113
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002114Extension modules
2115-----------------
2116
2117- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2118 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2119
2120- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2121
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002122- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2123
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002124- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2125 contained within the _strptime module.
2126
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002127- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2128 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2129
2130- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002131 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2132
2133- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2134 the find_class attribute, if present.
2135
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002136- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002137
2138 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2139 (SF bug 763298).
2140
2141 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002142 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2143 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2144 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002145
2146 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2147
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002148Library
2149-------
2150
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002151- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2152
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002153- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2154 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2155 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2156 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2157 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2158 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2159 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2160 or Tester().
2161
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002162- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2163 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2164 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2165 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2166 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2167 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2168 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2169 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2170 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002171
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002172 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002173
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002174- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2175 weren't before was an oversight.
2176
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002177- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2178 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2179
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002180- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2181 when there are no lines.
2182
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002183- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2184 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2185
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002186- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2187 to child processes.
2188
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002189- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2190
2191- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2192
2193- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2194 xmlrpclib.
2195
2196- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2197 responses.
2198
2199- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2200 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2201
2202- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2203 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2204 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2205
2206- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2207 used as patterns.
2208
2209- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2210 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2211 than Tk 8.3.
2212
2213- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2214
2215- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002216
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002217Tools/Demos
2218-----------
2219
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002220- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2221
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002222- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2223
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002224- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002225
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002226Build
2227-----
2228
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002229- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2230
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002231- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2232
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002233- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2234 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002235
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002236- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2237 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2238 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002239
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002240C API
2241-----
2242
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002243- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2244 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2245
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002246Windows
2247-------
2248
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002249- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2250 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2251 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2252 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2253 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2254 Python exception ::
2255
2256 thread.error: can't start new thread
2257
2258 is raised now.
2259
2260- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2261 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2262 instead of from DLL teardown.
2263
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002264Mac
2265---
2266
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002267- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002268 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002269 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2270 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2271 the executable in the bundle.
2272
2273- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002274
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002275- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2276
2277- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2278 on Panther.
2279
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002280What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2281================================
2282
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002283*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002284
2285Core and builtins
2286-----------------
2287
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002288- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2289 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2290 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2291 with the -i option.
2292
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002293- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2294 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2295
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002296- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2297 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2298
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002299- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2300 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2301 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2302 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2303 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2304 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2305 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2306 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2307 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2308 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2309 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2310 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2311 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002312
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002313- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2314 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2315 embedded in a lambda expression.
2316
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002317- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2318 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2319 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2320 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2321 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2322
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002323- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2324 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2325 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2326
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002327- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2328 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2329
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002330- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2331 It's writable again.
2332
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002333- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2334 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2335 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002336 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002337
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002338- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2339 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2340 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2341
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002342Extension modules
2343-----------------
2344
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002345- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2346 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2347
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002348- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2349 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2350 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2351 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2352
2353- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2354 collection.
2355
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002356- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2357 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2358 unique within a single program run.
2359
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002360- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2361 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2362
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002363- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2364 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2365
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002366- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2367 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002368
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002369- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2370
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002371- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2372 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2373
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002374- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2375 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2376 for many BSD-derived systems.
2377
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002378
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002379Library
2380-------
2381
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002382- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2383 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2384 primary ones:
2385
2386 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2387 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2388 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2389
2390 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2391 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2392 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2393 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2394 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2395 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2396
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002397- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2398 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2399 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2400 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2401 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2402 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2403 argument.
2404
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002405- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2406 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2407 in the archive.
2408
2409- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2410 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2411
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002412- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2413 569574).
2414
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002415- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2416 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2417 no more.
2418
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002419- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2420 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2421 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2422 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2423 code coverage.
2424
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002425- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2426 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2427 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002428 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2429 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002430
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002431- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2432 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2433 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002434 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002435
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002436- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2437
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002438- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2439 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2440 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2441 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2442
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002443- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2444 handling.
2445
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002446- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2447 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2448
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002449- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2450 in socket.py.
2451
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002452- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2453
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002454- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2455 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2456 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2457 opener with proxy support.
2458
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002459- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2460
2461- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2462
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002463Tools/Demos
2464-----------
2465
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002466- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2467
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002468- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2469
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002470- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2471 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002472
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002473- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2474 files.
2475
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002476Build
2477-----
2478
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002479- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002480 different root directory.
2481
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002482C API
2483-----
2484
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002485- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2486 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2487 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2488 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2489 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2490 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2491 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2492 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2493 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2494 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2495
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002496- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2497 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2498 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2499 from Python.
2500
2501
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002502New platforms
2503-------------
2504
2505None this time.
2506
2507Tests
2508-----
2509
2510- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2511 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2512
2513Windows
2514-------
2515
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002516- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2517
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002518- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2519 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2520 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2521 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2522 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2523 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2524 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2525 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2526 that's what it's for.
2527
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002528Mac
2529---
2530
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002531- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2532 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2533 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2534 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002535- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2536 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2537- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002538
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002539SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2540------------------------------------
2541
2542430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2543598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2544622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2545661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2546683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2547697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2548713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2549724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2550727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2551729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2552730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2553731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2554732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2555733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2556735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2557740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2558744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2559745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2560747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2561749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2562751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2563753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2564755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2565757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2566760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2567
2568
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002569What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2570================================
2571
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002572*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002573
2574Core and builtins
2575-----------------
2576
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002577- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2578 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2579
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002580- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2581 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2582 and cannot be strings).
2583
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002584- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2585 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2586 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2587 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2588
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002589- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2590 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2591 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2592 Python itself.
2593
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002594- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2595 the referenced object, if it has one.
2596
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002597- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2598 the thread started at
2599 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2600
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002601- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2602 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2603 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2604 placed on a list index.
2605
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002606- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2607 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2608 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2609 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2610
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002611- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2612 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2613 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2614 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2615 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2616 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2617 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2618
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002619- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2620 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2621 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2622 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2623 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2624
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002625- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2626 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002627
2628- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2629 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2630 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2631 #693195.)
2632
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002633- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2634 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002635
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002636- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002637 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002638 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2639 interpreter executions, would fail.
2640
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002641- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002642 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002643 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002644
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002645Extension modules
2646-----------------
2647
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002648- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2649 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2650 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2651 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2652
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002653- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2654 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2655
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002656- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2657 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2658 and Greg Chapman.)
2659
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002660- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2661 recursively.
2662
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002663- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002664 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2665 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2666 leaks.
2667
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002668- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2669
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002670- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2671 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2672 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2673 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2674 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2675 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2676 #705836.
2677
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002678- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002679 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2680
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002681- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2682 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2683 See SF bug #692416.
2684
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002685- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2686 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2687
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002688- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2689 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2690 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002691
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002692- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002693 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2694 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2695
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002696- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2697 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2698 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2699 timeouts to work properly.
2700
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002701Library
2702-------
2703
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002704- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2705 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2706 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2707 future release.
2708
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002709- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2710 for querying platform dependent features.
2711
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002712- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002713
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002714- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2715 pickle protocol versions.
2716
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002717- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2718 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2719 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2720
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002721- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2722
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002723- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2724 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2725 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2726 modules.
2727
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002728- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2729 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2730 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2731
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002732- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2733 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2734
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002735- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2736 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2737 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2738
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002739- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002740 MS Office extensions.
2741
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002742- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2743 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2744
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002745- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2746 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2747
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002748- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2749 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2750 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2751 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2752 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2753 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2754
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002755- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2756 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2757 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002758
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002759- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2760 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2761 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2762
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002763- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2764
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002765- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2766 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2767 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2768
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002769Tools/Demos
2770-----------
2771
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002772- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2773 See the module docstring for details.
2774
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002775Build
2776-----
2777
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002778- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2779 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002780
2781C API
2782-----
2783
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002784- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2785
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002786- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2787 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2788 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2789
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002790- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2791 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002792
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002793 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2794 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2795 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002796
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002797- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002798 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2799
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002800- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2801 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2802 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002803
2804New platforms
2805-------------
2806
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002807None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002808
2809Tests
2810-----
2811
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002812- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2813 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002814
2815Windows
2816-------
2817
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002818- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2819 function.
2820
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002821- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2822 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002823
2824Mac
2825---
2826
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002827- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2828 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002829
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002830- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2831 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002832
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002833- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2834 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2835 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002836
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002837- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002838 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2839 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002840
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002841- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2842 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002843
2844
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002845What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2846=================================
2847
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002848*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002849
2850Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002851-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002852
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002853- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2854 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2855 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2856
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002857- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2858 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2859 (SF patch #664376.)
2860
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002861- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2862 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2863 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2864 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2865 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2866 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002867 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002868
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002869- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2870 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2871 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2872 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002873 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002874
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002875- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2876 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2877 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2878 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2879 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2880 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2881 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2882 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2883 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2884 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2885 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2886
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002887- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2888 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2889 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2890 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2891 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2892 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2893
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002894- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2895 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2896
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002897- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2898 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2899 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2900 case.)
2901
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002902- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2903 passed as unicode strings.
2904
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002905- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2906 See SF bug #683467.
2907
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002908- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2909 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2910
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002911- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2912
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002913- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2914
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002915- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2916 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2917 arguments.
2918
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002919- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2920 See SF bug #667147.
2921
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002922- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002923 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002924 See SF bug #676155.
2925
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002926- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002927 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002928 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2929 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2930 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2931 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2932 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2933 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002934
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002935Extension modules
2936-----------------
2937
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002938- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2939 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2940 tp_as_number pointer.
2941
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002942- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2943 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2944 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2945 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2946 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2947
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002948- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2949
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002950- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2951
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002952- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002953 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002954 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2955 patch #678531.)
2956
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002957- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2958 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2959
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002960- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2961 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2962
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002963- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2964
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002965- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2966 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2967 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2968
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002969- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2970
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002971- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2972 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2973
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002974- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002975
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002976- datetime changes:
2977
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002978 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2979
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002980 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2981 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2982 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2983 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2984 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2985 now.
2986
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002987 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002988 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2989 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002990
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002991 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002992 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002993 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2994 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2995 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2996 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002997
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002998 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2999 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3000 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003001 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3002
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003003 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3004 by a later example coded by Guido.
3005
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003006 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003007 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3008 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3009 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003010 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3011 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3012
3013 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3014 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3015 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3016 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3017 tzinfo subclass instance.
3018
3019 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3020 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3021 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3022 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3023 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3024 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3025 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3026 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003027
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003028 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3029 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3030 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3031 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3032 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003033 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3034
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003035 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003036
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003037 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3038 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3039 as a naive datetime object.
3040
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003041 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3042 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3043 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3044
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003045 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3046 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3047 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3048 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3049 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3050 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3051 comparison.
3052
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003053 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3054 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3055 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3056 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003057 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003058
3059 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003060
3061 and ::
3062
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003063 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3064
3065 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3066 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3067 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3068 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3069
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003070 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3071 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3072 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3073 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3074 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3075
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003076 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3077 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003078 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3079 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003080
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003081Library
3082-------
3083
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003084- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3085 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3086
3087- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3088 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3089 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3090 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3091 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3092 See PEP 307 for details.
3093
3094- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3095 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3096
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003097- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3098 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003099 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003100 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3101 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003102 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003103
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003104- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3105 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3106
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003107- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3108 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3109 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3110
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003111- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3112
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003113- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3114 exception.
3115
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003116- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3117 class.
3118
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003119- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3120 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3121 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3122
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003123- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3124 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3125
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003126- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003127 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3128 See SF bug #659228.
3129
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003130- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3131 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3132 See SF patch #651082.
3133
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003134- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003135
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003136- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3137 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3138
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003139- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003140 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003141
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003142- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3143 DOS paths from other platforms.
3144
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003145Tools/Demos
3146-----------
3147
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003148- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3149 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3150 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3151 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3152 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3153 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3154 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3155 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3156 example:
3157
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003158 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3159 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003160
3161 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3162
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003163
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003164Build
3165-----
3166
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003167- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3168 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3169 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003170 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3171
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003172 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3173
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003174- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3175 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3176 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3177 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3178 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3179 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3180 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3181 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3182 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3183
3184- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3185 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3186 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3187 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3188
3189- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3190 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3191
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003192C API
3193-----
3194
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003195- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3196 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003197
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003198- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3199 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3200 tp_as_number pointer.
3201
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003202- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3203 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3204 (SF #681367)
3205
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003206- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3207 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3208 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3209 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003210
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003211Tests
3212-----
3213
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003214- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003215 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3216 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3217 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3218 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3219 pydoc.)
3220
3221- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3222
3223- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003224
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003225Windows
3226-------
3227
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003228- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3229 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3230 time).
3231
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003232- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3233 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3234
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003235- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3236 release without strong cryptography.
3237
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003238- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003239 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003240
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003241- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3242 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3243
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003244Mac
3245---
3246
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003247- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3248 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003249
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003250- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3251 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3252 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003253
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003254- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3255 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003256
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003257- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3258 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3259 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3260 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003261
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003262- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003263 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3264 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3265 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003266
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003267
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003268What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003269=================================
3270
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003271*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003272
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003273Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003274--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003275
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003276- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3277
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003278- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3279 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003280 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003281 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003282 a different meaning than before.
3283
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003284- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003285 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003286 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003287
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003288- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003289 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003290 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003291
3292- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3293 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3294 and deallocation.
3295
3296- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3297 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3298
3299- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3300 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3301 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3302 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3303 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3304
3305- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3306 now detected by the garbage collector.
3307
3308- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3309 [SF bug 519621]
3310
3311- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3312 identifier.
3313
3314- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3315 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3316 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3317 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3318 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3319 [SF bug 563060]
3320
3321- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3322 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3323 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3324 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3325 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3326
3327- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3328 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3329 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3330
3331- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3332
3333- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3334 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3335 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3336 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3337 state of the slots would be lost.)
3338
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003339Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003340-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003341
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003342- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003343 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3344 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3345 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3346 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003347 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3348 Jython 2.1.
3349
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003350- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003351 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003352 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3353 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3354 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3355 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3356 these, see PEP 302.
3357
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003358- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3359 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3360 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3361
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003362- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3363 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3364 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3365
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003366- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3367 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3368 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3369
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003370- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3371 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3372 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3373 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3374 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3375 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3376 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3377 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3378 releases or implementations.
3379
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003380- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003381 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3382 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003383
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003384- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3385 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3386
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003387- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3388 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3389 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3390
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003391- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3392 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3393
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003394- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3395 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003396 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3397 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003398
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003399- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3400 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3401 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3402 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3403 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3404
3405 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3406 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3407 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3408 pattern.
3409
3410 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3411 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3412 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3413 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3414
3415 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3416 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3417 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3418 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3419 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3420 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3421
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003422- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3423 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3424 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3425 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3426 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3427 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3428 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3429 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003430
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003431- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3432 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3433 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3434 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3435 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003436 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3437 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3438 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3439 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3440 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3441 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3442 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003443
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003444- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3445 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3446
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003447- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3448 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3449 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3450 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3451 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3452 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3453 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3454 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3455 to Zack Weinberg!
3456
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003457- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3458 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3459 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3460 type. This has been fixed now.
3461
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003462- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3463 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3464 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3465
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003466- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3467 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3468 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3469 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3470 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3471 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3472 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3473 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003474 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003475
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003476- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3477 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3478 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003479
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003480- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3481 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3482 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3483 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3484 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3485 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3486 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3487 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003488 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003489 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3490 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3491
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003492- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3493 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3494 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3495 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3496 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3497 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3498 this.)
3499
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003500- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3501 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003502 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003503 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003504 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3505 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003506 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3507 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003508
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003509- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3510 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3511 currently running.
3512
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003513- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3514 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3515 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3516 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3517
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003518- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3519 as directory names.
3520
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003521- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3522 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3523
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003524- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3525 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3526
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003527- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003528 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3529 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003530
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003531- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3532 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3533 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3534 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3535 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3536
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003537- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3538 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3539 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3540 removed.
3541
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003542- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3543 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3544 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3545
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003546- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3547 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3548 to __debug__.
3549
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003550- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3551 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3552 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3553
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003554- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3555 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3556 deprecated now.
3557
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003558- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3559 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3560 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003561
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003562- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3563 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3564 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3565 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3566 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003567
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003568- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3569 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3570
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003571- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3572 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3573 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003574 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003575 is backward compatible.
3576
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003577- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3578 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3579 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3580 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3581 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3582
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003583- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3584 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3585 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3586 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3587 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3588 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003589
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003590- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3591 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3592
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003593- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3594 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3595
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003596- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3597 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3598 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3599 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3600 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3601
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003602- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3603 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3604 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3605
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003606- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003607 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3608
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003609- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3610 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3611 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003612
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003613- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3614 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3615
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003616- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3617 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3618 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3619
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003620- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3621
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003622Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003623-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003624
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003625- Added three operators to the operator module:
3626 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3627 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3628 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3629
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003630- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3631
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003632- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3633 archives.
3634
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003635- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3636 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3637 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3638
3639 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3640
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003641- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3642 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3643 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003644 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003645
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003646- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3647 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3648 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3649 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003650 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3651 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3652 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3653 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003654
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003655- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3656 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003657
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003658- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3659
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003660- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3661 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3662
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003663- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3664 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3665 supported.
3666
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003667- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3668
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003669- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3670 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003671
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003672- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3673 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3674
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003675- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3676
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003677- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3678 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3679
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003680- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3681 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3682 functions but callable type objects.
3683
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003684- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003685 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003686 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003687
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003688- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3689 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003690
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003691- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3692 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003693
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003694- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3695 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3696 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3697 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3698
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003699- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3700 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003701
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003702- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3703 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3704 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3705 and __imul__.
3706
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003707- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003708 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3709 is called.
3710
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003711- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3712 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3713 interpreter was compiled.
3714
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003715- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3716 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3717 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003718 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003719 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3720 1, not 2.
3721
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003722- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3723 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3724 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3725 limit.
3726
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003727- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3728 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3729 bug #623464.
3730
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003731- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3732 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3733 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3734 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3735
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003736Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003737-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003738
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003739- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3740
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003741- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3742 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3743 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3744 with Python 2.3a2.
3745
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003746- os.path exposes getctime.
3747
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003748- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003749 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003750 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003751 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003752 unit tests of floating point results.
3753
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003754- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3755 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3756 has been increased.
3757
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003758- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3759 executed.
3760
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003761- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3762 postinstallation script.
3763
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003764- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3765 test the current module.
3766
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003767- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003768 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3769 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3770 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3771 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3772
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003773- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003774 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003775 Ward's Optik package.
3776
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003777- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3778 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3779 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3780 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3781
3782- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3783 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003784 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003785
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003786- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3787 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3788 shelf are binary pickles.
3789
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003790- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3791 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3792
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003793- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3794 modules are iterators now.
3795
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003796- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3797 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3798 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3799 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3800 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3801 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003802
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003803- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3804 with their entity value.
3805
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003806- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3807
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003808- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3809 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003810
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003811- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3812 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003813 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003814
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003815- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3816 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3817 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3818 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3819 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3820 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3821 main():
3822
3823 import locale
3824 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3825
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003826- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3827 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3828
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003829- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3830 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3831 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3832 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3833 to the new standard.
3834
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003835- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3836 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3837 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3838 an extension to the database.
3839
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003840- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3841 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3842 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3843 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003844 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003845
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003846- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003847 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003848
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003849- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3850 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3851 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3852 bounded integers.
3853
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003854- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3855 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3856 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3857 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3858 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3859 in existence.
3860
3861 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3862 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3863 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3864 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3865 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3866 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3867
3868 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3869 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3870 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3871 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3872
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003873- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3874 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3875 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3876
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003877- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3878
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003879- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3880 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3881 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3882 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3883
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003884- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3885 argument.
3886
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003887- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3888 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3889 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3890 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3891 [SF patch 560794].
3892
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003893- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3894 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3895 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003896 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3897 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3898 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003899
3900- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3901 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003902
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003903- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3904 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3905 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3906 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003907
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003908- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3909 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3910 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3911 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3912 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3913
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003914- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003915
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003916- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3917
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003918- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3919 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3920 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3921 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3922 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3923 identical to None.
3924
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003925- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3926 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3927 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3928 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3929 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3930 results now.
3931
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003932- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3933 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3934
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003935- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3936 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3937 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3938 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3939 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3940 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3941 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3942 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3943
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003944- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3945
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003946- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3947 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3948
3949- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3950 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3951 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3952 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3953 and other systems.
3954
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003955- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3956 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3957 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3958 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 +00003959 work well with these.
3960
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003961- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3962
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003963- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003964 connections.
3965
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003966- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3967 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3968 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3969
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003970- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3971 sets
3972
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003973- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3974 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3975 name.
3976
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003977- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3978 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3979 passed in.
3980
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003981- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003982 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003983 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3984 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003985
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003986- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3987
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003988- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3989
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003990- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3991 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3992 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3993
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003994- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3995 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3996 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3997 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003998 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003999
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004000- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004001 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004002 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004003
4004- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4005 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4006 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4007
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004008- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004009 the value of its expression argument.
4010
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004011- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4012 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4013 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4014
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004015- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4016 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4017 skipstone browser was included.
4018
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004019- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4020 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4021
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004022Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004023-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004024
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004025- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4026 names in addition to accepting file names.
4027
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004028- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4029 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4030 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4031 still used and useful.)
4032
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004033- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4034 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4035 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4036 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004037
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004038- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4039 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4040 the generated binary.
4041
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004042Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004043-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004044
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004045- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4046
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004047- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4048 except in the hands of experts.
4049
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004050- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004051 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4052 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4053 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004054
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004055- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4056 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4057 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4058 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4059 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4060 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4061 builds.
4062
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004063- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4064 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4065 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4066 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4067 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4068 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4069 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4070 new type.
4071
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004072- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004073
4074 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4075 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4076 positive infinities.
4077
4078 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4079 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4080 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4081 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4082 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4083 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4084 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4085
4086 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4087
4088 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4089
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004090- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4091 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4092 size of the executable.
4093
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004094- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4095 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4096 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4097 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004098
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004099- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4100
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004101- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4102 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4103 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004104
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004105- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4106 well as Unix.
4107
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004108- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4109 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4110 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4111 modules in the README file for details.
4112
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004113C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004114-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004115
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004116- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4117 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004118 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004119 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004120 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004121
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004122- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4123 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4124 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4125 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4126 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4127 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004128 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004129 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4130 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4131 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4132 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4133 aligned.)
4134
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004135- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4136 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4137 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4138
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004139- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4140 level.
4141
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004142- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4143 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4144 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4145 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4146 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4147
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004148- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4149 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4150 code.
4151
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004152- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4153 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4154 adjusting for negative indices.
4155
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004156- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4157 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4158 object.
4159
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004160- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4161 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4162 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4163
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004164- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4165 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004166
4167- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4168
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004169- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4170 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4171 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4172 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4173
4174- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4175
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004176- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004177
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004178- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004179 without going through the buffer API.
4180
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004181- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004182
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004183- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4184 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4185 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4186 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4187
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004188- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4189 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4190
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004191- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004192 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4193
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004194New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004195-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004196
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004197- OpenVMS is now supported.
4198
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004199- AtheOS is now supported.
4200
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004201- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4202
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004203- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4204
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004205Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004206-----
4207
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004208- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4209 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4210 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004211
4212Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004213-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004214
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004215- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4216 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4217 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4218 bugs.
4219 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004220 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004221 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4222 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004223 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004224
4225- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004226 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004227
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004228- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4229 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4230
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004231- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4232 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004233 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004234 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4235
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004236- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4237 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4238 use files" uninstall option).
4239
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004240- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4241
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004242- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4243 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4244
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004245- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4246 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4247 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4248
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004249- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4250 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4251 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4252 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4253 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004254 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4255 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4256 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004257
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004258- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004259 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004260 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4261 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4262 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4263 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4264 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4265 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4266 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4267 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4268 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4269 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4270 work around.
4271
4272- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4273 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4274 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4275 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4276 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4277 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4278 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4279 specified with O_CREAT too).
4280
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004281Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004282----
4283
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004284- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004285
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004286- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4287 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4288 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4289
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004290- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4291 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4292 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4293
4294- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4295 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4296 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4297 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4298 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4299 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4300 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4301 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004302
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004303- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4304 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4305 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004306
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004307- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4308 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4309 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4310 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4311 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004312
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004313- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4314 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4315 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004316
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004317- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4318 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004319
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004320- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4321 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4322 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4323 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4324 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004325
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004326- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4327 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4328 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4329
4330- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4331 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4332 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004333
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004334- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4335 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4336 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4337 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004338 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004339
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004340- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4341 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004342
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004343- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4344 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004345
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004346- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004347 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004348 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4349 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004350
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004351
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004352What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004353===============================
4354
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004355*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4356
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004357Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004358--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004359
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004360- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4361 with a custom metaclass.
4362
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004363Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004364-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004365
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004366- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4367 are proxies.
4368
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004369Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004370-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004371
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004372- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4373 very short strings.
4374
4375- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4376 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4377 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4378 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4379 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4380
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004381Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004382-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004383
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004384- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4385 close or delete time).
4386
4387- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4388 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4389
4390- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4391
4392- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004393 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004394
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004395Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004396-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004397
4398Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004399-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004400
4401C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004402-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004403
4404New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004405-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004406
4407Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004408-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004409
4410Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004411-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004412
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004413- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4414
4415- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4416 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4417
4418- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4419 deleted at process exit time.
4420
4421- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4422 in backslash.
4423
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004424Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004425----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004426
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004427- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4428 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4429 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4430
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004431
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004432What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004433===========================
4434
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004435*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4436
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004437Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004438--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004439
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004440- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4441 been extensively updated. See
4442
4443 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4444
4445 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4446
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004447- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4448 deleted!
4449
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004450- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4451 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4452 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4453 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4454 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4455
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004456- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4457
4458 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4459 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4460
4461 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4462 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4463 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4464 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4465 supported anyway.
4466
4467 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4468 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4469
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004470- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4471 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4472 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4473 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4474 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004475
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004476- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4477 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4478 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4479
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004480Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004481-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004482
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004483- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4484 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4485 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4486 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4487 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4488 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004489 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4490 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4491 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4492 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004493
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004494- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4495 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4496 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4497
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004498Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004499-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004500
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004501- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4502
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004503Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004504-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004505
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004506- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4507 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4508 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4509 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4510 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4511 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4512
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004513- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4514
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004515- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4516
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004517- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4518
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004519- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4520 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4521 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4522
4523- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4524
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004525Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004526-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004527
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004528- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4529 off a search on Google.
4530
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004531Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004532-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004533
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004534- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4535 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4536 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4537 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4538 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4539 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4540 other platforms should do likewise.
4541
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004542- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4543 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4544 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4545
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004546C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004547-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004548
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004549- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4550 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4551 producing key-value pairs.
4552
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004553- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004554 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004555 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4556 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4557 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4558 previously went unchallenged.
4559
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004560New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004561-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004562
4563Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004564-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004565
4566Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004567-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004568
4569Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004570----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004571
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004572- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4573 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004574
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004575- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4576 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4577 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4578 home.
4579
4580
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004581What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004582===========================
4583
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004584*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4585
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004586Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004587--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004588
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004589- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4590 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004591
4592 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004593 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004594
4595 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4596 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004597 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004598 This needs to be documented.
4599
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004600- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4601 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4602
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004603- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4604 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4605 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4606
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004607- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4608 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4609
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004610- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4611 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4612 class forbids it).
4613
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004614- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4615 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4616 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4617
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004618- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4619
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004620Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004621-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004622
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004623- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4624 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004625 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004626
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004627- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4628 (like 1 + '').
4629
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004630Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004631-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004632
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004633- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4634 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4635 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4636 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004637 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004638 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4639
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004640- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4641 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4642 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4643 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4644
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004645- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4646 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004647 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4648 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4649 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004650
4651- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4652 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004653
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004654- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4655 bytes on its input.
4656
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004657Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004658-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004659
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004660- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004661 convenience function.
4662
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004663- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4664 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4665 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004666 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4667 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4668 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4669 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4670 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4671 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004672
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004673- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4674 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4675 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4676 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4677
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004678- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4679 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4680 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4681
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004682- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4683 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4684 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4685 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4686
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004687- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4688 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004689 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004690 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4691 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4692 new -l and -e options.
4693
4694- statcache is now deprecated.
4695
4696- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4697 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004698 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004699 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4700 time properly taken into account.
4701
4702- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4703 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4704 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4705 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4706
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004707Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004708-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004709
4710Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004711-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004712
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004713- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4714 is built with libdb3 if available.
4715
4716- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4717
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004718C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004719-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004720
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004721- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4722 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4723 PySequence_Size().
4724
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004725- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4726
4727- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4728 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4729 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4730
4731- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4732 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4733
4734- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4735 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4736
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004737New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004738-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004739
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004740- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4741 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4742
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004743- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4744 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4745
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004746- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4747
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004748Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004749-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004750
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004751- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4752 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4753
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004754Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004755-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004756
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004757Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004758----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004759
4760- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4761 removed completely in the next release.
4762
4763- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4764 OSX.
4765
4766- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4767 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4768
4769- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4770
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004771
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004772What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004773===========================
4774
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004775*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4776
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004777Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004778--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004779
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004780- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004781 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004782 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004783 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4784 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004785 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4786 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004787 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4788 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004789
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004790- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4791 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4792
4793- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4794 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4795
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004796Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004797-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004798
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004799- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4800 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4801 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4802 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4803 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4804 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4805 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4806 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4807
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004808- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4809 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4810 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4811 example).
4812
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004813- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004814 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004815 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004816 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004817
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004818- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4819 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4820 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004821 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004822
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004823- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4824 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4825 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4826 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4827 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4828 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4829
4830 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4831
4832 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4833
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004834Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004835-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004836
4837- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4838
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004839- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4840
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004841- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4842 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004843
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004844- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4845 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4846 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4847 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4848 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4849 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004850 attributes.
4851
4852- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4853 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4854 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004855
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004856- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4857 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4858 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004859
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004860- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4861 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4862 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004863 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4864 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4865
4866- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4867 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004868
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004869Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004870-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004871
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004872- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4873 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4874
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004875- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4876 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4877 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4878 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4879
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004880- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4881 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4882 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4883 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4884
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004885 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4886 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4887 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4888 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4889 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4890 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4891 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4892 without losing information).
4893
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004894- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004895 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4896 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4897 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4898 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4899 module).
4900
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004901 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004902 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4903 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4904 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4905 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004906
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004907- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004908 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4909 encoding.
4910
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004911- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4912 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4913
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004914- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004915 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4916
4917- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4918 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4919 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4920 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4921
4922- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4923
4924- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4925 ON, and OFF.
4926
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004927- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4928 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4929
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004930Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004931-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004932
4933- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4934 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4935 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004936
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004937- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4938 been added: -X and -E.
4939
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004940Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004941-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004942
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004943- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4944 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4945
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004946C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004947-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004948
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004949- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4950 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4951 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4952 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4953 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4954
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004955- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4956 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4957 as long) arguments.
4958
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004959- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4960 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4961 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4962 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4963 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4964 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4965
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004966- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4967 input.
4968
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004969New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004970-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004971
4972Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004973-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004974
4975Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004976-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004977
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004978- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4979 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4980 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4981
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004982- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4983 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4984 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004985 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004986
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004987 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4988 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4989 import signal
4990 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004991
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004992 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004993 while 1:
4994 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004995 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004996 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4997 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4998 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4999 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005000
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005001
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005002What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5003===========================
5004
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005005*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5006
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005007Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005008--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005009
5010- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5011 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5012 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5013
5014- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5015 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5016 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5017 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5018 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5019 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5020 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005021
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005022- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005023 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005024 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5025 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5026 associate a docstring with a property.
5027
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005028- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5029 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5030 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5031 other built-in object types.
5032
5033- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5034 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5035 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5036 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5037 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5038
5039- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5040 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5041
5042- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5043 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005044 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005045 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5046 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5047 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5048 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5049 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5050
5051- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5052 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5053 class.
5054
5055- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5056 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5057 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5058 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5059
5060- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5061 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5062 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5063 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5064
5065- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5066 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5067
5068- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5069 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5070 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5071 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5072 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005073 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005074 with the same value as s.
5075
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005076- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5077
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005078Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005079----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005080
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005081- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5082
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005083- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5084 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5085 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5086 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5087 objects.
5088
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005089- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5090 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005091 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5092 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5093
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005094- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5095 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5096 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5097
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005098Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005099-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005100
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005101- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5102 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5103 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5104 by the instances.
5105
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005106- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5107 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5108 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5109
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005110- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5111 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5112 before the entire comparison is complete.
5113
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005114- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5115 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5116 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5117
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005118- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5119 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5120 getwriter().
5121
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005122- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5123 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5124
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005125- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005126 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5127 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5128
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005129- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5130 iterable object.
5131
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005132- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5133 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005134
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005135- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5136 authentication.
5137
5138- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5139 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005140
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005141- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005142 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5143 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5144 a sample driver.)
5145
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005146Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005147-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005148
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005149- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5150 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5151 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5152 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5153 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5154 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5155 kernel has large file support.
5156
5157- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5158 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5159 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5160 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5161 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5162
5163- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5164 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5165 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5166
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005167C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005168-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005169
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005170- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5171 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5172
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005173New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005174-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005175
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005176- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5177 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5178
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005179Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005180-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005181
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005182- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5183 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5184 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5185 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5186 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5187
5188- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5189 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5190 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5191 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5192
5193- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5194 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5195
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005196Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005197-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005198
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005199- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005200 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5201 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005202
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005203
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005204What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5205===========================
5206
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005207*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5208
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005209Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005210----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005211
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005212- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5213 big to represent as a C double.
5214
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005215- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5216 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5217 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5218 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5219 restriction).
5220
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005221- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5222 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5223 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5224 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5225 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5226
5227 >>> dir([])
5228 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5229 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5230 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5231 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5232 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5233 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5234 'reverse', 'sort']
5235
5236 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5237
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005238- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005239 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5240 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5241 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5242 OverflowError exception.
5243
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005244- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005245 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005246 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5247 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5248 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5249 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5250 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005251 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005252 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5253 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5254
5255 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5256 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5257 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5258 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005259
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005260- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005261 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5262 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5263 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5264 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5265 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5266 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5267 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5268 once it is created.
5269
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005270- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5271 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5272 (key, value) pairs.
5273
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005274- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005275 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5276 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5277
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005278- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5279 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5280 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5281 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5282 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005283
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005284- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005285 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5286 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5287
5288 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5289
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005290- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005291 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5292
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005293Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005294-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005295
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005296- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005297 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5298 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005299
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005300- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5301 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5302 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5303 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5304 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5305 in this area anymore).
5306
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005307- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5308 threading.Timer.
5309
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005310- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5311 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5312
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005313- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005314 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5315
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005316- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005317 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5318 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5319 converted to Python longs.
5320
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005321- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005322 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5323
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005324- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5325 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5326 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5327
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005328Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005329-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005330
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005331- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5332 division operators as per PEP 238.
5333
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005334Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005335-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005336
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005337- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5338 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5339 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5340 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5341
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005342C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005343-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005344
5345- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005346
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005347- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5348 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005349 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005350
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005351 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5352 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005353 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005354 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005355
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005356- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005357 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5358 module:
5359
5360 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005361
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005362 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5363 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005364
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005365 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5366 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005367
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005368 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5369
5370 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5371
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005372- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005373 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5374 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5375 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005376
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005377New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005378-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005379
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005380- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5381 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5382 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5383 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5384 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005385
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005386Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005387-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005388
5389Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005390-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005391
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005392- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5393 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5394 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5395 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005396 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5397 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5398 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5399 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5400 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005401
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005402- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005403 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5404
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005405
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005406What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5407===========================
5408
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005409*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5410
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005411Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005412-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005413
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005414- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5415 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5416
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005417- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5418 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5419 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005420
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005421- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5422 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5423 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5424 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005425
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005426- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5427
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005428- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005429
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005430Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005431-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005432
5433- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005434 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005435 the module docstring for details.
5436
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005437Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005438-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005439
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005440- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005441 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5442 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5443 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005444
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005445- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5446 Nick Mathewson.
5447
5448Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005449----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005450
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005451- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5452 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5453 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5454 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5455 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5456 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5457 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5458 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5459
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005460- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5461 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5462 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5463 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5464
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005465- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5466 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5467 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5468 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5469 come a long way).
5470
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005471- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5472 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5473 write filters for these warnings).
5474
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005475- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5476 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5477 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5478 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5479 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5480
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005481- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5482 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5483 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5484 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5485 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5486 older distribution.
5487
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005488Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005489-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005490
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005491- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5492 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005493 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005494
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005495- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5496 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5497 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5498
5499- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5500
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005501- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5502
5503- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5504
5505- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5506
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005507- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005508
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005509- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5510
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005511New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005512-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005513
5514C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005515-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005516
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005517- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5518 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5519 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5520 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5521 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5522 against buffer overruns.
5523
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005524- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005525 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5526 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005527 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5528 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5529 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5530
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005531- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5532 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5533 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5534 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5535 deprecated.
5536
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005537Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005538-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005539
5540- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5541 relevant is found.
5542
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005543
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005544What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005545===========================
5546
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005547*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5548
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005549Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005550----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005551
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005552- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5553 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5554 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5555 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5556 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5557 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5558 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5559 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005560 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005561 repaired.
5562
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005563- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005564 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005565 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5566 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5567 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5568 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5569 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5570 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5571 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5572 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5573
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005574- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5575 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5576 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5577 leading BMO character).
5578
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005579- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5580 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5581 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5582
5583 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5584 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5585 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005586
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005587 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5588 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5589 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5590 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5591 for various simple to use conversions.
5592
5593 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5594 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5595
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005596 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5597 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5598 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5599 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5600 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5601 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5602 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5603 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5604 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5605 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5606 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5607 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5608 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5609 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5610 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005611
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005612- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5613 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5614 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005615 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005616 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005617
5618 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005619 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5620 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5621 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5622 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5623 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005624 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5625 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005626
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005627 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5628 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5629 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005630 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005631
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005632- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5633 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5634 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5635 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5636 floating arithmetic,
5637
5638 x = 9007199254740992.0
5639 print long(x)
5640
5641 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5642 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5643 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5644 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5645 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5646 functions are of good quality).
5647
5648 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5649 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5650 algorithms to break.
5651
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005652- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5653 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5654 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5655 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5656 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5657 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5658 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5659 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5660 order.
5661
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005662- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5663 operation along the most common code paths.
5664
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005665- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5666 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5667
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005668- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5669 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5670 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5671 {}.update(UserDict())
5672
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005673- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5674 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5675 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5676 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5677 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5678 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5679 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5680 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5681
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005682- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005683 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005684
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005685 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005686 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5687 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005688 join() method of strings
5689 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005690 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5691 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005692 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005693 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005694
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005695- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5696 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5697
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005698- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5699 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5700
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005701- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5702 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5703 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5704 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5705
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005706- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5707 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005708 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005709 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5710 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005711
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005712- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5713
5714
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005715Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005716-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005717
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005718- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005719 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005720 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5721 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5722
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005723- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5724 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5725
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005726- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5727 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5728 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5729 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5730
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005731- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5732 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5733 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5734
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005735- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5736
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005737- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5738
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005739- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5740 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5741 that are still imported into string.py).
5742
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005743- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5744
5745- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5746 Now it does.
5747
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005748- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5749
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005750- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5751 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5752 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5753 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5754 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005755 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5756 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005757
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005758- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5759 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5760 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5761 'help(object)'.
5762
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005763Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005764-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005765
5766- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005767 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005768 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5769 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5770
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005771- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005772 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5773 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005774
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005775C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005776-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005777
5778- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5779 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005780
5781----
5782
5783**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**