blob: 619549d722cfac71b1edf9a9874a29d0b17e5fb3 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwis18e16552006-02-15 17:27:45 +000015- PEP 353: Using ssize_t as the index type.
16
Neal Norwitzfc76d632006-01-10 06:03:13 +000017- Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
18 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
19 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
20
Neal Norwitz671b9e32006-01-09 07:07:12 +000021- Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
22 configure would break checking curses.h.
23
Georg Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000024- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
25 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
26
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000027- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
28
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000029- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
30
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000031- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
32
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000033- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
34 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
35
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000036- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
37 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number
38 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
39
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000040- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
41 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000042 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000043
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000044- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
45 now encodes backslash correctly.
46
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000047- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
48
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000049- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
50 and long longs.
51
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000052- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
53 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
54 message in this case.
55
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000056- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
57 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
58 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
59 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
60 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
61
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000062- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000063
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000064- Speed up some Unicode operations.
65
66- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
67
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000068- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000069 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
70
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000071- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
72
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000073- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
74 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
75
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000076- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
77
78- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
79
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000080- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
81 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
82 was empty.
83
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000084- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
85 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
86
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000087- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000088 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000089
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000090- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
91 codes.
92
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000093- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
94 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
95 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
96
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000097- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
98 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
99
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +0000100- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +0000101 (fixes bug #1119418).
102
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +0000103- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
104
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +0000105- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
106 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
107
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +0000108- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
109 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
110 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
111
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000112- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
113
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000114- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
115 reference counts in some error exit cases.
116
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000117- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
118 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
119 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
120 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
121 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
122 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
123 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
124 realloc.
125
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000126- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
127 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
128
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000129- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
130 like their int counterparts.
131
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000132- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
133 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
134 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
135 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
136 for a longer write-up of the problem).
137
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000138- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
139 serializing floats.
140
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000141- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
142 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
143 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
144
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000145- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
146 278.
147
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000148- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
149 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
150 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
151 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000152 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000153 PyNumber_*().
154 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
155
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000156- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
157 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
158 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
159 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
160
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000161- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
162 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
163 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
164 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
165 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
166
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000167- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
168 disabled caused a crash.
169
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000170- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
171 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
172
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000173- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000174 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
175
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000176- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
177
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000178- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000179 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
180 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
181 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000182
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000183- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
184
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000185- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
186 returning None.
187
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000188- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000189 ('\') with a specific error message.
190
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000191- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
192
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000193- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
194 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
195
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000196- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000197 an ferror() call.
198
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000199- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
200 list.sort().
201
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000202- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
203 (2+3) --> (5).
204
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000205- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
206
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000207- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
208 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000209
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000210- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
211 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
212 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
213
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000214- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
215 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
216 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
217
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000218Extension Modules
219-----------------
220
Neal Norwitz082b2df2006-02-07 07:04:46 +0000221- Bug #876637, prevent stack corruption when socket descriptor
222 is larger than FD_SETSIZE.
223
Neal Norwitz0e6bc8c2006-02-05 05:45:43 +0000224- Patch #1407135, bug #1424041: harmonize mmap behavior of anonymous memory.
225 mmap.mmap(-1, size) now returns anonymous memory in both Unix and Windows.
226 mmap.mmap(0, size) should not be used on Windows for anonymous memory.
227
Martin v. Löwis57a34e82006-02-04 19:12:37 +0000228- Patch #1422385: The nis module now supports access to domains other
229 than the system default domain.
230
Martin v. Löwis14694662006-02-03 12:54:16 +0000231- Use Win32 API to implement os.stat/fstat. As a result, subsecond timestamps
232 are reported, the limit on path name lengths is removed, and stat reports
233 WindowsError now (instead of OSError).
234
Gregory P. Smithcfc4a8d2006-01-29 19:46:23 +0000235- Add bsddb.db.DBEnv.set_tx_timestamp allowing time based database recovery.
236
Neal Norwitz62a21122006-01-25 05:21:55 +0000237- Bug #1413192, fix seg fault in bsddb if a transaction was deleted
238 before the env.
239
Martin v. Löwis11017b12006-01-14 18:12:57 +0000240- Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
241
Neal Norwitz3b4fff82006-01-11 08:54:45 +0000242- Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
243
Neal Norwitz88bbd732006-01-10 07:05:44 +0000244- Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
245 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
246 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
247
Neal Norwitz5e3d8622006-01-09 06:24:35 +0000248- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
249 without prior setting of the userptr.
250
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000251- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
252
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000253- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
254
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000255- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
256 problem on AIX.
257
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000258- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
259
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000260- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
261
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000262- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
263
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000264- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
265 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
266
Gregory P. Smithe101df92006-01-24 20:09:45 +0000267- Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using
268 BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1.
269
270- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4
271
272- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000273
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000274- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
275 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
276
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000277- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
278
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000279- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
280 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
281
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000282- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
283 returns in cStringIO.c.
284
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000285- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
286 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
287
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000288- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
289
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000290- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
291
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000292- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
293 the file system encoding.
294
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000295- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
296 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000297
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000298- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
299
300- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000301 line without newlines.
302
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000303- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
304 on Windows.
305
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000306- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000307 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
308
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000309- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
310 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
311 for large or negative values.
312
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000313- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000314 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000315
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000316- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
317
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000318- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
319 if available on the platform.
320
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000321- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
322 available on the platform.
323
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000324- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
325 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
326
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000327- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
328
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000329- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
330 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
331 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
332
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000333- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
334
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000335- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
336 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
337
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000338- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000339 file size.
340
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000341- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
342
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000343- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
344 {remove_history,replace_history}
345
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000346- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
347 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000348
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000349- stat_float_times is now True.
350
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000351- array.array objects are now picklable.
352
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000353- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
354 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
355
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000356- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
357 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
358 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
359
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000360- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
361 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000362
363Library
364-------
365
Georg Brandl7b4e7c22006-02-18 21:10:56 +0000366- Patch #1373643: The chunk module can now read chunks larger than
367 two gigabytes.
368
Georg Brandl21dd1af2006-02-17 13:35:13 +0000369- Patch #1417555: SimpleHTTPServer now returns Last-Modified headers.
370
Georg Brandlbd3bc4d2006-02-17 09:52:53 +0000371- Bug #1430298: It is now possible to send a mail with an empty
372 return address using smtplib.
373
Georg Brandl0e1abe22006-02-17 09:48:14 +0000374- Bug #1432260: The names of lambda functions are now properly displayed
375 in pydoc.
Georg Brandl501dd0d2006-02-17 09:45:40 +0000376
Martin v. Löwis00756902006-02-05 17:09:41 +0000377- Patch #1412872: zipfile now sets the creator system to 3 (Unix)
378 unless the system is Win32.
379
Martin v. Löwisc81e3a62006-01-30 15:04:31 +0000380- Patch #1349118: urllib now supports user:pass@ style proxy
Martin v. Löwis3e865952006-01-24 15:51:21 +0000381 specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols
382 are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections.
383
Georg Brandl531ceba2006-01-21 07:20:56 +0000384- Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications.
385
386- Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.
Georg Brandl89f35ac2006-01-20 17:24:23 +0000387
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000388- Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
389
Neal Norwitzf60cd472006-01-14 07:05:13 +0000390- Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
Georg Brandl45ab2332006-01-13 17:05:56 +0000391 any more.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000392
Georg Brandl4edd9892006-01-13 16:59:46 +0000393- Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
394 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000395
Martin v. Löwis412ed3b2006-01-08 10:45:39 +0000396- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
397
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000398- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
399
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000400- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
401 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
402 LoadError subclasses IOError.
403
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000404- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000405 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
406 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
407 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
408 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
409
410 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
411 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
412 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
413 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
414 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000415
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000416- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
417 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
418 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
419
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000420- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
421
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000422- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
423
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000424- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
425 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
426 illegal argument)
427
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000428- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
429 is an error in the format string.
430
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000431- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
432
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000433- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000434 "parent" argument.
435
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000436- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
437 for padding.
438
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000439- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
440 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
441
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000442- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
443 to get the correct encoding.
444
445- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
446 languages.
447
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000448- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
449
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000450- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
451
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000452- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
453
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000454- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
455 functionality.
456
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000457- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
458
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000459- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
460 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
461
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000462- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
463 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
464 match the Content-Length header.
465
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000466- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
467
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000468- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
469 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000470 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000471
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000472- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
473
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000474- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
475
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000476- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
477 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
478
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000479- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
480 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
481 Tkdnd.
482
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000483- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
484 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
485
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000486- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
487 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
488
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000489- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000490 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
491
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000492- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
493 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
494
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000495- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
496 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
497
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000498- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000499 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000500
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000501- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
502
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000503- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
504 error messages.
505
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000506- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
507
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000508- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
509 Bug #1224621.
510
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000511- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
512 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
513 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
514 terminates by raising StopIteration.
515
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000516- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
517
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000518- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
519 component of the path.
520
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000521- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
522 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
523 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
524 class at all.
525
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000526- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
527 files to PyPI.
528
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000529- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
530 them to PyPI.
531
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000532- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
533 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
534 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
535 work as expected.
536
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000537- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
538 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
539
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000540- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000541 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
542
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000543- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
544
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000545- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
546 to build.
547
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000548- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
549 symbolic links on Windows.
550
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000551- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000552 profile.py if available.
553
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000554- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
555
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000556- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
557 in LWPCookieJar.
558
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000559- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
560
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000561- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
562
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000563- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
564
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000565- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
566
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000567- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
568
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000569- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
570
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000571- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
572
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000573- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
574
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000575- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
576 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
577 be exploited in various ways.
578
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000579- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000580 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
581
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000582- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
583 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
584
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000585- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000586 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
587
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000588- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
589
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000590- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
591
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000592- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
593
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000594- Enhancements to the csv module:
595
596 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000597 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000598 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000599 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
600 reporting.
601 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
602 dictates.
603 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000604 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000605 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000606 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
607 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000608 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
609 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000610 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000611 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
612 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
613 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
614 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
615 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
616 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
617 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
618 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
619 without first creating a dialect class.
620 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
621 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
622 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000623 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000624 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
625 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000626 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
627 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
628 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
629 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000630 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
631 This has been fixed.
632
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000633- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
634 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
635 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
636 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
637
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000638- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
639
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000640- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
641 (Bug #951915).
642
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000643- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
644 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
645 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000646 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000647
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000648- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
649
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000650- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
651 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
652
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000653- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
654
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000655- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
656
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000657- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
658
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000659- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
660
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000661- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
662
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000663- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
664 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
665 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
666
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000667- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000668 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000669
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000670- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
671 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
672 tokenizer with very long source lines.
673
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000674- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
675 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
676 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000677
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000678- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
679 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000680
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000681- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
682 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
683
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000684- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
685 correctly.
686
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000687- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
688 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
689 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
690 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
691 between two lines.
692
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000693- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
694 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
695 handlers.
696
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000697- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000698 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
699 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000700
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000701- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
702 considering it exactly like a '*'.
703
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000704- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
705 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000706
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000707- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
708
Gustavo Niemeyer548148812006-01-31 18:34:13 +0000709- Patch #1413711: Certain patterns of differences were making difflib
710 touch the recursion limit.
711
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000712Build
713-----
714
Martin v. Löwis86d66262006-02-17 08:40:11 +0000715- Patch #1432345: Make python compile on DragonFly.
716
Martin v. Löwis856bf9a2006-02-14 20:42:55 +0000717- Build support for Win64-AMD64 was added.
718
Martin v. Löwisa55e55e2006-02-11 15:55:14 +0000719- Patch #1428494: Prefer linking against ncursesw over ncurses library.
720
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000721- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
722
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000723- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
724 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
725
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000726- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
727
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000728- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
729 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
730
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000731- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
732 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
733
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000734- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
735 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
736 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000737 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000738
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000739- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
740 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
741 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
742
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000743- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
744
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000745- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
746 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
747
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000748- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
749 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
750 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
751 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
752 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
753 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
754 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
755 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
756
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000757- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
758 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
759 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
760 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
761
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000762C API
763-----
764
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000765- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
766
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000767- Removed PyRange_New().
768
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000769- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
770 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
771 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
772 mappings.
773
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000774
775Tests
776-----
777
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000778- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000779
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000780- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
781 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
782
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000783
784Documentation
785-------------
786
Georg Brandl8cb30772006-01-20 09:34:29 +0000787- Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.
788
Georg Brandla3a93ae2006-01-20 09:14:36 +0000789- Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
790 values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
791
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000792- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
793
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000794- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
795
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000796- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
797
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000798- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
799
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000800- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
801
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000802- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
803
804- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
805
806- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
807
808- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
809
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000810- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
811 Closes bug #1166582.
812
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000813- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
814 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
815 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
816
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000817Mac
818---
819
820
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000821New platforms
822-------------
823
824- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
825
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000826
827Tools/Demos
828-----------
829
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000830- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
831 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
832 source files that need an encoding declaration.
833 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
834
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000835- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
836
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000837- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000838
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000839- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
840 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000841
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000842What's New in Python 2.4 final?
843===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000844
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000845*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000846
847Core and builtins
848-----------------
849
850- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
851 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
852 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
853
854
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000855What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
856==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000857
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000858*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000859
860Core and builtins
861-----------------
862
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000863- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
864 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
865 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
866
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000867
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000868Library
869-------
870
871- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
872 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
873 raised is re-raised.
874
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000875- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
876 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
877
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000878- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
879 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
880 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
881 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
882 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
883 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
884 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
885 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
886 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
887 by the slice are recomputed now.
888
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000889- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000890
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000891Build
892-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000893
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000894- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
895 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
896 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000897
898C API
899-----
900
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000901- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
902
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000903
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000904What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
905================================
906
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000907*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000908
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000909License
910-------
911
912The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
913is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
914changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
915Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
916intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
917durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
918the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
919License::
920
921 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
922
923says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
924to Python 2.1.1.
925
926The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
927License Version 2.
928
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000929Core and builtins
930-----------------
931
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000932- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
933 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
934 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
935 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
936 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
937 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
938 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000939 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000940 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
941 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
942
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000943- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000944
945Extension Modules
946-----------------
947
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000948- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
949 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
950 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
951 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000952
953Library
954-------
955
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000956- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
957 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
958 returned.
959
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000960- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
961
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000962- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
963 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
964
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000965- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
966
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000967- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
968 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000969
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000970- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
971
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000972- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
973
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000974- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000975 the source code is updated and reloaded.
976
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000977Build
978-----
979
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000980- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000981
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000982What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
983================================
984
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000985*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000986
987Core and builtins
988-----------------
989
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000990- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000991 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
992
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000993- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
994 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
995 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
996 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
997
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000998- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
999 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
1000
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +00001001- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
1002 constant.
1003
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001004- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
1005 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
1006 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
1007 large), and to anomalies such as
1008 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
1009 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
1010 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
1011 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001012
1013Extension modules
1014-----------------
1015
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +00001016- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
1017 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001018 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
1019 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
1020 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001021
1022Library
1023-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001024
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001025- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001026 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001027 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
1028 --swig-cpp.
1029
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +00001030- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
1031 it is set.
1032
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +00001033- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +00001034
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +00001035- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
1036 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
1037 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
1038 Closes bug #1039270.
1039
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001040- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +00001041
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +00001042 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001043 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
1044 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
1045 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
1046 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
1047 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
1048 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
1049 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
1050 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
1051 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
1052 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
1053 + Updates to documentation.
1054
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +00001055- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
1056 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
1057 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
1058 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
1059
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001060- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001061
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +00001062- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
1063 applications should use the getmember function.
1064
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +00001065- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
1066
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +00001067- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
1068 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
1069 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
1070 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
1071 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
1072 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
1073 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
1074 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
1075 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
1076
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001077- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
1078 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +00001079 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001080
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001081- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
1082 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
1083 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
1084 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
1085 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
1086 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
1087 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
1088 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001089
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001090- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1091 the new public features (of which there are many).
1092
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001093- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001094 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1095 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1096 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1097 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001098 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001099
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001100- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1101
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001102- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1103 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1104 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1105 options.
1106
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001107- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1108 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1109 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1110 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1111 conditions under which non-string values work.
1112
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001113Build
1114-----
1115
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001116- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1117 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1118 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1119
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001120- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1121 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1122 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1123 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1124 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001125
1126C API
1127-----
1128
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001129- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1130 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1131
1132- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1133
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001134- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1135 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1136 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1137 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1138 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1139 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1140 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1141 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1142 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1143
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001144- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1145
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001146- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1147 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1148 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001149
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001150Tests
1151-----
1152
1153- test__locale ported to unittest
1154
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001155Mac
1156---
1157
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001158- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1159 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1160 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001161
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001162Tools/Demos
1163-----------
1164
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001165- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1166 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1167 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1168 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1169 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001170
1171
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001172What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1173=================================
1174
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001175*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001176
1177Core and builtins
1178-----------------
1179
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001180- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001181 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1182
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001183- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1184 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1185 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1186 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1187 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1188 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1189 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1190 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001191 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1192 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1193 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1194 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1195 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001196
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001197- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1198 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1199 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1200 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1201 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1202
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001203- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1204
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001205- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1206 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1207
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001208- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1209 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1210 modified the list.
1211
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001212- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1213 functions is now writable.
1214
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001215- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1216 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1217 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1218 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1219
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001220- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1221 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1222 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1223 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1224 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001225
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001226- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1227 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1228
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001229Extension modules
1230-----------------
1231
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001232- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1233
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001234- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1235 data.
1236
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001237- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1238 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1239 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1240 supposed to have been truncated away.
1241
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001242- Added socket.socketpair().
1243
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001244- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1245 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1246
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001247- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001248 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1249
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001250Library
1251-------
1252
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001253- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001254 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001255
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001256- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1257 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1258
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001259- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1260 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1261
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001262- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1263
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001264- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1265 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001266
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001267- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1268 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1269
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001270- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1271
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001272- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1273
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001274- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1275
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001276- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1277 Percivall.
1278
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001279- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1280 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1281
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001282- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1283 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1284 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001285 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001286
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001287- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1288 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1289 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1290 and exponent.
1291
1292- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1293
1294- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001295 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001296 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1297
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001298- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1299 to the readline module.
1300
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001301- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001302 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1303 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001304
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001305- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1306 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1307 contains symlinks.
1308
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001309- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1310 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1311
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001312- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1313 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1314 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1315
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001316- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1317 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1318 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1319 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1320 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1321 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1322 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1323 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1324 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1325 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1326 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1327 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1328 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1329
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001330- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1331
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001332Tools/Demos
1333-----------
1334
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001335- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1336 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1337
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001338- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1339
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001340Build
1341-----
1342
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001343- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1344 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1345 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1346 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1347 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1348 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1349 plans to do so.
1350
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001351- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1352 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1353
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001354- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1355 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1356
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001357- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1358 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1359
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001360- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1361 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1362
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001363- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1364 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1365
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001366C API
1367-----
1368
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001369..
1370
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001371Documentation
1372-------------
1373
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001374- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1375 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1376
1377- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1378 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1379 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001380
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001381New platforms
1382-------------
1383
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001384- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1385
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001386Tests
1387-----
1388
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001389..
1390
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001391Windows
1392-------
1393
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001394- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1395 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1396 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1397 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1398 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1399 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1400 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1401 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1402 the problem.
1403
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001404Mac
1405---
1406
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001407..
1408
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001409
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001410What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1411=================================
1412
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001413*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001414
1415Core and builtins
1416-----------------
1417
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001418- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1419 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1420 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1421 sensitive code.
1422
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001423- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001424 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001425
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001426 @staticmethod
1427 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001428
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001429 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001430
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001431- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1432 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1433 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1434 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1435 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1436 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1437 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1438 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1439 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1440 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1441 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1442
1443 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1444 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1445 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1446 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1447 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1448 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1449 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1450
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001451- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1452 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1453
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001454- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001455 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001456
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001457- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001458 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001459 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1460
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001461- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001462 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1463 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1464
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001465- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1466 types that support garbage collection.
1467
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001468- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1469
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001470- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1471 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1472 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1473 Jython.
1474
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001475- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1476
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001477- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1478 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1479
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001480- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1481 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1482 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001483
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001484- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1485 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1486 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1487
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001488Extension modules
1489-----------------
1490
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001491- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1492
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001493Library
1494-------
1495
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001496- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1497 TIS-620
1498
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001499- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1500 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1501 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1502 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1503 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1504 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1505 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1506 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1507 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1508 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1509
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001510- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1511
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001512- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1513 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1514 same as when the argument is omitted).
1515 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1516
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001517- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1518
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001519- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1520 schemes are offered.
1521
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001522- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1523
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001524- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1525 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1526 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1527
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001528- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1529
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001530- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1531 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1532
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001533- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1534 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1535 when dummy_threading is being used.
1536
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001537- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1538 from a tarfile.
1539
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001540- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001541 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001542
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001543- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1544 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1545 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1546 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1547
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001548- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1549 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1550
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001551- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1552 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1553 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1554 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1555 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1556 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1557 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1558 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1559 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1560 by some other method in progress).
1561
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001562- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1563 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1564 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001565
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001566- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1567
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001568- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1569 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1570 AM Kuchling.
1571
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001572- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1573 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1574 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1575
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001576- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1577 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1578 instead of unsigned.
1579
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001580- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001581 no longer part of the public API.
1582
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001583- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1584 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1585 string methods of the same name).
1586
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001587- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001588 SF patch 945642.
1589
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001590- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1591
1592 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1593
1594 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1595 DocTestSuites.
1596
1597- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1598 that provide thread-local data.
1599
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001600- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1601 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1602
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001603- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1604
1605- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1606 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1607 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1608
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001609- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1610
1611 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1612 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1613 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001614
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001615 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1616 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1617 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1618 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1619
1620 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1621 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1622
1623 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1624 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1625 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1626 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1627
1628 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1629 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1630 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1631 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1632 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1633
1634 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1635 wrapping help output.
1636
1637 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1638 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1639 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001640
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001641C API
1642-----
1643
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001644- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1645 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1646 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1647 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1648 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1649 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1650 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1651 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1652 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1653 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1654 its visible semantics have not changed.
1655
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001656- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1657 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1658
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001659Documentation
1660-------------
1661
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001662- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001663
1664 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001665 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001666
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001667 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001668
1669 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1670
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001671- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001672
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001673Tests
1674-----
1675
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001676- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001677 platforms that use the Makefile.
1678
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001679- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1680 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1681 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1682
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001683
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001684What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1685=================================
1686
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001687*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001688
1689Core and builtins
1690-----------------
1691
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001692- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1693 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1694 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1695 objects now (one object instead of three).
1696
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001697- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1698 Windows DLLs.
1699
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001700- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1701 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001702
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001703- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1704 a new .pyc magic.
1705
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001706- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1707 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1708 be there.
1709
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001710- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1711 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1712 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1713
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001714- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1715 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1716 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1717
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001718- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1719
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001720- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1721 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1722 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001723
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001724- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1725 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1726
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001727- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1728
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001729- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001730 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001731
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001732- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1733
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001734- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1735
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001736- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1737 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1738
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001739- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1740 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1741 Fixes bug #858016 .
1742
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001743- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1744 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1745 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1746
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001747- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1748 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1749 improves their performance (about 35%).
1750
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001751- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1752 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1753 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1754
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001755- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1756 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1757 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1758 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1759
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001760- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1761 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001762 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001763 length is not known).
1764
1765- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1766 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001767 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1768 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001769 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1770
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001771- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1772 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1773
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001774- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1775 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1776 keyword arguments.
1777
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001778- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1779 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1780 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1781
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001782- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1783 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1784 cases.
1785
1786- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1787 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1788 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1789 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1790 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1791 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1792 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1793 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1794 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1795 a release build.
1796
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001797- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1798 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1799
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001800- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001801 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001802
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001803- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1804 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1805 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1806 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1807 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1808 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1809 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1810 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1811 destroyed.
1812
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001813- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1814 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1815 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1816 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1817 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1818 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1819 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1820 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1821
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001822- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1823 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1824 character other than a space.
1825
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001826- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1827 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1828 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1829 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1830 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1831 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1832 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1833 attributes with the same name.
1834
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001835- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1836 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1837 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1838 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1839 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1840 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1841 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1842 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1843 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1844 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1845 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1846 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1847 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1848 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001849
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001850- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1851 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1852 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1853 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1854 This has been repaired.
1855
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001856- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1857
1858- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1859
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001860- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1861 over a sequence.
1862
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001863- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001864 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001865
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001866- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1867
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001868- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1869 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1870 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1871 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1872 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1873 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1874 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1875 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1876
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001877- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1878 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1879 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1880
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001881- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1882 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1883 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1884 freelist.
1885
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001886- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1887 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1888
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001889- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1890 number.
1891
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001892- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1893 a TypeError exception.
1894
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001895- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1896 820195.
1897
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001898- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1899 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1900 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1901
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001902- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001903 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1904 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001905
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001906- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1907 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1908 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1909
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001910- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1911 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001912 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001913
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001914- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001915 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1916 the first call.
1917
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001918
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001919Extension modules
1920-----------------
1921
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001922- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1923 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1924
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001925- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1926 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1927 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1928 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1929 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1930 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1931 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001932
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001933- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1934
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001935- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1936
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001937- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1938 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1939
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001940- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1941 fewer false positives.
1942
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001943- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1944 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1945
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001946- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001947 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1948
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001949- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001950 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001951 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001952 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1953 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001954
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001955- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1956 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1957 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1958 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1959
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001960- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1961 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1962 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1963 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1964 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1965 #897625.
1966
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001967- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1968 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1969
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001970- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1971 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1972 and pops on either side of the deque.
1973
1974- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1975 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1976
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001977- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1978 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1979 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1980 other functions that expect a function argument.
1981
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001982- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1983
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001984- os.getsid was added.
1985
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001986- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1987 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1988 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1989
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001990- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1991
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001992- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1993
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001994- readline.clear_history was added.
1995
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001996- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1997
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001998- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1999
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00002000- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
2001
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00002002- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
2003
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00002004- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
2005
2006- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
2007
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00002008- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
2009
2010- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
2011
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002012- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
2013 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
2014 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
2015
2016- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
2017 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
2018 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
2019 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
2020 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
2021 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
2022 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
2023
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00002024- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
2025 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
2026 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
2027 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002028
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002029- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002030 iterators from a single iterable.
2031
2032- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
2033 of raising a TypeError exception.
2034
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00002035- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
2036 as parameter.
2037
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002038Library
2039-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00002040
Armin Rigoa871ef22006-02-08 12:53:56 +00002041- Added a new module: cProfile, a C profiler with the same interface as the
2042 profile module. cProfile avoids some of the drawbacks of the hotshot
2043 profiler and provides a bit more information than the other two profilers.
2044 Based on "lsprof" (patch #1212837).
2045
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00002046- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
2047
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00002048- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
2049 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
2050 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002051
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00002052- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
2053 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
2054 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00002055
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00002056- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00002057
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00002058- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
2059 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00002060
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00002061- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
2062 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
2063
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002064- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
2065
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002066- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002067 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002068
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002069- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00002070 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002071
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00002072- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
2073
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00002074- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
2075 on cygwin and mingw32.
2076
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00002077- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
2078
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00002079- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
2080 module.
2081
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00002082- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
2083 installation scheme for all platforms.
2084
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002085- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00002086 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002087
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002088- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
2089 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
2090 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
2091
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00002092- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
2093 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2094 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2095
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002096- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2097
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002098- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2099
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002100- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2101 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2102
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002103- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2104 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2105 type pattern with the same value exists.
2106
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002107- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2108 when run from the command prompt).
2109
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002110- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2111 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2112
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002113- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2114 default sort).
2115
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002116- Added global runctx function to profile module
2117
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002118- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2119
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002120- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2121
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002122- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2123
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002124- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002125 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2126 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2127 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2128 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2129 accordingly.
2130
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002131- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2132 decoding standards.
2133
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002134- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2135 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2136 called for all requests.
2137
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002138- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2139 they are passed to the compiler.
2140
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002141- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2142 indent, width and depth.
2143
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002144- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2145 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2146
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002147- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2148 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2149
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002150- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2151
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002152- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2153
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002154- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2155
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002156- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2157 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2158
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002159- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002160 for better performance.
2161
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002162- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002163
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002164- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2165 a string).
2166
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002167- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2168
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002169- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2170
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002171- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2172
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002173- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2174
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002175- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2176 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2177 list of fieldnames.
2178
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002179- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2180 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2181
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002182- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2183
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002184- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2185 empty lists.
2186
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002187- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2188 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2189 and shelves.
2190
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002191- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2192 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2193
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002194- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002195 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2196 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002197
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002198- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2199 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002200 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002201
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002202- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002203 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2204 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2205
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002206- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2207 and removed in Py2.4.
2208
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002209- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2210
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002211- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2212
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002213Tools/Demos
2214-----------
2215
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002216- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2217 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2218
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002219- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2220
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002221- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2222 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2223 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2224 destination in situations where both files are given.
2225
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002226- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2227 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2228 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2229 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2230
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002231- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2232
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002233- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2234 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2235 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2236 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2237 now.
2238
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002239- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2240 in effect
2241
2242- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2243 C-c C-h
2244
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002245- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2246 -d option was given.
2247
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002248Build
2249-----
2250
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002251- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2252 build under OS X.
2253
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002254- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2255 --enable-profiling.
2256
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002257- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2258 is configured --with-tsc.
2259
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002260- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2261 on AMD64.
2262
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002263- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2264 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2265
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002266- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2267 removed.
2268
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002269- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2270 supported (see PEP 11).
2271
2272- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2273
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002274- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2275
2276- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2277 (see PEP 11).
2278
2279- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2280 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2281
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002282C API
2283-----
2284
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002285- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2286 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2287 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2288
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002289- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2290 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2291 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2292 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2293
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002294- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2295 generator objects.
2296
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002297- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2298 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002299 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2300 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002301
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002302- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2303 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2304
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002305- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2306 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2307 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2308 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2309 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2310
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002311- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2312 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2313 about 10% faster.
2314
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002315- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2316 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2317
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002318- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2319 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2320 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2321 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2322
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002323Windows
2324-------
2325
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002326- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2327 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2328 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2329 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2330
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002331- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2332 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2333 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2334
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002335
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002336What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2337===============================
2338
2339*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2340
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002341IDLE
2342----
2343
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002344- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2345 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2346 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2347 context-menu actions.
2348
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002349- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2350 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2351 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2352 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2353 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2354 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2355 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2356 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2357 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2358
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002359
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002360What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2361=============================================
2362
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002363*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002364
2365Core and builtins
2366-----------------
2367
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002368- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002369 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002370 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2371
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002372Extension modules
2373-----------------
2374
2375- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2376 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2377 than once. This has been fixed.
2378
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002379- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2380 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2381 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2382 call.
2383
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002384- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2385
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002386Library
2387-------
2388
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002389- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2390 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2391
2392- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2393 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2394 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2395 restored.
2396
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002397IDLE
2398----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002399
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002400- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002401
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002402Build
2403-----
2404
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002405- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2406 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2407
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002408C API
2409-----
2410
2411Windows
2412-------
2413
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002414- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2415 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2416
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002417- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2418
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002419Mac
2420---
2421
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002422- Various fixes to pimp.
2423
2424- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2425
2426- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2427 more problems than it solves.
2428
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002429
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002430What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2431=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002432
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002433*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2434
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002435Core and builtins
2436-----------------
2437
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002438- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2439 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2440
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002441- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2442 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002443 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002444
2445- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2446 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2447 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002448 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002449
2450- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2451 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002452
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002453- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2454 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2455 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2456
2457- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002458 770247.
2459
2460- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002461
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002462Extension modules
2463-----------------
2464
2465- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2466 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2467
2468- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2469
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002470- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2471
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002472- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2473 contained within the _strptime module.
2474
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002475- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2476 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2477
2478- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002479 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2480
2481- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2482 the find_class attribute, if present.
2483
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002484- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002485
2486 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2487 (SF bug 763298).
2488
2489 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002490 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2491 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2492 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002493
2494 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2495
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002496Library
2497-------
2498
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002499- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2500
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002501- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2502 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2503 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2504 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2505 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2506 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2507 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2508 or Tester().
2509
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002510- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2511 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2512 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2513 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2514 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2515 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2516 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2517 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2518 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002519
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002520 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002521
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002522- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2523 weren't before was an oversight.
2524
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002525- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2526 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2527
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002528- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2529 when there are no lines.
2530
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002531- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2532 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2533
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002534- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2535 to child processes.
2536
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002537- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2538
2539- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2540
2541- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2542 xmlrpclib.
2543
2544- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2545 responses.
2546
2547- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2548 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2549
2550- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2551 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2552 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2553
2554- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2555 used as patterns.
2556
2557- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2558 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2559 than Tk 8.3.
2560
2561- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2562
2563- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002564
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002565Tools/Demos
2566-----------
2567
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002568- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2569
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002570- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2571
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002572- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002573
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002574Build
2575-----
2576
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002577- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2578
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002579- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2580
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002581- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2582 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002583
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002584- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2585 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2586 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002587
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002588C API
2589-----
2590
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002591- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2592 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2593
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002594Windows
2595-------
2596
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002597- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2598 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2599 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2600 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2601 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2602 Python exception ::
2603
2604 thread.error: can't start new thread
2605
2606 is raised now.
2607
2608- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2609 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2610 instead of from DLL teardown.
2611
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002612Mac
2613---
2614
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002615- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002616 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002617 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2618 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2619 the executable in the bundle.
2620
2621- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002622
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002623- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2624
2625- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2626 on Panther.
2627
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002628What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2629================================
2630
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002631*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002632
2633Core and builtins
2634-----------------
2635
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002636- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2637 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2638 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2639 with the -i option.
2640
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002641- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2642 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2643
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002644- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2645 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2646
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002647- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2648 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2649 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2650 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2651 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2652 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2653 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2654 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2655 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2656 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2657 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2658 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2659 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002660
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002661- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2662 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2663 embedded in a lambda expression.
2664
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002665- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2666 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2667 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2668 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2669 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2670
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002671- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2672 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2673 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2674
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002675- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2676 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2677
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002678- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2679 It's writable again.
2680
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002681- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2682 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2683 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002684 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002685
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002686- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2687 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2688 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2689
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002690Extension modules
2691-----------------
2692
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002693- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2694 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2695
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002696- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2697 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2698 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2699 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2700
2701- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2702 collection.
2703
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002704- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2705 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2706 unique within a single program run.
2707
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002708- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2709 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2710
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002711- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2712 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2713
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002714- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2715 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002716
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002717- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2718
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002719- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2720 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2721
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002722- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2723 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2724 for many BSD-derived systems.
2725
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002726
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002727Library
2728-------
2729
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002730- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2731 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2732 primary ones:
2733
2734 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2735 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2736 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2737
2738 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2739 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2740 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2741 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2742 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2743 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2744
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002745- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2746 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2747 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2748 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2749 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2750 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2751 argument.
2752
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002753- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2754 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2755 in the archive.
2756
2757- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2758 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2759
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002760- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2761 569574).
2762
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002763- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2764 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2765 no more.
2766
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002767- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2768 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2769 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2770 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2771 code coverage.
2772
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002773- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2774 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2775 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002776 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2777 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002778
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002779- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2780 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2781 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002782 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002783
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002784- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2785
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002786- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2787 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2788 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2789 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2790
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002791- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2792 handling.
2793
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002794- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2795 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2796
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002797- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2798 in socket.py.
2799
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002800- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2801
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002802- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2803 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2804 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2805 opener with proxy support.
2806
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002807- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2808
2809- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2810
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002811Tools/Demos
2812-----------
2813
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002814- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2815
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002816- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2817
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002818- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2819 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002820
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002821- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2822 files.
2823
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002824Build
2825-----
2826
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002827- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002828 different root directory.
2829
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002830C API
2831-----
2832
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002833- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2834 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2835 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2836 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2837 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2838 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2839 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2840 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2841 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2842 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2843
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002844- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2845 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2846 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2847 from Python.
2848
2849
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002850New platforms
2851-------------
2852
2853None this time.
2854
2855Tests
2856-----
2857
2858- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2859 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2860
2861Windows
2862-------
2863
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002864- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2865
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002866- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2867 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2868 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2869 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2870 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2871 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2872 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2873 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2874 that's what it's for.
2875
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002876Mac
2877---
2878
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002879- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2880 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2881 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2882 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002883- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2884 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2885- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002886
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002887SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2888------------------------------------
2889
2890430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2891598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2892622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2893661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2894683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2895697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2896713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2897724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2898727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2899729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2900730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2901731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2902732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2903733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2904735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2905740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2906744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2907745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2908747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2909749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2910751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2911753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2912755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2913757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2914760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2915
2916
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002917What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2918================================
2919
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002920*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002921
2922Core and builtins
2923-----------------
2924
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002925- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2926 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2927
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002928- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2929 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2930 and cannot be strings).
2931
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002932- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2933 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2934 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2935 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2936
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002937- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2938 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2939 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2940 Python itself.
2941
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002942- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2943 the referenced object, if it has one.
2944
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002945- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2946 the thread started at
2947 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2948
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002949- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2950 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2951 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2952 placed on a list index.
2953
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002954- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2955 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2956 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2957 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2958
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002959- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2960 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2961 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2962 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2963 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2964 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2965 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2966
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002967- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2968 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2969 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2970 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2971 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2972
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002973- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2974 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002975
2976- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2977 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2978 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2979 #693195.)
2980
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002981- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2982 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002983
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002984- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002985 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002986 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2987 interpreter executions, would fail.
2988
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002989- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002990 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002991 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002992
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002993Extension modules
2994-----------------
2995
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002996- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2997 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2998 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2999 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
3000
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00003001- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
3002 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
3003
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00003004- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
3005 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
3006 and Greg Chapman.)
3007
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003008- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
3009 recursively.
3010
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00003011- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00003012 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
3013 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
3014 leaks.
3015
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00003016- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
3017
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00003018- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
3019 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
3020 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
3021 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
3022 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
3023 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
3024 #705836.
3025
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00003026- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00003027 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
3028
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00003029- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
3030 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
3031 See SF bug #692416.
3032
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00003033- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
3034 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
3035
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00003036- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
3037 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
3038 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003039
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003040- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00003041 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
3042 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
3043
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00003044- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
3045 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
3046 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
3047 timeouts to work properly.
3048
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003049Library
3050-------
3051
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003052- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
3053 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
3054 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
3055 future release.
3056
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00003057- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
3058 for querying platform dependent features.
3059
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00003060- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00003061
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00003062- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
3063 pickle protocol versions.
3064
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00003065- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
3066 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
3067 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
3068
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00003069- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
3070
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00003071- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
3072 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
3073 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
3074 modules.
3075
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00003076- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
3077 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
3078 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
3079
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003080- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
3081 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
3082
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00003083- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
3084 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
3085 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
3086
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003087- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00003088 MS Office extensions.
3089
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00003090- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
3091 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
3092
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00003093- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3094 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3095
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003096- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3097 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3098 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3099 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3100 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3101 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3102
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003103- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3104 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3105 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003106
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003107- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3108 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3109 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3110
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003111- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3112
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003113- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3114 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3115 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3116
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003117Tools/Demos
3118-----------
3119
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003120- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3121 See the module docstring for details.
3122
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003123Build
3124-----
3125
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003126- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3127 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003128
3129C API
3130-----
3131
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003132- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3133
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003134- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3135 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3136 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3137
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003138- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3139 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003140
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003141 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3142 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3143 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003144
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003145- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003146 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3147
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003148- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3149 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3150 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003151
3152New platforms
3153-------------
3154
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003155None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003156
3157Tests
3158-----
3159
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003160- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3161 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003162
3163Windows
3164-------
3165
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003166- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3167 function.
3168
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003169- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3170 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003171
3172Mac
3173---
3174
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003175- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3176 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003177
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003178- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3179 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003180
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003181- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3182 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3183 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003184
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003185- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003186 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3187 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003188
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003189- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3190 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003191
3192
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003193What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3194=================================
3195
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003196*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003197
3198Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003199-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003200
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003201- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3202 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3203 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3204
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003205- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3206 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3207 (SF patch #664376.)
3208
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003209- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3210 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3211 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3212 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3213 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3214 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003215 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003216
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003217- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3218 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3219 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3220 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003221 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003222
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003223- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3224 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3225 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3226 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3227 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3228 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3229 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3230 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3231 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3232 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3233 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3234
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003235- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3236 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3237 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3238 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3239 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3240 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3241
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003242- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3243 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3244
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003245- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3246 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3247 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3248 case.)
3249
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003250- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3251 passed as unicode strings.
3252
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003253- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3254 See SF bug #683467.
3255
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003256- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3257 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3258
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003259- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3260
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003261- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3262
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003263- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3264 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3265 arguments.
3266
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003267- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3268 See SF bug #667147.
3269
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003270- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003271 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003272 See SF bug #676155.
3273
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003274- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003275 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003276 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3277 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3278 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3279 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3280 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3281 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003282
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003283Extension modules
3284-----------------
3285
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003286- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3287 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3288 tp_as_number pointer.
3289
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003290- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3291 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3292 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3293 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3294 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3295
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003296- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3297
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003298- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3299
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003300- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003301 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003302 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3303 patch #678531.)
3304
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003305- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3306 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3307
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003308- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3309 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3310
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003311- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3312
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003313- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3314 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3315 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3316
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003317- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3318
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003319- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3320 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3321
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003322- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003323
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003324- datetime changes:
3325
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003326 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3327
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003328 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3329 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3330 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3331 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3332 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3333 now.
3334
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003335 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003336 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3337 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003338
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003339 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003340 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003341 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3342 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3343 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3344 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003345
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003346 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3347 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3348 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003349 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3350
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003351 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3352 by a later example coded by Guido.
3353
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003354 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003355 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3356 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3357 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003358 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3359 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3360
3361 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3362 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3363 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3364 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3365 tzinfo subclass instance.
3366
3367 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3368 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3369 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3370 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3371 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3372 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3373 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3374 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003375
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003376 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3377 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3378 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3379 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3380 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003381 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3382
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003383 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003384
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003385 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3386 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3387 as a naive datetime object.
3388
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003389 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3390 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3391 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3392
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003393 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3394 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3395 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3396 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3397 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3398 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3399 comparison.
3400
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003401 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3402 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3403 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3404 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003405 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003406
3407 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003408
3409 and ::
3410
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003411 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3412
3413 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3414 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3415 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3416 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3417
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003418 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3419 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3420 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3421 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3422 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3423
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003424 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3425 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003426 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3427 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003428
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003429Library
3430-------
3431
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003432- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3433 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3434
3435- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3436 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3437 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3438 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3439 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3440 See PEP 307 for details.
3441
3442- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3443 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3444
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003445- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3446 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003447 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003448 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3449 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003450 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003451
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003452- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3453 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3454
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003455- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3456 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3457 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3458
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003459- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3460
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003461- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3462 exception.
3463
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003464- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3465 class.
3466
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003467- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3468 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3469 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3470
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003471- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3472 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3473
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003474- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003475 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3476 See SF bug #659228.
3477
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003478- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3479 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3480 See SF patch #651082.
3481
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003482- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003483
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003484- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3485 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3486
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003487- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003488 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003489
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003490- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3491 DOS paths from other platforms.
3492
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003493Tools/Demos
3494-----------
3495
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003496- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3497 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3498 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3499 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3500 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3501 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3502 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3503 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3504 example:
3505
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003506 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3507 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003508
3509 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3510
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003511
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003512Build
3513-----
3514
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003515- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3516 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3517 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003518 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3519
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003520 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3521
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003522- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3523 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3524 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3525 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3526 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3527 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3528 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3529 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3530 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3531
3532- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3533 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3534 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3535 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3536
3537- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3538 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3539
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003540C API
3541-----
3542
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003543- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3544 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003545
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003546- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3547 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3548 tp_as_number pointer.
3549
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003550- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3551 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3552 (SF #681367)
3553
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003554- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3555 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3556 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3557 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003558
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003559Tests
3560-----
3561
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003562- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003563 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3564 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3565 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3566 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3567 pydoc.)
3568
3569- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3570
3571- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003572
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003573Windows
3574-------
3575
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003576- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3577 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3578 time).
3579
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003580- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3581 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3582
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003583- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3584 release without strong cryptography.
3585
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003586- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003587 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003588
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003589- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3590 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3591
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003592Mac
3593---
3594
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003595- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3596 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003597
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003598- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3599 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3600 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003601
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003602- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3603 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003604
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003605- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3606 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3607 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3608 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003609
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003610- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003611 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3612 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3613 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003614
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003615
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003616What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003617=================================
3618
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003619*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003620
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003621Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003622--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003623
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003624- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3625
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003626- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3627 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003628 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003629 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003630 a different meaning than before.
3631
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003632- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003633 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003634 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003635
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003636- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003637 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003638 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003639
3640- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3641 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3642 and deallocation.
3643
3644- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3645 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3646
3647- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3648 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3649 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3650 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3651 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3652
3653- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3654 now detected by the garbage collector.
3655
3656- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3657 [SF bug 519621]
3658
3659- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3660 identifier.
3661
3662- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3663 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3664 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3665 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3666 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3667 [SF bug 563060]
3668
3669- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3670 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3671 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3672 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3673 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3674
3675- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3676 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3677 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3678
3679- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3680
3681- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3682 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3683 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3684 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3685 state of the slots would be lost.)
3686
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003687Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003688-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003689
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003690- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003691 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3692 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3693 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3694 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003695 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3696 Jython 2.1.
3697
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003698- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003699 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003700 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3701 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3702 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3703 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3704 these, see PEP 302.
3705
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003706- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3707 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3708 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3709
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003710- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3711 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3712 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3713
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003714- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3715 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3716 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3717
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003718- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3719 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3720 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3721 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3722 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3723 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3724 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3725 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3726 releases or implementations.
3727
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003728- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003729 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3730 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003731
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003732- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3733 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3734
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003735- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3736 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3737 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3738
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003739- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3740 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3741
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003742- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3743 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003744 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3745 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003746
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003747- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3748 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3749 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3750 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3751 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3752
3753 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3754 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3755 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3756 pattern.
3757
3758 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3759 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3760 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3761 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3762
3763 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3764 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3765 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3766 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3767 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3768 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3769
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003770- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3771 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3772 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3773 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3774 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3775 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3776 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3777 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003778
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003779- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3780 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3781 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3782 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3783 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003784 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3785 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3786 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3787 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3788 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3789 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3790 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003791
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003792- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3793 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3794
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003795- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3796 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3797 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3798 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3799 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3800 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3801 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3802 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3803 to Zack Weinberg!
3804
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003805- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3806 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3807 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3808 type. This has been fixed now.
3809
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003810- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3811 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3812 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3813
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003814- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3815 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3816 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3817 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3818 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3819 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3820 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3821 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003822 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003823
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003824- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3825 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3826 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003827
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003828- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3829 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3830 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3831 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3832 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3833 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3834 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3835 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003836 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003837 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3838 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3839
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003840- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3841 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3842 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3843 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3844 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3845 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3846 this.)
3847
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003848- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3849 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003850 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003851 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003852 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3853 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003854 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3855 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003856
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003857- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3858 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3859 currently running.
3860
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003861- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3862 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3863 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3864 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3865
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003866- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3867 as directory names.
3868
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003869- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3870 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3871
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003872- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3873 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3874
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003875- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003876 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3877 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003878
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003879- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3880 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3881 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3882 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3883 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3884
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003885- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3886 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3887 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3888 removed.
3889
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003890- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3891 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3892 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3893
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003894- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3895 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3896 to __debug__.
3897
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003898- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3899 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3900 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3901
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003902- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3903 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3904 deprecated now.
3905
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003906- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3907 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3908 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003909
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003910- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3911 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3912 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3913 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3914 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003915
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003916- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3917 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3918
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003919- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3920 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3921 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003922 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003923 is backward compatible.
3924
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003925- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3926 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3927 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3928 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3929 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3930
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003931- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3932 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3933 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3934 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3935 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3936 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003937
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003938- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3939 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3940
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003941- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3942 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3943
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003944- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3945 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3946 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3947 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3948 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3949
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003950- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3951 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3952 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3953
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003954- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003955 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3956
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003957- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3958 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3959 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003960
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003961- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3962 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3963
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003964- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3965 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3966 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3967
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003968- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3969
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003970Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003971-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003972
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003973- Added three operators to the operator module:
3974 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3975 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3976 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3977
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003978- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3979
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003980- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3981 archives.
3982
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003983- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3984 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3985 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3986
3987 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3988
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003989- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3990 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3991 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003992 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003993
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003994- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3995 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3996 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3997 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003998 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3999 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
4000 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
4001 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00004002
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00004003- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
4004 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00004005
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00004006- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
4007
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00004008- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
4009 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
4010
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00004011- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
4012 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
4013 supported.
4014
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00004015- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
4016
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00004017- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
4018 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00004019
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00004020- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
4021 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
4022
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00004023- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
4024
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004025- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
4026 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
4027
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00004028- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
4029 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
4030 functions but callable type objects.
4031
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004032- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004033 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004034 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004035
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00004036- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
4037 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00004038
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00004039- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
4040 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00004041
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00004042- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
4043 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
4044 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
4045 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
4046
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00004047- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
4048 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00004049
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00004050- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
4051 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
4052 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
4053 and __imul__.
4054
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00004055- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00004056 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
4057 is called.
4058
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00004059- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
4060 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
4061 interpreter was compiled.
4062
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004063- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
4064 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
4065 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004066 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004067 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
4068 1, not 2.
4069
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00004070- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
4071 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
4072 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
4073 limit.
4074
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00004075- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
4076 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
4077 bug #623464.
4078
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00004079- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
4080 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
4081 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
4082 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
4083
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004084Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004085-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004086
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00004087- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
4088
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00004089- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
4090 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
4091 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
4092 with Python 2.3a2.
4093
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004094- os.path exposes getctime.
4095
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004096- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004097 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004098 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004099 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004100 unit tests of floating point results.
4101
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004102- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4103 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4104 has been increased.
4105
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004106- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4107 executed.
4108
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004109- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4110 postinstallation script.
4111
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004112- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4113 test the current module.
4114
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004115- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004116 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4117 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4118 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4119 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4120
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004121- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004122 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004123 Ward's Optik package.
4124
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004125- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4126 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4127 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4128 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4129
4130- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4131 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004132 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004133
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004134- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4135 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4136 shelf are binary pickles.
4137
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004138- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4139 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4140
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004141- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4142 modules are iterators now.
4143
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004144- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4145 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4146 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4147 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4148 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4149 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004150
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004151- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4152 with their entity value.
4153
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004154- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4155
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004156- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4157 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004158
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004159- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4160 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004161 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004162
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004163- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4164 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4165 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4166 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4167 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4168 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4169 main():
4170
4171 import locale
4172 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4173
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004174- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4175 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4176
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004177- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4178 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4179 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4180 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4181 to the new standard.
4182
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004183- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4184 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4185 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4186 an extension to the database.
4187
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004188- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4189 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4190 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4191 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004192 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004193
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004194- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004195 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004196
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004197- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4198 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4199 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4200 bounded integers.
4201
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004202- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4203 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4204 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4205 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4206 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4207 in existence.
4208
4209 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4210 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4211 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4212 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4213 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4214 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4215
4216 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4217 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4218 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4219 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4220
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004221- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4222 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4223 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4224
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004225- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4226
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004227- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4228 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4229 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4230 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4231
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004232- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4233 argument.
4234
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004235- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4236 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4237 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4238 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4239 [SF patch 560794].
4240
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004241- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4242 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4243 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004244 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4245 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4246 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004247
4248- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4249 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004250
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004251- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4252 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4253 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4254 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004255
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004256- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4257 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4258 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4259 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4260 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4261
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004262- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004263
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004264- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4265
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004266- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4267 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4268 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4269 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4270 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4271 identical to None.
4272
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004273- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4274 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4275 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4276 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4277 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4278 results now.
4279
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004280- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4281 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4282
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004283- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4284 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4285 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4286 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4287 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4288 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4289 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4290 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4291
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004292- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4293
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004294- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4295 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4296
4297- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4298 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4299 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4300 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4301 and other systems.
4302
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004303- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4304 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4305 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4306 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 +00004307 work well with these.
4308
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004309- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4310
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004311- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004312 connections.
4313
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004314- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4315 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4316 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4317
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004318- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4319 sets
4320
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004321- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4322 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4323 name.
4324
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004325- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4326 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4327 passed in.
4328
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004329- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004330 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004331 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4332 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004333
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004334- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4335
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004336- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4337
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004338- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4339 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4340 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4341
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004342- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4343 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4344 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4345 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004346 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004347
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004348- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004349 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004350 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004351
4352- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4353 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4354 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4355
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004356- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004357 the value of its expression argument.
4358
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004359- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4360 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4361 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4362
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004363- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4364 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4365 skipstone browser was included.
4366
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004367- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4368 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4369
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004370Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004371-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004372
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004373- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4374 names in addition to accepting file names.
4375
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004376- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4377 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4378 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4379 still used and useful.)
4380
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004381- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4382 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4383 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4384 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004385
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004386- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4387 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4388 the generated binary.
4389
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004390Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004391-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004392
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004393- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4394
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004395- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4396 except in the hands of experts.
4397
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004398- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004399 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4400 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4401 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004402
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004403- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4404 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4405 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4406 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4407 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4408 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4409 builds.
4410
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004411- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4412 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4413 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4414 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4415 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4416 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4417 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4418 new type.
4419
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004420- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004421
4422 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4423 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4424 positive infinities.
4425
4426 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4427 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4428 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4429 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4430 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4431 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4432 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4433
4434 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4435
4436 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4437
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004438- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4439 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4440 size of the executable.
4441
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004442- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4443 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4444 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4445 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004446
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004447- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4448
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004449- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4450 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4451 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004452
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004453- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4454 well as Unix.
4455
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004456- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4457 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4458 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4459 modules in the README file for details.
4460
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004461C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004462-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004463
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004464- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4465 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004466 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004467 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004468 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004469
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004470- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4471 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4472 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4473 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4474 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4475 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004476 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004477 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4478 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4479 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4480 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4481 aligned.)
4482
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004483- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4484 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4485 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4486
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004487- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4488 level.
4489
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004490- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4491 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4492 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4493 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4494 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4495
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004496- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4497 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4498 code.
4499
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004500- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4501 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4502 adjusting for negative indices.
4503
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004504- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4505 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4506 object.
4507
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004508- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4509 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4510 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4511
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004512- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4513 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004514
4515- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4516
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004517- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4518 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4519 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4520 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4521
4522- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4523
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004524- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004525
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004526- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004527 without going through the buffer API.
4528
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004529- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004530
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004531- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4532 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4533 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4534 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4535
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004536- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4537 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4538
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004539- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004540 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4541
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004542New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004543-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004544
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004545- OpenVMS is now supported.
4546
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004547- AtheOS is now supported.
4548
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004549- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4550
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004551- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4552
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004553Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004554-----
4555
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004556- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4557 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4558 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004559
4560Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004561-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004562
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004563- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4564 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4565 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4566 bugs.
4567 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004568 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004569 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4570 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004571 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004572
4573- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004574 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004575
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004576- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4577 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4578
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004579- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4580 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004581 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004582 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4583
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004584- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4585 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4586 use files" uninstall option).
4587
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004588- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4589
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004590- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4591 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4592
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004593- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4594 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4595 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4596
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004597- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4598 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4599 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4600 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4601 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004602 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4603 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4604 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004605
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004606- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004607 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004608 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4609 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4610 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4611 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4612 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4613 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4614 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4615 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4616 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4617 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4618 work around.
4619
4620- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4621 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4622 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4623 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4624 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4625 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4626 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4627 specified with O_CREAT too).
4628
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004629Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004630----
4631
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004632- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004633
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004634- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4635 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4636 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4637
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004638- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4639 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4640 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4641
4642- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4643 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4644 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4645 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4646 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4647 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4648 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4649 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004650
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004651- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4652 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4653 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004654
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004655- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4656 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4657 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4658 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4659 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004660
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004661- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4662 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4663 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004664
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004665- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4666 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004667
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004668- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4669 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4670 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4671 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4672 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004673
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004674- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4675 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4676 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4677
4678- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4679 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4680 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004681
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004682- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4683 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4684 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4685 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004686 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004687
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004688- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4689 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004690
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004691- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4692 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004693
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004694- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004695 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004696 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4697 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004698
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004699
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004700What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004701===============================
4702
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004703*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4704
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004705Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004706--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004707
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004708- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4709 with a custom metaclass.
4710
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004711Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004712-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004713
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004714- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4715 are proxies.
4716
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004717Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004718-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004719
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004720- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4721 very short strings.
4722
4723- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4724 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4725 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4726 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4727 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4728
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004729Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004730-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004731
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004732- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4733 close or delete time).
4734
4735- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4736 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4737
4738- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4739
4740- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004741 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004742
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004743Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004744-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004745
4746Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004747-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004748
4749C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004750-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004751
4752New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004753-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004754
4755Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004756-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004757
4758Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004759-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004760
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004761- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4762
4763- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4764 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4765
4766- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4767 deleted at process exit time.
4768
4769- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4770 in backslash.
4771
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004772Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004773----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004774
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004775- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4776 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4777 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4778
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004779
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004780What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004781===========================
4782
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004783*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4784
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004785Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004786--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004787
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004788- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4789 been extensively updated. See
4790
4791 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4792
4793 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4794
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004795- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4796 deleted!
4797
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004798- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4799 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4800 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4801 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4802 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4803
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004804- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4805
4806 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4807 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4808
4809 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4810 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4811 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4812 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4813 supported anyway.
4814
4815 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4816 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4817
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004818- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4819 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4820 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4821 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4822 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004823
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004824- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4825 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4826 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4827
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004828Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004829-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004830
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004831- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4832 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4833 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4834 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4835 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4836 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004837 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4838 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4839 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4840 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004841
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004842- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4843 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4844 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4845
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004846Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004847-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004848
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004849- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4850
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004851Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004852-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004853
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004854- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4855 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4856 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4857 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4858 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4859 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4860
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004861- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4862
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004863- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4864
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004865- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4866
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004867- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4868 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4869 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4870
4871- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4872
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004873Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004874-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004875
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004876- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4877 off a search on Google.
4878
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004879Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004880-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004881
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004882- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4883 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4884 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4885 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4886 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4887 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4888 other platforms should do likewise.
4889
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004890- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4891 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4892 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4893
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004894C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004895-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004896
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004897- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4898 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4899 producing key-value pairs.
4900
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004901- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004902 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004903 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4904 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4905 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4906 previously went unchallenged.
4907
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004908New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004909-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004910
4911Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004912-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004913
4914Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004915-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004916
4917Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004918----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004919
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004920- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4921 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004922
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004923- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4924 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4925 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4926 home.
4927
4928
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004929What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004930===========================
4931
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004932*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4933
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004934Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004935--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004936
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004937- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4938 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004939
4940 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004941 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004942
4943 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4944 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004945 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004946 This needs to be documented.
4947
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004948- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4949 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4950
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004951- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4952 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4953 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4954
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004955- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4956 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4957
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004958- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4959 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4960 class forbids it).
4961
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004962- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4963 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4964 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4965
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004966- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4967
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004968Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004969-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004970
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004971- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4972 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004973 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004974
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004975- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4976 (like 1 + '').
4977
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004978Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004979-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004980
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004981- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4982 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4983 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4984 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004985 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004986 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4987
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004988- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4989 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4990 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4991 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4992
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004993- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4994 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004995 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4996 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4997 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004998
4999- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
5000 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005001
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00005002- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
5003 bytes on its input.
5004
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005005Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005006-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005007
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005008- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00005009 convenience function.
5010
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005011- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
5012 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
5013 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005014 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
5015 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
5016 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
5017 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
5018 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
5019 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005020
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00005021- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
5022 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
5023 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
5024 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
5025
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00005026- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
5027 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
5028 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
5029
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005030- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
5031 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
5032 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
5033 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
5034
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005035- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
5036 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005037 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005038 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
5039 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
5040 new -l and -e options.
5041
5042- statcache is now deprecated.
5043
5044- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
5045 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005046 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005047 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
5048 time properly taken into account.
5049
5050- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
5051 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
5052 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
5053 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
5054
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005055Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005056-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005057
5058Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005059-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005060
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005061- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
5062 is built with libdb3 if available.
5063
5064- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
5065
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005066C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005067-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005068
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00005069- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
5070 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
5071 PySequence_Size().
5072
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005073- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
5074
5075- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
5076 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
5077 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
5078
5079- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
5080 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
5081
5082- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
5083 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
5084
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005085New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005086-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005087
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005088- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
5089 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
5090
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00005091- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
5092 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
5093
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005094- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5095
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005096Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005097-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005098
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005099- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5100 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5101
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005102Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005103-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005104
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005105Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005106----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005107
5108- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5109 removed completely in the next release.
5110
5111- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5112 OSX.
5113
5114- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5115 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5116
5117- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5118
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005119
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005120What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005121===========================
5122
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005123*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5124
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005125Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005126--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005127
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005128- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005129 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005130 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005131 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5132 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005133 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5134 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005135 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5136 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005137
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005138- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5139 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5140
5141- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5142 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5143
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005144Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005145-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005146
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005147- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5148 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5149 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5150 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5151 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5152 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5153 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5154 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5155
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005156- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5157 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5158 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5159 example).
5160
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005161- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005162 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005163 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005164 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005165
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005166- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5167 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5168 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005169 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005170
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005171- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5172 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5173 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5174 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5175 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5176 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5177
5178 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5179
5180 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5181
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005182Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005183-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005184
5185- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5186
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005187- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5188
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005189- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5190 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005191
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005192- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5193 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5194 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5195 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5196 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5197 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005198 attributes.
5199
5200- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5201 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5202 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005203
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005204- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5205 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5206 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005207
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005208- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5209 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5210 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005211 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5212 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5213
5214- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5215 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005216
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005217Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005218-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005219
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005220- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5221 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5222
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005223- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5224 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5225 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5226 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5227
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005228- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5229 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5230 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5231 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5232
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005233 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5234 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5235 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5236 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5237 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5238 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5239 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5240 without losing information).
5241
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005242- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005243 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5244 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5245 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5246 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5247 module).
5248
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005249 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005250 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5251 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5252 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5253 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005254
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005255- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005256 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5257 encoding.
5258
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005259- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5260 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5261
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005262- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005263 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5264
5265- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5266 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5267 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5268 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5269
5270- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5271
5272- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5273 ON, and OFF.
5274
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005275- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5276 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5277
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005278Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005279-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005280
5281- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5282 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5283 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005284
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005285- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5286 been added: -X and -E.
5287
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005288Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005289-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005290
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005291- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5292 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5293
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005294C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005295-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005296
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005297- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5298 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5299 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5300 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5301 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5302
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005303- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5304 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5305 as long) arguments.
5306
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005307- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5308 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5309 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5310 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5311 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5312 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5313
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005314- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5315 input.
5316
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005317New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005318-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005319
5320Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005321-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005322
5323Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005324-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005325
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005326- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5327 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5328 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5329
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005330- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5331 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5332 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005333 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005334
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005335 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5336 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5337 import signal
5338 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005339
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005340 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005341 while 1:
5342 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005343 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005344 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5345 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5346 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5347 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005348
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005349
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005350What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5351===========================
5352
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005353*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5354
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005355Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005356--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005357
5358- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5359 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5360 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5361
5362- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5363 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5364 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5365 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5366 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5367 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5368 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005369
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005370- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005371 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005372 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5373 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5374 associate a docstring with a property.
5375
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005376- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5377 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5378 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5379 other built-in object types.
5380
5381- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5382 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5383 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5384 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5385 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5386
5387- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5388 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5389
5390- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5391 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005392 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005393 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5394 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5395 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5396 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5397 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5398
5399- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5400 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5401 class.
5402
5403- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5404 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5405 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5406 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5407
5408- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5409 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5410 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5411 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5412
5413- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5414 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5415
5416- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5417 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5418 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5419 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5420 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005421 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005422 with the same value as s.
5423
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005424- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5425
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005426Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005427----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005428
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005429- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5430
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005431- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5432 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5433 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5434 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5435 objects.
5436
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005437- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5438 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005439 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5440 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5441
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005442- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5443 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5444 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5445
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005446Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005447-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005448
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005449- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5450 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5451 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5452 by the instances.
5453
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005454- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5455 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5456 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5457
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005458- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5459 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5460 before the entire comparison is complete.
5461
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005462- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5463 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5464 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5465
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005466- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5467 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5468 getwriter().
5469
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005470- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5471 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5472
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005473- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005474 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5475 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5476
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005477- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5478 iterable object.
5479
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005480- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5481 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005482
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005483- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5484 authentication.
5485
5486- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5487 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005488
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005489- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005490 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5491 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5492 a sample driver.)
5493
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005494Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005495-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005496
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005497- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5498 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5499 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5500 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5501 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5502 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5503 kernel has large file support.
5504
5505- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5506 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5507 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5508 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5509 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5510
5511- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5512 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5513 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5514
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005515C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005516-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005517
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005518- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5519 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5520
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005521New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005522-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005523
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005524- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5525 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5526
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005527Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005528-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005529
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005530- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5531 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5532 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5533 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5534 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5535
5536- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5537 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5538 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5539 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5540
5541- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5542 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5543
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005544Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005545-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005546
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005547- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005548 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5549 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005550
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005551
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005552What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5553===========================
5554
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005555*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5556
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005557Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005558----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005559
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005560- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5561 big to represent as a C double.
5562
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005563- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5564 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5565 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5566 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5567 restriction).
5568
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005569- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5570 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5571 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5572 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5573 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5574
5575 >>> dir([])
5576 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5577 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5578 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5579 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5580 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5581 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5582 'reverse', 'sort']
5583
5584 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5585
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005586- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005587 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5588 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5589 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5590 OverflowError exception.
5591
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005592- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005593 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005594 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5595 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5596 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5597 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5598 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005599 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005600 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5601 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5602
5603 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5604 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5605 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5606 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005607
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005608- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005609 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5610 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5611 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5612 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5613 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5614 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5615 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5616 once it is created.
5617
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005618- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5619 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5620 (key, value) pairs.
5621
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005622- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005623 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5624 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5625
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005626- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5627 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5628 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5629 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5630 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005631
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005632- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005633 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5634 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5635
5636 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5637
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005638- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005639 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5640
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005641Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005642-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005643
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005644- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005645 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5646 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005647
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005648- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5649 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5650 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5651 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5652 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5653 in this area anymore).
5654
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005655- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5656 threading.Timer.
5657
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005658- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5659 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5660
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005661- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005662 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5663
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005664- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005665 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5666 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5667 converted to Python longs.
5668
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005669- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005670 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5671
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005672- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5673 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5674 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5675
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005676Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005677-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005678
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005679- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5680 division operators as per PEP 238.
5681
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005682Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005683-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005684
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005685- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5686 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5687 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5688 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5689
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005690C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005691-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005692
5693- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005694
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005695- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5696 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005697 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005698
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005699 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5700 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005701 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005702 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005703
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005704- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005705 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5706 module:
5707
5708 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005709
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005710 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5711 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005712
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005713 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5714 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005715
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005716 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5717
5718 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5719
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005720- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005721 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5722 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5723 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005724
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005725New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005726-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005727
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005728- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5729 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5730 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5731 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5732 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005733
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005734Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005735-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005736
5737Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005738-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005739
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005740- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5741 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5742 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5743 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005744 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5745 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5746 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5747 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5748 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005749
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005750- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005751 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5752
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005753
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005754What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5755===========================
5756
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005757*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5758
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005759Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005760-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005761
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005762- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5763 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5764
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005765- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5766 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5767 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005768
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005769- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5770 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5771 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5772 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005773
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005774- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5775
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005776- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005777
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005778Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005779-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005780
5781- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005782 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005783 the module docstring for details.
5784
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005785Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005786-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005787
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005788- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005789 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5790 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5791 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005792
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005793- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5794 Nick Mathewson.
5795
5796Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005797----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005798
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005799- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5800 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5801 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5802 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5803 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5804 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5805 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5806 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5807
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005808- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5809 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5810 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5811 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5812
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005813- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5814 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5815 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5816 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5817 come a long way).
5818
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005819- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5820 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5821 write filters for these warnings).
5822
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005823- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5824 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5825 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5826 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5827 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5828
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005829- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5830 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5831 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5832 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5833 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5834 older distribution.
5835
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005836Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005837-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005838
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005839- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5840 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005841 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005842
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005843- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5844 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5845 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5846
5847- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5848
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005849- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5850
5851- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5852
5853- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5854
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005855- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005856
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005857- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5858
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005859New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005860-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005861
5862C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005863-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005864
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005865- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5866 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5867 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5868 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5869 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5870 against buffer overruns.
5871
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005872- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005873 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5874 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005875 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5876 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5877 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5878
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005879- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5880 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5881 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5882 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5883 deprecated.
5884
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005885Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005886-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005887
5888- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5889 relevant is found.
5890
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005891
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005892What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005893===========================
5894
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005895*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5896
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005897Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005898----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005899
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005900- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5901 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5902 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5903 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5904 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5905 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5906 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5907 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005908 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005909 repaired.
5910
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005911- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005912 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005913 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5914 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5915 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5916 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5917 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5918 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5919 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5920 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5921
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005922- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5923 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5924 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5925 leading BMO character).
5926
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005927- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5928 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5929 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5930
5931 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5932 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5933 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005934
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005935 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5936 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5937 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5938 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5939 for various simple to use conversions.
5940
5941 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5942 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5943
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005944 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5945 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5946 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5947 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5948 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5949 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5950 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5951 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5952 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5953 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5954 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5955 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5956 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5957 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5958 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005959
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005960- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5961 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5962 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005963 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005964 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005965
5966 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005967 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5968 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5969 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5970 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5971 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005972 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5973 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005974
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005975 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5976 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5977 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005978 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005979
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005980- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5981 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5982 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5983 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5984 floating arithmetic,
5985
5986 x = 9007199254740992.0
5987 print long(x)
5988
5989 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5990 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5991 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5992 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5993 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5994 functions are of good quality).
5995
5996 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5997 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5998 algorithms to break.
5999
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00006000- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
6001 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
6002 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
6003 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
6004 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
6005 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
6006 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
6007 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
6008 order.
6009
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006010- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
6011 operation along the most common code paths.
6012
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006013- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
6014 the same as dict.has_key(x).
6015
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00006016- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
6017 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
6018 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
6019 {}.update(UserDict())
6020
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006021- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
6022 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
6023 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
6024 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
6025 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
6026 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
6027 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
6028 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
6029
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006030- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00006031 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006032
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006033 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00006034 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
6035 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00006036 join() method of strings
6037 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006038 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
6039 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006040 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00006041 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006042
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00006043- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
6044 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
6045
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006046- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
6047 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
6048
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00006049- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
6050 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
6051 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
6052 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
6053
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006054- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
6055 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006056 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006057 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
6058 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00006059
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00006060- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
6061
6062
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006063Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006064-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006065
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006066- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006067 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006068 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
6069 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
6070
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00006071- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
6072 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
6073
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00006074- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
6075 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
6076 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
6077 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
6078
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00006079- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
6080 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
6081 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
6082
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00006083- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
6084
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00006085- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
6086
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00006087- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
6088 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
6089 that are still imported into string.py).
6090
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006091- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
6092
6093- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6094 Now it does.
6095
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006096- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6097
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006098- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6099 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6100 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6101 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6102 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006103 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6104 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006105
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006106- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6107 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6108 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6109 'help(object)'.
6110
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006111Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006112-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006113
6114- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006115 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006116 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6117 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6118
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006119- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006120 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6121 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006122
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006123C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006124-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006125
6126- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6127 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006128
6129----
6130
6131**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**