blob: 1b6ef048320a1a4c1cf814c242703168df316c55 [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. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000015- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
16
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000017- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
18 and long longs.
19
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000020- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
21 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
22 message in this case.
23
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000024- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
25 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
26 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
27 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
28 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
29
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000030- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000031
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000032- Speed up some Unicode operations.
33
34- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
35
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000036- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000037 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
38
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000039- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
40
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000041- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
42 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
43
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000044- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
45
46- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
47
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000048- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
49 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
50 was empty.
51
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000052- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
53 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
54
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000055- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000056 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000057
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000058- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
59 codes.
60
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000061- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
62 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
63 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
64
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000065- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
66 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
67
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000068- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000069 (fixes bug #1119418).
70
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000071- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
72
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000073- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
74 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
75
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000076- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
77 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
78 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
79
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000080- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
81
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000082- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
83 reference counts in some error exit cases.
84
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000085- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
86 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
87 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
88 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
89 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
90 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
91 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
92 realloc.
93
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000094- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
95 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
96
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000097- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
98 like their int counterparts.
99
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000100- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
101 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
102 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
103 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
104 for a longer write-up of the problem).
105
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000106- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
107 serializing floats.
108
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000109- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
110 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
111 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
112
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000113- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
114 278.
115
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000116- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
117 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
118 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
119 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000120 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000121 PyNumber_*().
122 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
123
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000124- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
125 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
126 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
127 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
128
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000129- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
130 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
131 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
132 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
133 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
134
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000135- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
136 disabled caused a crash.
137
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000138- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
139 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
140
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000141- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000142 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
143
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000144- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
145
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000146- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000147 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
148 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
149 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000150
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000151- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
152
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000153- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
154 returning None.
155
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000156- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000157 ('\') with a specific error message.
158
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000159- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
160
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000161- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
162 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
163
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000164- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000165 an ferror() call.
166
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000167- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
168 list.sort().
169
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000170- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
171 (2+3) --> (5).
172
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000173- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
174
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000175- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
176 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000177
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000178- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
179 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
180 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
181
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000182- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
183 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
184 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
185
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000186Extension Modules
187-----------------
188
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000189- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
190 problem on AIX.
191
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000192- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
193
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000194- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
195
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000196- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
197
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000198- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
199 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
200
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000201- Get bsddb module to build with BSD DB version 3.2
202
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000203- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
204 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
205
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000206- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
207
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000208- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
209 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
210
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000211- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
212 returns in cStringIO.c.
213
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000214- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
215 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
216
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000217- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
218
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000219- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
220
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000221- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
222 the file system encoding.
223
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000224- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
225 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000226
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000227- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
228
229- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000230 line without newlines.
231
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000232- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
233 on Windows.
234
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000235- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000236 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
237
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000238- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
239 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
240 for large or negative values.
241
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000242- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000243 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000244
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000245- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
246
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000247- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
248 if available on the platform.
249
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000250- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
251 available on the platform.
252
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000253- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
254 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
255
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000256- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
257
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000258- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
259 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
260 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
261
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000262- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
263
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000264- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
265 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
266
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000267- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000268 file size.
269
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000270- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
271
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000272- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
273 {remove_history,replace_history}
274
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000275- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
276 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000277
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000278- stat_float_times is now True.
279
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000280- array.array objects are now picklable.
281
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000282- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
283 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
284
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000285- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
286 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
287 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
288
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000289- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
290 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000291
292Library
293-------
294
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000295- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000296 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
297 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
298 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
299 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
300
301 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
302 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
303 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
304 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
305 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000306
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000307- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
308 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
309 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
310
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000311- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
312
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000313- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
314
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000315- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
316 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
317 illegal argument)
318
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000319- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
320 is an error in the format string.
321
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000322- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
323
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000324- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000325 "parent" argument.
326
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000327- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
328 for padding.
329
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000330- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
331 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
332
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000333- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
334 to get the correct encoding.
335
336- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
337 languages.
338
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000339- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
340
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000341- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
342
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000343- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
344
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000345- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
346 functionality.
347
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000348- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
349
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000350- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
351 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
352
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000353- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
354 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
355 match the Content-Length header.
356
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000357- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
358
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000359- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
360 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000361 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000362
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000363- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
364
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000365- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
366
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000367- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
368 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
369
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000370- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
371 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
372 Tkdnd.
373
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000374- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
375 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
376
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000377- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
378 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
379
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000380- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000381 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
382
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000383- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
384 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
385
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000386- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
387 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
388
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000389- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000390 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000391
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000392- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
393
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000394- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
395 error messages.
396
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000397- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
398
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000399- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
400 Bug #1224621.
401
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000402- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
403 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
404 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
405 terminates by raising StopIteration.
406
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000407- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
408
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000409- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
410 component of the path.
411
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000412- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
413 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
414 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
415 class at all.
416
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000417- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
418 files to PyPI.
419
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000420- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
421 them to PyPI.
422
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000423- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
424 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
425 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
426 work as expected.
427
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000428- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
429 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
430
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000431- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000432 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
433
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000434- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
435
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000436- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
437 to build.
438
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000439- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
440 symbolic links on Windows.
441
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000442- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000443 profile.py if available.
444
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000445- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
446
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000447- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
448 in LWPCookieJar.
449
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000450- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
451
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000452- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
453
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000454- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
455
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000456- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
457
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000458- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
459
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000460- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
461
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000462- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
463
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000464- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
465
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000466- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
467 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
468 be exploited in various ways.
469
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000470- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000471 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
472
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000473- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
474 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
475
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000476- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000477 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
478
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000479- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
480
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000481- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
482
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000483- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
484
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000485- Enhancements to the csv module:
486
487 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000488 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000489 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000490 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
491 reporting.
492 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
493 dictates.
494 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000495 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000496 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000497 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
498 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000499 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
500 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000501 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000502 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
503 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
504 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
505 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
506 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
507 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
508 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
509 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
510 without first creating a dialect class.
511 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
512 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
513 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000514 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000515 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
516 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000517 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
518 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
519 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
520 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000521 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
522 This has been fixed.
523
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000524- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
525 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
526 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
527 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
528
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000529- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
530
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000531- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
532 (Bug #951915).
533
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000534- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
535 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
536 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000537 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000538
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000539- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
540
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000541- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
542 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
543
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000544- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
545
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000546- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
547
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000548- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
549
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000550- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
551
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000552- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
553
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000554- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
555 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
556 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
557
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000558- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000559 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000560
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000561- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
562 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
563 tokenizer with very long source lines.
564
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000565- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
566 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
567
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000568- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
569 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000570
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000571- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
572 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
573
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000574- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
575 correctly.
576
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000577- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
578 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
579 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
580 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
581 between two lines.
582
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000583- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
584 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
585 handlers.
586
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000587- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000588 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
589 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000590
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000591- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
592 considering it exactly like a '*'.
593
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000594- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
595 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000596
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000597- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
598
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000599Build
600-----
601
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000602- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
603 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
604
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000605- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
606 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
607
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000608- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
609 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
610 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000611 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000612
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000613- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
614 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
615 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
616
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000617- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
618
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000619- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
620 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
621
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000622- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
623 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
624 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
625 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
626 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
627 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
628 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
629 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
630
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000631- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
632 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
633 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
634 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
635
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000636
637C API
638-----
639
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000640- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
641
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000642- Removed PyRange_New().
643
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000644- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
645 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
646 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
647 mappings.
648
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000649
650Tests
651-----
652
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000653- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000654
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000655- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
656 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
657
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000658
659Documentation
660-------------
661
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000662- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
663
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000664- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
665
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000666- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
667
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000668- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
669
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000670- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
671
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000672- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
673
674- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
675
676- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
677
678- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
679
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000680- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
681 Closes bug #1166582.
682
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000683- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
684 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
685 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
686
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000687Mac
688---
689
690
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000691New platforms
692-------------
693
694- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
695
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000696
697Tools/Demos
698-----------
699
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000700- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
701 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
702 source files that need an encoding declaration.
703 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
704
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000705- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
706
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000707- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000708
709
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000710What's New in Python 2.4 final?
711===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000712
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000713*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000714
715Core and builtins
716-----------------
717
718- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
719 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
720 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
721
722
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000723What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
724==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000725
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000726*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000727
728Core and builtins
729-----------------
730
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000731- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
732 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
733 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
734
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000735
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000736Library
737-------
738
739- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
740 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
741 raised is re-raised.
742
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000743- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
744 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
745
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000746- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
747 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
748 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
749 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
750 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
751 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
752 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
753 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
754 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
755 by the slice are recomputed now.
756
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000757- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000758
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000759Build
760-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000761
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000762- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
763 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
764 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000765
766C API
767-----
768
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000769- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
770
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000771
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000772What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
773================================
774
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000775*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000776
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000777License
778-------
779
780The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
781is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
782changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
783Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
784intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
785durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
786the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
787License::
788
789 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
790
791says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
792to Python 2.1.1.
793
794The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
795License Version 2.
796
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000797Core and builtins
798-----------------
799
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000800- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
801 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
802 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
803 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
804 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
805 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
806 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000807 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000808 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
809 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
810
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000811- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000812
813Extension Modules
814-----------------
815
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000816- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
817 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
818 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
819 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000820
821Library
822-------
823
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000824- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
825 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
826 returned.
827
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000828- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
829
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000830- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
831 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
832
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000833- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
834
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000835- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
836 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000837
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000838- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
839
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000840- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
841
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000842- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000843 the source code is updated and reloaded.
844
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000845Build
846-----
847
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000848- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000849
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000850What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
851================================
852
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000853*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000854
855Core and builtins
856-----------------
857
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000858- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000859 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
860
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000861- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
862 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
863 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
864 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
865
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000866- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
867 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
868
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000869- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
870 constant.
871
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000872- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
873 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
874 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
875 large), and to anomalies such as
876 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
877 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
878 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
879 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000880
881Extension modules
882-----------------
883
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000884- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
885 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000886 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
887 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
888 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000889
890Library
891-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000892
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000893- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000894 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000895 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
896 --swig-cpp.
897
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000898- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
899 it is set.
900
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000901- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000902
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000903- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
904 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
905 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
906 Closes bug #1039270.
907
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000908- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000909
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000910 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000911 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
912 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
913 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
914 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
915 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
916 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
917 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
918 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
919 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
920 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
921 + Updates to documentation.
922
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000923- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
924 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
925 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
926 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
927
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000928- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000929
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000930- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
931 applications should use the getmember function.
932
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000933- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
934
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000935- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
936 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
937 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
938 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
939 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
940 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
941 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
942 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
943 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
944
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000945- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
946 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000947 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000948
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000949- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
950 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
951 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
952 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
953 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
954 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
955 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
956 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000957
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000958- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
959 the new public features (of which there are many).
960
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000961- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000962 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
963 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
964 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
965 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000966 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000967
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000968- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
969
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000970- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
971 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
972 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
973 options.
974
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000975- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
976 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
977 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
978 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
979 conditions under which non-string values work.
980
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000981Build
982-----
983
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000984- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
985 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
986 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
987
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000988- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
989 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
990 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
991 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
992 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000993
994C API
995-----
996
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000997- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
998 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
999
1000- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1001
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001002- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1003 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1004 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1005 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1006 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1007 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1008 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1009 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1010 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1011
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001012- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1013
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001014- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1015 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1016 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001017
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001018Tests
1019-----
1020
1021- test__locale ported to unittest
1022
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001023Mac
1024---
1025
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001026- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1027 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1028 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001029
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001030Tools/Demos
1031-----------
1032
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001033- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1034 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1035 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1036 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1037 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001038
1039
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001040What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1041=================================
1042
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001043*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001044
1045Core and builtins
1046-----------------
1047
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001048- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001049 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1050
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001051- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1052 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1053 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1054 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1055 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1056 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1057 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1058 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001059 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1060 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1061 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1062 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1063 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001064
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001065- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1066 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1067 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1068 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1069 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1070
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001071- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1072
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001073- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1074 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1075
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001076- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1077 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1078 modified the list.
1079
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001080- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1081 functions is now writable.
1082
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001083- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1084 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1085 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1086 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1087
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001088- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1089 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1090 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1091 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1092 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001093
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001094- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1095 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1096
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001097Extension modules
1098-----------------
1099
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001100- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1101
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001102- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1103 data.
1104
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001105- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1106 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1107 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1108 supposed to have been truncated away.
1109
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001110- Added socket.socketpair().
1111
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001112- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1113 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1114
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001115- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001116 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1117
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001118Library
1119-------
1120
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001121- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001122 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001123
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001124- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1125 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1126
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001127- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1128 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1129
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001130- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1131
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001132- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1133 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001134
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001135- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1136 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1137
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001138- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1139
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001140- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1141
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001142- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1143
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001144- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1145 Percivall.
1146
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001147- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1148 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1149
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001150- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1151 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1152 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001153 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001154
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001155- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1156 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1157 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1158 and exponent.
1159
1160- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1161
1162- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001163 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001164 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1165
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001166- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1167 to the readline module.
1168
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001169- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001170 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1171 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001172
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001173- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1174 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1175 contains symlinks.
1176
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001177- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1178 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1179
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001180- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1181 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1182 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1183
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001184- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1185 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1186 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1187 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1188 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1189 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1190 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1191 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1192 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1193 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1194 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1195 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1196 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1197
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001198- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1199
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001200Tools/Demos
1201-----------
1202
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001203- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1204 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1205
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001206- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1207
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001208Build
1209-----
1210
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001211- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1212 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1213 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1214 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1215 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1216 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1217 plans to do so.
1218
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001219- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1220 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1221
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001222- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1223 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1224
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001225- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1226 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1227
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001228- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1229 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1230
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001231- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1232 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1233
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001234C API
1235-----
1236
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001237..
1238
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001239Documentation
1240-------------
1241
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001242- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1243 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1244
1245- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1246 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1247 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001248
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001249New platforms
1250-------------
1251
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001252- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1253
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001254Tests
1255-----
1256
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001257..
1258
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001259Windows
1260-------
1261
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001262- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1263 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1264 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1265 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1266 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1267 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1268 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1269 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1270 the problem.
1271
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001272Mac
1273---
1274
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001275..
1276
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001277
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001278What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1279=================================
1280
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001281*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001282
1283Core and builtins
1284-----------------
1285
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001286- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1287 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1288 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1289 sensitive code.
1290
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001291- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001292 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001293
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001294 @staticmethod
1295 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001296
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001297 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001298
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001299- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1300 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1301 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1302 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1303 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1304 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1305 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1306 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1307 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1308 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1309 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1310
1311 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1312 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1313 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1314 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1315 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1316 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1317 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1318
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001319- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1320 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1321
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001322- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001323 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001324
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001325- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001326 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001327 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1328
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001329- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001330 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1331 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1332
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001333- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1334 types that support garbage collection.
1335
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001336- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1337
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001338- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1339 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1340 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1341 Jython.
1342
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001343- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1344
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001345- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1346 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1347
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001348- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1349 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1350 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001351
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001352- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1353 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1354 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1355
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001356Extension modules
1357-----------------
1358
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001359- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1360
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001361Library
1362-------
1363
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001364- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1365 TIS-620
1366
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001367- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1368 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1369 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1370 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1371 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1372 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1373 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1374 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1375 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1376 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1377
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001378- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1379
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001380- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1381 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1382 same as when the argument is omitted).
1383 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1384
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001385- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1386
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001387- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1388 schemes are offered.
1389
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001390- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1391
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001392- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1393 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1394 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1395
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001396- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1397
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001398- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1399 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1400
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001401- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1402 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1403 when dummy_threading is being used.
1404
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001405- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1406 from a tarfile.
1407
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001408- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001409 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001410
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001411- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1412 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1413 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1414 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1415
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001416- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1417 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1418
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001419- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1420 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1421 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1422 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1423 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1424 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1425 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1426 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1427 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1428 by some other method in progress).
1429
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001430- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1431 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1432 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001433
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001434- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1435
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001436- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1437 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1438 AM Kuchling.
1439
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001440- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1441 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1442 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1443
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001444- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1445 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1446 instead of unsigned.
1447
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001448- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001449 no longer part of the public API.
1450
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001451- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1452 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1453 string methods of the same name).
1454
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001455- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001456 SF patch 945642.
1457
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001458- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1459
1460 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1461
1462 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1463 DocTestSuites.
1464
1465- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1466 that provide thread-local data.
1467
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001468- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1469 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1470
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001471- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1472
1473- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1474 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1475 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1476
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001477- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1478
1479 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1480 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1481 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001482
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001483 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1484 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1485 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1486 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1487
1488 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1489 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1490
1491 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1492 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1493 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1494 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1495
1496 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1497 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1498 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1499 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1500 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1501
1502 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1503 wrapping help output.
1504
1505 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1506 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1507 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001508
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001509C API
1510-----
1511
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001512- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1513 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1514 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1515 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1516 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1517 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1518 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1519 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1520 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1521 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1522 its visible semantics have not changed.
1523
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001524- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1525 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1526
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001527Documentation
1528-------------
1529
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001530- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001531
1532 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001533 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001534
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001535 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001536
1537 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1538
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001539- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001540
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001541Tests
1542-----
1543
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001544- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001545 platforms that use the Makefile.
1546
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001547- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1548 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1549 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1550
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001551
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001552What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1553=================================
1554
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001555*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001556
1557Core and builtins
1558-----------------
1559
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001560- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1561 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1562 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1563 objects now (one object instead of three).
1564
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001565- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1566 Windows DLLs.
1567
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001568- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1569 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001570
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001571- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1572 a new .pyc magic.
1573
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001574- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1575 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1576 be there.
1577
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001578- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1579 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1580 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1581
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001582- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1583 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1584 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1585
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001586- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1587
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001588- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1589 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1590 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001591
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001592- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1593 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1594
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001595- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1596
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001597- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001598 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001599
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001600- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1601
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001602- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1603
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001604- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1605 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1606
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001607- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1608 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1609 Fixes bug #858016 .
1610
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001611- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1612 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1613 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1614
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001615- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1616 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1617 improves their performance (about 35%).
1618
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001619- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1620 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1621 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1622
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001623- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1624 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1625 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1626 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1627
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001628- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1629 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001630 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001631 length is not known).
1632
1633- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1634 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001635 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1636 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001637 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1638
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001639- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1640 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1641
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001642- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1643 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1644 keyword arguments.
1645
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001646- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1647 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1648 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1649
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001650- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1651 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1652 cases.
1653
1654- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1655 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1656 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1657 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1658 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1659 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1660 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1661 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1662 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1663 a release build.
1664
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001665- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1666 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1667
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001668- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001669 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001670
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001671- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1672 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1673 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1674 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1675 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1676 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1677 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1678 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1679 destroyed.
1680
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001681- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1682 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1683 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1684 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1685 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1686 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1687 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1688 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1689
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001690- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1691 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1692 character other than a space.
1693
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001694- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1695 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1696 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1697 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1698 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1699 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1700 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1701 attributes with the same name.
1702
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001703- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1704 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1705 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1706 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1707 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1708 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1709 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1710 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1711 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1712 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1713 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1714 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1715 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1716 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001717
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001718- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1719 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1720 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1721 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1722 This has been repaired.
1723
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001724- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1725
1726- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1727
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001728- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1729 over a sequence.
1730
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001731- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001732 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001733
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001734- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1735
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001736- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1737 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1738 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1739 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1740 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1741 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1742 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1743 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1744
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001745- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1746 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1747 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1748
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001749- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1750 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1751 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1752 freelist.
1753
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001754- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1755 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1756
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001757- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1758 number.
1759
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001760- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1761 a TypeError exception.
1762
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001763- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1764 820195.
1765
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001766- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1767 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1768 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1769
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001770- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001771 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1772 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001773
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001774- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1775 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1776 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1777
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001778- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1779 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001780 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001781
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001782- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001783 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1784 the first call.
1785
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001786
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001787Extension modules
1788-----------------
1789
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001790- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1791 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1792
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001793- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1794 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1795 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1796 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1797 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1798 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1799 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001800
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001801- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1802
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001803- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1804
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001805- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1806 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1807
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001808- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1809 fewer false positives.
1810
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001811- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1812 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1813
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001814- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001815 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1816
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001817- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001818 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001819 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001820 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1821 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001822
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001823- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1824 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1825 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1826 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1827
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001828- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1829 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1830 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1831 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1832 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1833 #897625.
1834
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001835- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1836 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1837
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001838- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1839 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1840 and pops on either side of the deque.
1841
1842- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1843 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1844
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001845- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1846 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1847 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1848 other functions that expect a function argument.
1849
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001850- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1851
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001852- os.getsid was added.
1853
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001854- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1855 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1856 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1857
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001858- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1859
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001860- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1861
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001862- readline.clear_history was added.
1863
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001864- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1865
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001866- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1867
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001868- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1869
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001870- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1871
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001872- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1873
1874- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1875
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001876- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1877
1878- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1879
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001880- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1881 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1882 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1883
1884- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1885 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1886 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1887 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1888 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1889 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1890 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1891
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001892- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1893 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1894 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1895 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001896
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001897- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001898 iterators from a single iterable.
1899
1900- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1901 of raising a TypeError exception.
1902
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001903- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1904 as parameter.
1905
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001906Library
1907-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001908
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001909- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1910
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001911- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1912 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1913 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001914
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001915- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1916 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1917 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001918
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001919- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001920
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001921- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1922 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001923
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001924- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1925 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1926
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001927- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1928
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001929- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001930 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001931
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001932- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001933 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001934
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001935- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1936
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001937- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1938 on cygwin and mingw32.
1939
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001940- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1941
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001942- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1943 module.
1944
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001945- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1946 installation scheme for all platforms.
1947
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001948- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001949 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001950
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001951- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1952 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1953 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1954
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001955- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1956 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1957 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1958
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001959- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1960
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001961- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1962
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001963- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1964 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1965
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001966- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1967 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1968 type pattern with the same value exists.
1969
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001970- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1971 when run from the command prompt).
1972
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001973- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1974 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1975
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001976- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1977 default sort).
1978
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001979- Added global runctx function to profile module
1980
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001981- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1982
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001983- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1984
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001985- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1986
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001987- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001988 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1989 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1990 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1991 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1992 accordingly.
1993
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001994- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1995 decoding standards.
1996
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001997- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1998 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1999 called for all requests.
2000
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002001- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2002 they are passed to the compiler.
2003
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002004- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2005 indent, width and depth.
2006
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002007- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2008 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2009
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002010- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2011 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2012
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002013- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2014
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002015- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2016
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002017- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2018
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002019- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2020 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2021
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002022- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002023 for better performance.
2024
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002025- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002026
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002027- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2028 a string).
2029
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002030- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2031
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002032- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2033
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002034- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2035
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002036- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2037
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002038- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2039 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2040 list of fieldnames.
2041
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002042- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2043 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2044
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002045- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2046
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002047- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2048 empty lists.
2049
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002050- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2051 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2052 and shelves.
2053
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002054- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2055 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2056
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002057- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002058 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2059 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002060
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002061- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2062 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002063 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002064
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002065- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002066 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2067 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2068
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002069- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2070 and removed in Py2.4.
2071
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002072- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2073
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002074- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2075
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002076Tools/Demos
2077-----------
2078
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002079- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2080 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2081
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002082- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2083
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002084- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2085 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2086 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2087 destination in situations where both files are given.
2088
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002089- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2090 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2091 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2092 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2093
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002094- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2095
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002096- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2097 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2098 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2099 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2100 now.
2101
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002102- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2103 in effect
2104
2105- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2106 C-c C-h
2107
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002108- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2109 -d option was given.
2110
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002111Build
2112-----
2113
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002114- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2115 build under OS X.
2116
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002117- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2118 --enable-profiling.
2119
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002120- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2121 is configured --with-tsc.
2122
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002123- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2124 on AMD64.
2125
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002126- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2127 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2128
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002129- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2130 removed.
2131
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002132- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2133 supported (see PEP 11).
2134
2135- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2136
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002137- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2138
2139- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2140 (see PEP 11).
2141
2142- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2143 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2144
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002145C API
2146-----
2147
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002148- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2149 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2150 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2151
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002152- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2153 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2154 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2155 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2156
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002157- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2158 generator objects.
2159
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002160- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2161 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002162 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2163 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002164
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002165- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2166 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2167
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002168- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2169 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2170 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2171 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2172 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2173
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002174- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2175 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2176 about 10% faster.
2177
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002178- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2179 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2180
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002181- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2182 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2183 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2184 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2185
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002186Windows
2187-------
2188
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002189- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2190 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2191 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2192 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2193
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002194- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2195 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2196 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2197
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002198
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002199What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2200===============================
2201
2202*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2203
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002204IDLE
2205----
2206
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002207- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2208 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2209 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2210 context-menu actions.
2211
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002212- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2213 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2214 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2215 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2216 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2217 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2218 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2219 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2220 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2221
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002222
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002223What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2224=============================================
2225
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002226*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002227
2228Core and builtins
2229-----------------
2230
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002231- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002232 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002233 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2234
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002235Extension modules
2236-----------------
2237
2238- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2239 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2240 than once. This has been fixed.
2241
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002242- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2243 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2244 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2245 call.
2246
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002247- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2248
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002249Library
2250-------
2251
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002252- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2253 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2254
2255- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2256 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2257 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2258 restored.
2259
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002260IDLE
2261----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002262
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002263- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002264
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002265Build
2266-----
2267
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002268- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2269 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2270
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002271C API
2272-----
2273
2274Windows
2275-------
2276
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002277- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2278 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2279
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002280- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2281
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002282Mac
2283---
2284
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002285- Various fixes to pimp.
2286
2287- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2288
2289- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2290 more problems than it solves.
2291
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002292
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002293What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2294=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002295
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002296*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2297
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002298Core and builtins
2299-----------------
2300
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002301- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2302 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2303
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002304- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2305 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002306 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002307
2308- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2309 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2310 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002311 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002312
2313- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2314 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002315
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002316- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2317 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2318 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2319
2320- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002321 770247.
2322
2323- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002324
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002325Extension modules
2326-----------------
2327
2328- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2329 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2330
2331- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2332
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002333- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2334
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002335- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2336 contained within the _strptime module.
2337
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002338- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2339 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2340
2341- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002342 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2343
2344- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2345 the find_class attribute, if present.
2346
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002347- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002348
2349 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2350 (SF bug 763298).
2351
2352 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002353 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2354 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2355 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002356
2357 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2358
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002359Library
2360-------
2361
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002362- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2363
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002364- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2365 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2366 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2367 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2368 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2369 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2370 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2371 or Tester().
2372
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002373- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2374 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2375 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2376 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2377 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2378 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2379 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2380 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2381 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002382
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002383 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002384
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002385- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2386 weren't before was an oversight.
2387
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002388- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2389 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2390
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002391- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2392 when there are no lines.
2393
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002394- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2395 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2396
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002397- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2398 to child processes.
2399
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002400- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2401
2402- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2403
2404- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2405 xmlrpclib.
2406
2407- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2408 responses.
2409
2410- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2411 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2412
2413- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2414 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2415 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2416
2417- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2418 used as patterns.
2419
2420- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2421 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2422 than Tk 8.3.
2423
2424- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2425
2426- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002427
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002428Tools/Demos
2429-----------
2430
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002431- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2432
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002433- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2434
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002435- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002436
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002437Build
2438-----
2439
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002440- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2441
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002442- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2443
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002444- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2445 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002446
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002447- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2448 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2449 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002450
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002451C API
2452-----
2453
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002454- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2455 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2456
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002457Windows
2458-------
2459
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002460- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2461 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2462 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2463 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2464 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2465 Python exception ::
2466
2467 thread.error: can't start new thread
2468
2469 is raised now.
2470
2471- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2472 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2473 instead of from DLL teardown.
2474
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002475Mac
2476---
2477
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002478- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002479 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002480 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2481 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2482 the executable in the bundle.
2483
2484- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002485
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002486- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2487
2488- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2489 on Panther.
2490
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002491What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2492================================
2493
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002494*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002495
2496Core and builtins
2497-----------------
2498
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002499- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2500 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2501 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2502 with the -i option.
2503
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002504- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2505 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2506
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002507- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2508 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2509
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002510- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2511 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2512 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2513 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2514 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2515 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2516 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2517 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2518 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2519 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2520 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2521 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2522 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002523
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002524- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2525 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2526 embedded in a lambda expression.
2527
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002528- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2529 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2530 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2531 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2532 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2533
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002534- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2535 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2536 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2537
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002538- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2539 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2540
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002541- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2542 It's writable again.
2543
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002544- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2545 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2546 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002547 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002548
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002549- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2550 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2551 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2552
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002553Extension modules
2554-----------------
2555
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002556- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2557 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2558
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002559- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2560 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2561 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2562 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2563
2564- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2565 collection.
2566
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002567- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2568 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2569 unique within a single program run.
2570
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002571- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2572 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2573
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002574- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2575 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2576
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002577- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2578 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002579
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002580- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2581
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002582- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2583 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2584
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002585- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2586 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2587 for many BSD-derived systems.
2588
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002589
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002590Library
2591-------
2592
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002593- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2594 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2595 primary ones:
2596
2597 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2598 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2599 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2600
2601 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2602 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2603 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2604 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2605 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2606 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2607
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002608- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2609 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2610 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2611 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2612 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2613 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2614 argument.
2615
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002616- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2617 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2618 in the archive.
2619
2620- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2621 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2622
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002623- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2624 569574).
2625
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002626- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2627 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2628 no more.
2629
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002630- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2631 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2632 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2633 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2634 code coverage.
2635
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002636- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2637 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2638 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002639 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2640 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002641
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002642- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2643 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2644 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002645 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002646
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002647- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2648
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002649- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2650 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2651 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2652 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2653
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002654- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2655 handling.
2656
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002657- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2658 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2659
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002660- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2661 in socket.py.
2662
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002663- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2664
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002665- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2666 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2667 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2668 opener with proxy support.
2669
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002670- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2671
2672- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2673
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002674Tools/Demos
2675-----------
2676
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002677- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2678
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002679- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2680
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002681- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2682 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002683
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002684- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2685 files.
2686
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002687Build
2688-----
2689
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002690- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002691 different root directory.
2692
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002693C API
2694-----
2695
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002696- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2697 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2698 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2699 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2700 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2701 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2702 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2703 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2704 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2705 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2706
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002707- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2708 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2709 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2710 from Python.
2711
2712
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002713New platforms
2714-------------
2715
2716None this time.
2717
2718Tests
2719-----
2720
2721- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2722 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2723
2724Windows
2725-------
2726
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002727- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2728
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002729- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2730 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2731 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2732 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2733 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2734 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2735 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2736 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2737 that's what it's for.
2738
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002739Mac
2740---
2741
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002742- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2743 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2744 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2745 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002746- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2747 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2748- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002749
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002750SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2751------------------------------------
2752
2753430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2754598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2755622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2756661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2757683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2758697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2759713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2760724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2761727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2762729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2763730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2764731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2765732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2766733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2767735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2768740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2769744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2770745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2771747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2772749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2773751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2774753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2775755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2776757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2777760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2778
2779
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002780What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2781================================
2782
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002783*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002784
2785Core and builtins
2786-----------------
2787
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002788- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2789 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2790
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002791- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2792 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2793 and cannot be strings).
2794
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002795- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2796 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2797 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2798 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2799
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002800- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2801 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2802 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2803 Python itself.
2804
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002805- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2806 the referenced object, if it has one.
2807
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002808- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2809 the thread started at
2810 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2811
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002812- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2813 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2814 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2815 placed on a list index.
2816
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002817- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2818 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2819 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2820 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2821
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002822- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2823 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2824 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2825 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2826 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2827 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2828 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2829
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002830- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2831 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2832 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2833 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2834 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2835
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002836- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2837 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002838
2839- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2840 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2841 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2842 #693195.)
2843
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002844- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2845 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002846
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002847- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002848 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002849 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2850 interpreter executions, would fail.
2851
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002852- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002853 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002854 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002855
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002856Extension modules
2857-----------------
2858
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002859- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2860 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2861 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2862 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2863
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002864- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2865 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2866
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002867- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2868 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2869 and Greg Chapman.)
2870
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002871- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2872 recursively.
2873
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002874- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002875 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2876 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2877 leaks.
2878
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002879- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2880
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002881- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2882 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2883 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2884 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2885 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2886 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2887 #705836.
2888
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002889- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002890 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2891
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002892- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2893 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2894 See SF bug #692416.
2895
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002896- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2897 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2898
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002899- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2900 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2901 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002902
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002903- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002904 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2905 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2906
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002907- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2908 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2909 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2910 timeouts to work properly.
2911
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002912Library
2913-------
2914
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002915- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2916 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2917 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2918 future release.
2919
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002920- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2921 for querying platform dependent features.
2922
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002923- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002924
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002925- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2926 pickle protocol versions.
2927
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002928- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2929 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2930 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2931
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002932- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2933
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002934- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2935 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2936 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2937 modules.
2938
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002939- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2940 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2941 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2942
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002943- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2944 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2945
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002946- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2947 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2948 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2949
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002950- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002951 MS Office extensions.
2952
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002953- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2954 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2955
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002956- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2957 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2958
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002959- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2960 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2961 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2962 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2963 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2964 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2965
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002966- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2967 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2968 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002969
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002970- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2971 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2972 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2973
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002974- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2975
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002976- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2977 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2978 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2979
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002980Tools/Demos
2981-----------
2982
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002983- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2984 See the module docstring for details.
2985
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002986Build
2987-----
2988
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002989- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2990 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002991
2992C API
2993-----
2994
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002995- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2996
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002997- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2998 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2999 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3000
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003001- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3002 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003003
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003004 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3005 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3006 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003007
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003008- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003009 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3010
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003011- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3012 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3013 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003014
3015New platforms
3016-------------
3017
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003018None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003019
3020Tests
3021-----
3022
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003023- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3024 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003025
3026Windows
3027-------
3028
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003029- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3030 function.
3031
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003032- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3033 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003034
3035Mac
3036---
3037
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003038- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3039 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003040
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003041- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3042 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003043
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003044- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3045 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3046 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003047
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003048- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003049 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3050 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003051
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003052- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3053 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003054
3055
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003056What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3057=================================
3058
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003059*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003060
3061Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003062-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003063
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003064- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3065 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3066 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3067
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003068- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3069 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3070 (SF patch #664376.)
3071
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003072- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3073 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3074 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3075 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3076 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3077 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003078 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003079
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003080- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3081 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3082 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3083 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003084 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003085
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003086- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3087 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3088 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3089 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3090 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3091 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3092 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3093 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3094 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3095 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3096 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3097
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003098- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3099 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3100 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3101 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3102 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3103 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3104
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003105- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3106 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3107
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003108- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3109 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3110 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3111 case.)
3112
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003113- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3114 passed as unicode strings.
3115
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003116- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3117 See SF bug #683467.
3118
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003119- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3120 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3121
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003122- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3123
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003124- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3125
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003126- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3127 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3128 arguments.
3129
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003130- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3131 See SF bug #667147.
3132
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003133- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003134 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003135 See SF bug #676155.
3136
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003137- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003138 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003139 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3140 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3141 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3142 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3143 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3144 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003145
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003146Extension modules
3147-----------------
3148
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003149- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3150 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3151 tp_as_number pointer.
3152
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003153- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3154 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3155 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3156 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3157 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3158
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003159- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3160
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003161- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3162
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003163- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003164 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003165 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3166 patch #678531.)
3167
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003168- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3169 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3170
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003171- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3172 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3173
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003174- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3175
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003176- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3177 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3178 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3179
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003180- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3181
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003182- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3183 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3184
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003185- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003186
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003187- datetime changes:
3188
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003189 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3190
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003191 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3192 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3193 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3194 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3195 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3196 now.
3197
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003198 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003199 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3200 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003201
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003202 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003203 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003204 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3205 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3206 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3207 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003208
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003209 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3210 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3211 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003212 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3213
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003214 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3215 by a later example coded by Guido.
3216
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003217 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003218 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3219 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3220 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003221 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3222 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3223
3224 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3225 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3226 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3227 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3228 tzinfo subclass instance.
3229
3230 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3231 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3232 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3233 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3234 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3235 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3236 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3237 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003238
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003239 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3240 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3241 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3242 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3243 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003244 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3245
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003246 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003247
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003248 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3249 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3250 as a naive datetime object.
3251
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003252 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3253 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3254 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3255
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003256 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3257 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3258 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3259 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3260 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3261 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3262 comparison.
3263
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003264 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3265 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3266 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3267 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003268 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003269
3270 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003271
3272 and ::
3273
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003274 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3275
3276 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3277 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3278 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3279 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3280
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003281 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3282 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3283 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3284 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3285 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3286
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003287 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3288 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003289 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3290 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003291
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003292Library
3293-------
3294
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003295- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3296 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3297
3298- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3299 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3300 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3301 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3302 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3303 See PEP 307 for details.
3304
3305- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3306 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3307
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003308- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3309 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003310 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003311 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3312 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003313 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003314
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003315- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3316 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3317
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003318- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3319 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3320 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3321
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003322- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3323
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003324- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3325 exception.
3326
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003327- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3328 class.
3329
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003330- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3331 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3332 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3333
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003334- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3335 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3336
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003337- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003338 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3339 See SF bug #659228.
3340
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003341- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3342 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3343 See SF patch #651082.
3344
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003345- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003346
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003347- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3348 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3349
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003350- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003351 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003352
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003353- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3354 DOS paths from other platforms.
3355
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003356Tools/Demos
3357-----------
3358
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003359- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3360 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3361 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3362 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3363 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3364 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3365 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3366 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3367 example:
3368
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003369 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3370 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003371
3372 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3373
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003374
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003375Build
3376-----
3377
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003378- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3379 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3380 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003381 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3382
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003383 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3384
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003385- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3386 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3387 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3388 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3389 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3390 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3391 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3392 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3393 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3394
3395- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3396 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3397 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3398 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3399
3400- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3401 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3402
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003403C API
3404-----
3405
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003406- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3407 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003408
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003409- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3410 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3411 tp_as_number pointer.
3412
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003413- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3414 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3415 (SF #681367)
3416
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003417- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3418 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3419 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3420 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003421
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003422Tests
3423-----
3424
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003425- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003426 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3427 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3428 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3429 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3430 pydoc.)
3431
3432- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3433
3434- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003435
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003436Windows
3437-------
3438
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003439- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3440 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3441 time).
3442
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003443- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3444 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3445
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003446- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3447 release without strong cryptography.
3448
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003449- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003450 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003451
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003452- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3453 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3454
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003455Mac
3456---
3457
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003458- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3459 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003460
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003461- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3462 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3463 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003464
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003465- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3466 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003467
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003468- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3469 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3470 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3471 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003472
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003473- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003474 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3475 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3476 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003477
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003478
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003479What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003480=================================
3481
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003482*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003483
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003484Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003485--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003486
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003487- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3488
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003489- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3490 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003491 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003492 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003493 a different meaning than before.
3494
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003495- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003496 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003497 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003498
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003499- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003500 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003501 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003502
3503- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3504 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3505 and deallocation.
3506
3507- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3508 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3509
3510- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3511 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3512 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3513 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3514 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3515
3516- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3517 now detected by the garbage collector.
3518
3519- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3520 [SF bug 519621]
3521
3522- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3523 identifier.
3524
3525- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3526 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3527 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3528 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3529 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3530 [SF bug 563060]
3531
3532- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3533 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3534 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3535 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3536 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3537
3538- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3539 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3540 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3541
3542- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3543
3544- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3545 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3546 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3547 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3548 state of the slots would be lost.)
3549
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003550Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003551-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003552
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003553- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003554 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3555 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3556 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3557 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003558 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3559 Jython 2.1.
3560
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003561- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003562 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003563 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3564 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3565 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3566 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3567 these, see PEP 302.
3568
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003569- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3570 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3571 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3572
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003573- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3574 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3575 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3576
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003577- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3578 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3579 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3580
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003581- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3582 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3583 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3584 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3585 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3586 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3587 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3588 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3589 releases or implementations.
3590
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003591- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003592 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3593 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003594
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003595- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3596 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3597
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003598- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3599 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3600 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3601
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003602- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3603 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3604
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003605- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3606 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003607 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3608 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003609
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003610- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3611 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3612 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3613 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3614 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3615
3616 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3617 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3618 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3619 pattern.
3620
3621 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3622 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3623 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3624 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3625
3626 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3627 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3628 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3629 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3630 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3631 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3632
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003633- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3634 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3635 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3636 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3637 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3638 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3639 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3640 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003641
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003642- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3643 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3644 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3645 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3646 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003647 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3648 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3649 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3650 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3651 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3652 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3653 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003654
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003655- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3656 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3657
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003658- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3659 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3660 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3661 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3662 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3663 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3664 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3665 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3666 to Zack Weinberg!
3667
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003668- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3669 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3670 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3671 type. This has been fixed now.
3672
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003673- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3674 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3675 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3676
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003677- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3678 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3679 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3680 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3681 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3682 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3683 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3684 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003685 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003686
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003687- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3688 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3689 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003690
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003691- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3692 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3693 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3694 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3695 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3696 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3697 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3698 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003699 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003700 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3701 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3702
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003703- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3704 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3705 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3706 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3707 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3708 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3709 this.)
3710
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003711- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3712 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003713 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003714 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003715 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3716 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003717 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3718 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003719
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003720- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3721 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3722 currently running.
3723
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003724- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3725 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3726 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3727 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3728
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003729- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3730 as directory names.
3731
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003732- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3733 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3734
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003735- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3736 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3737
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003738- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003739 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3740 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003741
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003742- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3743 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3744 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3745 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3746 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3747
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003748- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3749 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3750 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3751 removed.
3752
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003753- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3754 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3755 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3756
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003757- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3758 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3759 to __debug__.
3760
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003761- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3762 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3763 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3764
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003765- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3766 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3767 deprecated now.
3768
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003769- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3770 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3771 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003772
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003773- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3774 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3775 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3776 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3777 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003778
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003779- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3780 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3781
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003782- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3783 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3784 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003785 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003786 is backward compatible.
3787
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003788- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3789 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3790 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3791 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3792 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3793
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003794- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3795 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3796 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3797 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3798 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3799 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003800
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003801- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3802 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3803
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003804- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3805 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3806
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003807- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3808 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3809 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3810 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3811 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3812
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003813- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3814 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3815 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3816
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003817- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003818 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3819
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003820- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3821 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3822 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003823
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003824- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3825 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3826
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003827- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3828 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3829 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3830
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003831- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3832
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003833Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003834-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003835
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003836- Added three operators to the operator module:
3837 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3838 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3839 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3840
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003841- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3842
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003843- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3844 archives.
3845
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003846- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3847 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3848 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3849
3850 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3851
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003852- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3853 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3854 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003855 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003856
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003857- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3858 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3859 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3860 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003861 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3862 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3863 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3864 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003865
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003866- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3867 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003868
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003869- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3870
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003871- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3872 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3873
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003874- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3875 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3876 supported.
3877
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003878- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3879
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003880- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3881 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003882
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003883- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3884 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3885
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003886- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3887
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003888- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3889 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3890
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003891- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3892 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3893 functions but callable type objects.
3894
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003895- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003896 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003897 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003898
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003899- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3900 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003901
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003902- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3903 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003904
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003905- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3906 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3907 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3908 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3909
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003910- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3911 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003912
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003913- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3914 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3915 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3916 and __imul__.
3917
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003918- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003919 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3920 is called.
3921
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003922- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3923 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3924 interpreter was compiled.
3925
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003926- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3927 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3928 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003929 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003930 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3931 1, not 2.
3932
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003933- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3934 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3935 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3936 limit.
3937
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003938- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3939 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3940 bug #623464.
3941
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003942- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3943 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3944 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3945 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3946
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003947Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003948-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003949
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003950- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3951
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003952- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3953 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3954 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3955 with Python 2.3a2.
3956
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003957- os.path exposes getctime.
3958
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003959- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003960 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003961 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003962 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003963 unit tests of floating point results.
3964
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003965- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3966 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3967 has been increased.
3968
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003969- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3970 executed.
3971
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003972- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3973 postinstallation script.
3974
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003975- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3976 test the current module.
3977
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003978- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003979 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3980 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3981 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3982 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3983
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003984- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003985 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003986 Ward's Optik package.
3987
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003988- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3989 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3990 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3991 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3992
3993- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3994 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003995 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003996
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003997- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3998 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3999 shelf are binary pickles.
4000
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004001- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4002 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4003
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004004- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4005 modules are iterators now.
4006
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004007- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4008 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4009 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4010 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4011 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4012 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004013
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004014- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4015 with their entity value.
4016
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004017- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4018
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004019- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4020 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004021
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004022- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4023 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004024 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004025
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004026- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4027 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4028 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4029 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4030 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4031 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4032 main():
4033
4034 import locale
4035 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4036
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004037- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4038 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4039
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004040- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4041 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4042 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4043 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4044 to the new standard.
4045
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004046- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4047 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4048 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4049 an extension to the database.
4050
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004051- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4052 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4053 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4054 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004055 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004056
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004057- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004058 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004059
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004060- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4061 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4062 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4063 bounded integers.
4064
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004065- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4066 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4067 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4068 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4069 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4070 in existence.
4071
4072 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4073 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4074 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4075 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4076 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4077 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4078
4079 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4080 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4081 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4082 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4083
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004084- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4085 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4086 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4087
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004088- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4089
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004090- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4091 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4092 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4093 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4094
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004095- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4096 argument.
4097
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004098- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4099 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4100 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4101 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4102 [SF patch 560794].
4103
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004104- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4105 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4106 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004107 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4108 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4109 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004110
4111- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4112 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004113
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004114- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4115 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4116 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4117 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004118
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004119- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4120 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4121 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4122 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4123 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4124
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004125- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004126
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004127- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4128
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004129- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4130 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4131 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4132 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4133 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4134 identical to None.
4135
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004136- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4137 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4138 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4139 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4140 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4141 results now.
4142
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004143- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4144 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4145
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004146- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4147 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4148 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4149 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4150 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4151 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4152 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4153 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4154
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004155- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4156
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004157- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4158 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4159
4160- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4161 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4162 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4163 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4164 and other systems.
4165
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004166- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4167 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4168 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4169 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 +00004170 work well with these.
4171
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004172- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4173
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004174- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004175 connections.
4176
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004177- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4178 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4179 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4180
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004181- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4182 sets
4183
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004184- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4185 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4186 name.
4187
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004188- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4189 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4190 passed in.
4191
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004192- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004193 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004194 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4195 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004196
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004197- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4198
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004199- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4200
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004201- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4202 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4203 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4204
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004205- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4206 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4207 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4208 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004209 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004210
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004211- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004212 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004213 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004214
4215- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4216 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4217 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4218
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004219- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004220 the value of its expression argument.
4221
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004222- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4223 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4224 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4225
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004226- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4227 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4228 skipstone browser was included.
4229
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004230- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4231 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4232
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004233Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004234-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004235
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004236- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4237 names in addition to accepting file names.
4238
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004239- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4240 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4241 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4242 still used and useful.)
4243
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004244- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4245 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4246 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4247 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004248
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004249- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4250 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4251 the generated binary.
4252
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004253Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004254-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004255
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004256- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4257
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004258- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4259 except in the hands of experts.
4260
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004261- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004262 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4263 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4264 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004265
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004266- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4267 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4268 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4269 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4270 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4271 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4272 builds.
4273
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004274- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4275 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4276 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4277 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4278 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4279 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4280 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4281 new type.
4282
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004283- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004284
4285 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4286 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4287 positive infinities.
4288
4289 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4290 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4291 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4292 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4293 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4294 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4295 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4296
4297 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4298
4299 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4300
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004301- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4302 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4303 size of the executable.
4304
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004305- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4306 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4307 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4308 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004309
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004310- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4311
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004312- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4313 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4314 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004315
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004316- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4317 well as Unix.
4318
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004319- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4320 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4321 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4322 modules in the README file for details.
4323
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004324C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004325-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004326
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004327- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4328 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004329 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004330 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004331 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004332
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004333- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4334 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4335 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4336 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4337 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4338 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004339 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004340 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4341 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4342 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4343 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4344 aligned.)
4345
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004346- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4347 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4348 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4349
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004350- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4351 level.
4352
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004353- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4354 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4355 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4356 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4357 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4358
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004359- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4360 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4361 code.
4362
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004363- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4364 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4365 adjusting for negative indices.
4366
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004367- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4368 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4369 object.
4370
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004371- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4372 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4373 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4374
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004375- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4376 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004377
4378- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4379
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004380- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4381 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4382 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4383 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4384
4385- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4386
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004387- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004388
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004389- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004390 without going through the buffer API.
4391
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004392- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004393
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004394- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4395 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4396 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4397 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4398
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004399- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4400 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4401
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004402- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004403 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4404
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004405New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004406-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004407
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004408- OpenVMS is now supported.
4409
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004410- AtheOS is now supported.
4411
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004412- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4413
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004414- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4415
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004416Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004417-----
4418
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004419- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4420 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4421 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004422
4423Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004424-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004425
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004426- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4427 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4428 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4429 bugs.
4430 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004431 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004432 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4433 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004434 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004435
4436- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004437 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004438
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004439- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4440 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4441
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004442- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4443 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004444 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004445 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4446
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004447- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4448 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4449 use files" uninstall option).
4450
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004451- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4452
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004453- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4454 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4455
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004456- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4457 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4458 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4459
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004460- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4461 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4462 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4463 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4464 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004465 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4466 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4467 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004468
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004469- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004470 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004471 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4472 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4473 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4474 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4475 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4476 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4477 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4478 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4479 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4480 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4481 work around.
4482
4483- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4484 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4485 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4486 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4487 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4488 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4489 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4490 specified with O_CREAT too).
4491
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004492Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004493----
4494
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004495- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004496
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004497- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4498 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4499 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4500
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004501- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4502 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4503 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4504
4505- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4506 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4507 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4508 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4509 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4510 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4511 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4512 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004513
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004514- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4515 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4516 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004517
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004518- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4519 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4520 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4521 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4522 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004523
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004524- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4525 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4526 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004527
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004528- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4529 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004530
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004531- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4532 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4533 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4534 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4535 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004536
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004537- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4538 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4539 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4540
4541- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4542 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4543 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004544
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004545- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4546 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4547 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4548 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004549 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004550
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004551- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4552 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004553
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004554- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4555 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004556
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004557- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004558 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004559 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4560 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004561
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004562
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004563What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004564===============================
4565
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004566*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4567
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004568Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004569--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004570
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004571- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4572 with a custom metaclass.
4573
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004574Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004575-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004576
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004577- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4578 are proxies.
4579
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004580Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004581-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004582
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004583- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4584 very short strings.
4585
4586- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4587 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4588 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4589 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4590 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4591
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004592Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004593-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004594
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004595- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4596 close or delete time).
4597
4598- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4599 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4600
4601- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4602
4603- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004604 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004605
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004606Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004607-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004608
4609Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004610-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004611
4612C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004613-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004614
4615New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004616-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004617
4618Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004619-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004620
4621Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004622-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004623
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004624- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4625
4626- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4627 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4628
4629- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4630 deleted at process exit time.
4631
4632- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4633 in backslash.
4634
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004635Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004636----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004637
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004638- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4639 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4640 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4641
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004642
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004643What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004644===========================
4645
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004646*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4647
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004648Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004649--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004650
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004651- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4652 been extensively updated. See
4653
4654 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4655
4656 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4657
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004658- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4659 deleted!
4660
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004661- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4662 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4663 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4664 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4665 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4666
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004667- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4668
4669 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4670 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4671
4672 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4673 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4674 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4675 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4676 supported anyway.
4677
4678 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4679 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4680
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004681- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4682 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4683 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4684 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4685 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004686
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004687- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4688 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4689 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4690
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004691Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004692-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004693
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004694- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4695 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4696 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4697 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4698 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4699 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004700 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4701 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4702 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4703 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004704
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004705- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4706 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4707 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4708
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004709Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004710-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004711
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004712- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4713
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004714Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004715-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004716
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004717- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4718 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4719 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4720 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4721 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4722 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4723
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004724- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4725
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004726- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4727
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004728- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4729
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004730- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4731 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4732 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4733
4734- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4735
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004736Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004737-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004738
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004739- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4740 off a search on Google.
4741
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004742Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004743-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004744
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004745- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4746 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4747 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4748 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4749 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4750 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4751 other platforms should do likewise.
4752
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004753- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4754 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4755 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4756
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004757C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004758-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004759
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004760- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4761 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4762 producing key-value pairs.
4763
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004764- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004765 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004766 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4767 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4768 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4769 previously went unchallenged.
4770
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004771New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004772-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004773
4774Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004775-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004776
4777Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004778-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004779
4780Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004781----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004782
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004783- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4784 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004785
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004786- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4787 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4788 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4789 home.
4790
4791
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004792What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004793===========================
4794
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004795*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4796
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004797Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004798--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004799
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004800- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4801 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004802
4803 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004804 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004805
4806 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4807 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004808 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004809 This needs to be documented.
4810
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004811- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4812 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4813
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004814- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4815 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4816 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4817
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004818- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4819 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4820
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004821- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4822 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4823 class forbids it).
4824
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004825- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4826 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4827 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4828
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004829- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4830
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004831Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004832-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004833
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004834- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4835 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004836 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004837
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004838- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4839 (like 1 + '').
4840
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004841Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004842-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004843
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004844- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4845 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4846 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4847 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004848 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004849 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4850
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004851- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4852 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4853 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4854 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4855
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004856- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4857 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004858 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4859 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4860 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004861
4862- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4863 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004864
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004865- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4866 bytes on its input.
4867
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004868Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004869-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004870
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004871- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004872 convenience function.
4873
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004874- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4875 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4876 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004877 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4878 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4879 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4880 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4881 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4882 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004883
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004884- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4885 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4886 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4887 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4888
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004889- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4890 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4891 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4892
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004893- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4894 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4895 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4896 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4897
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004898- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4899 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004900 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004901 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4902 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4903 new -l and -e options.
4904
4905- statcache is now deprecated.
4906
4907- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4908 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004909 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004910 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4911 time properly taken into account.
4912
4913- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4914 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4915 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4916 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4917
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004918Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004919-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004920
4921Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004922-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004923
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004924- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4925 is built with libdb3 if available.
4926
4927- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4928
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004929C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004930-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004931
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004932- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4933 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4934 PySequence_Size().
4935
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004936- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4937
4938- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4939 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4940 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4941
4942- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4943 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4944
4945- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4946 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4947
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004948New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004949-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004950
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004951- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4952 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4953
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004954- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4955 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4956
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004957- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4958
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004959Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004960-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004961
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004962- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4963 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4964
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004965Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004966-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004967
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004968Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004969----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004970
4971- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4972 removed completely in the next release.
4973
4974- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4975 OSX.
4976
4977- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4978 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4979
4980- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4981
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004982
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004983What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004984===========================
4985
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004986*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4987
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004988Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004989--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004990
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004991- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004992 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004993 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004994 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4995 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004996 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4997 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004998 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4999 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005000
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005001- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5002 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5003
5004- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5005 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5006
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005007Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005008-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005009
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005010- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5011 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5012 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5013 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5014 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5015 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5016 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5017 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5018
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005019- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5020 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5021 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5022 example).
5023
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005024- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005025 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005026 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005027 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005028
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005029- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5030 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5031 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005032 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005033
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005034- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5035 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5036 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5037 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5038 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5039 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5040
5041 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5042
5043 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5044
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005045Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005046-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005047
5048- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5049
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005050- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5051
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005052- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5053 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005054
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005055- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5056 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5057 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5058 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5059 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5060 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005061 attributes.
5062
5063- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5064 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5065 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005066
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005067- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5068 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5069 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005070
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005071- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5072 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5073 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005074 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5075 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5076
5077- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5078 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005079
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005080Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005081-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005082
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005083- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5084 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5085
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005086- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5087 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5088 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5089 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5090
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005091- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5092 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5093 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5094 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5095
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005096 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5097 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5098 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5099 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5100 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5101 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5102 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5103 without losing information).
5104
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005105- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005106 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5107 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5108 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5109 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5110 module).
5111
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005112 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005113 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5114 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5115 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5116 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005117
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005118- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005119 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5120 encoding.
5121
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005122- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5123 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5124
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005125- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005126 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5127
5128- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5129 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5130 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5131 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5132
5133- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5134
5135- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5136 ON, and OFF.
5137
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005138- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5139 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5140
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005141Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005142-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005143
5144- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5145 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5146 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005147
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005148- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5149 been added: -X and -E.
5150
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005151Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005152-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005153
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005154- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5155 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5156
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005157C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005158-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005159
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005160- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5161 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5162 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5163 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5164 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5165
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005166- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5167 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5168 as long) arguments.
5169
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005170- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5171 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5172 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5173 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5174 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5175 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5176
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005177- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5178 input.
5179
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005180New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005181-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005182
5183Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005184-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005185
5186Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005187-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005188
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005189- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5190 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5191 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5192
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005193- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5194 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5195 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005196 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005197
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005198 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5199 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5200 import signal
5201 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005202
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005203 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005204 while 1:
5205 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005206 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005207 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5208 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5209 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5210 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005211
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005212
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005213What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5214===========================
5215
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005216*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5217
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005218Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005219--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005220
5221- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5222 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5223 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5224
5225- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5226 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5227 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5228 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5229 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5230 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5231 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005232
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005233- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005234 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005235 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5236 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5237 associate a docstring with a property.
5238
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005239- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5240 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5241 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5242 other built-in object types.
5243
5244- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5245 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5246 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5247 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5248 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5249
5250- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5251 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5252
5253- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5254 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005255 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005256 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5257 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5258 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5259 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5260 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5261
5262- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5263 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5264 class.
5265
5266- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5267 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5268 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5269 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5270
5271- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5272 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5273 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5274 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5275
5276- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5277 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5278
5279- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5280 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5281 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5282 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5283 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005284 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005285 with the same value as s.
5286
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005287- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5288
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005289Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005290----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005291
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005292- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5293
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005294- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5295 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5296 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5297 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5298 objects.
5299
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005300- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5301 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005302 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5303 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5304
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005305- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5306 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5307 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5308
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005309Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005310-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005311
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005312- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5313 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5314 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5315 by the instances.
5316
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005317- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5318 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5319 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5320
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005321- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5322 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5323 before the entire comparison is complete.
5324
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005325- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5326 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5327 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5328
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005329- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5330 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5331 getwriter().
5332
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005333- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5334 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5335
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005336- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005337 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5338 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5339
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005340- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5341 iterable object.
5342
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005343- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5344 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005345
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005346- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5347 authentication.
5348
5349- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5350 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005351
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005352- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005353 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5354 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5355 a sample driver.)
5356
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005357Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005358-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005359
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005360- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5361 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5362 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5363 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5364 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5365 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5366 kernel has large file support.
5367
5368- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5369 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5370 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5371 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5372 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5373
5374- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5375 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5376 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5377
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005378C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005379-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005380
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005381- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5382 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5383
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005384New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005385-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005386
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005387- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5388 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5389
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005390Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005391-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005392
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005393- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5394 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5395 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5396 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5397 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5398
5399- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5400 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5401 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5402 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5403
5404- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5405 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5406
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005407Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005408-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005409
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005410- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005411 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5412 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005413
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005414
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005415What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5416===========================
5417
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005418*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5419
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005420Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005421----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005422
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005423- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5424 big to represent as a C double.
5425
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005426- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5427 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5428 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5429 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5430 restriction).
5431
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005432- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5433 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5434 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5435 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5436 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5437
5438 >>> dir([])
5439 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5440 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5441 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5442 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5443 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5444 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5445 'reverse', 'sort']
5446
5447 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5448
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005449- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005450 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5451 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5452 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5453 OverflowError exception.
5454
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005455- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005456 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005457 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5458 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5459 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5460 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5461 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005462 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005463 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5464 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5465
5466 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5467 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5468 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5469 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005470
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005471- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005472 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5473 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5474 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5475 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5476 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5477 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5478 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5479 once it is created.
5480
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005481- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5482 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5483 (key, value) pairs.
5484
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005485- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005486 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5487 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5488
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005489- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5490 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5491 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5492 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5493 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005494
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005495- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005496 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5497 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5498
5499 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5500
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005501- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005502 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5503
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005504Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005505-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005506
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005507- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005508 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5509 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005510
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005511- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5512 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5513 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5514 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5515 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5516 in this area anymore).
5517
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005518- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5519 threading.Timer.
5520
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005521- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5522 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5523
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005524- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005525 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5526
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005527- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005528 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5529 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5530 converted to Python longs.
5531
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005532- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005533 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5534
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005535- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5536 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5537 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5538
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005539Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005540-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005541
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005542- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5543 division operators as per PEP 238.
5544
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005545Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005546-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005547
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005548- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5549 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5550 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5551 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5552
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005553C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005554-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005555
5556- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005557
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005558- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5559 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005560 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005561
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005562 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5563 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005564 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005565 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005566
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005567- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005568 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5569 module:
5570
5571 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005572
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005573 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5574 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005575
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005576 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5577 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005578
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005579 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5580
5581 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5582
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005583- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005584 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5585 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5586 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005587
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005588New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005589-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005590
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005591- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5592 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5593 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5594 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5595 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005596
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005597Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005598-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005599
5600Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005601-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005602
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005603- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5604 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5605 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5606 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005607 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5608 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5609 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5610 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5611 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005612
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005613- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005614 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5615
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005616
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005617What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5618===========================
5619
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005620*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5621
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005622Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005623-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005624
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005625- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5626 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5627
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005628- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5629 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5630 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005631
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005632- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5633 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5634 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5635 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005636
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005637- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5638
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005639- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005640
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005641Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005642-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005643
5644- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005645 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005646 the module docstring for details.
5647
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005648Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005649-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005650
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005651- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005652 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5653 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5654 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005655
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005656- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5657 Nick Mathewson.
5658
5659Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005660----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005661
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005662- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5663 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5664 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5665 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5666 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5667 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5668 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5669 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5670
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005671- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5672 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5673 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5674 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5675
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005676- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5677 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5678 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5679 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5680 come a long way).
5681
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005682- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5683 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5684 write filters for these warnings).
5685
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005686- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5687 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5688 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5689 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5690 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5691
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005692- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5693 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5694 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5695 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5696 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5697 older distribution.
5698
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005699Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005700-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005701
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005702- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5703 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005704 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005705
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005706- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5707 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5708 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5709
5710- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5711
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005712- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5713
5714- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5715
5716- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5717
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005718- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005719
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005720- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5721
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005722New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005723-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005724
5725C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005726-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005727
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005728- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5729 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5730 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5731 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5732 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5733 against buffer overruns.
5734
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005735- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005736 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5737 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005738 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5739 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5740 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5741
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005742- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5743 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5744 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5745 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5746 deprecated.
5747
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005748Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005749-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005750
5751- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5752 relevant is found.
5753
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005754
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005755What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005756===========================
5757
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005758*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5759
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005760Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005761----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005762
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005763- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5764 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5765 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5766 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5767 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5768 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5769 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5770 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005771 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005772 repaired.
5773
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005774- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005775 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005776 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5777 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5778 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5779 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5780 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5781 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5782 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5783 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5784
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005785- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5786 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5787 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5788 leading BMO character).
5789
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005790- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5791 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5792 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5793
5794 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5795 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5796 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005797
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005798 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5799 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5800 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5801 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5802 for various simple to use conversions.
5803
5804 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5805 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5806
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005807 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5808 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5809 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5810 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5811 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5812 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5813 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5814 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5815 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5816 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5817 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5818 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5819 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5820 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5821 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005822
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005823- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5824 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5825 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005826 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005827 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005828
5829 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005830 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5831 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5832 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5833 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5834 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005835 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5836 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005837
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005838 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5839 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5840 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005841 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005842
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005843- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5844 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5845 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5846 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5847 floating arithmetic,
5848
5849 x = 9007199254740992.0
5850 print long(x)
5851
5852 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5853 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5854 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5855 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5856 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5857 functions are of good quality).
5858
5859 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5860 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5861 algorithms to break.
5862
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005863- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5864 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5865 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5866 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5867 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5868 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5869 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5870 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5871 order.
5872
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005873- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5874 operation along the most common code paths.
5875
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005876- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5877 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5878
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005879- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5880 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5881 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5882 {}.update(UserDict())
5883
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005884- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5885 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5886 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5887 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5888 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5889 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5890 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5891 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5892
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005893- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005894 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005895
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005896 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005897 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5898 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005899 join() method of strings
5900 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005901 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5902 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005903 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005904 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005905
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005906- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5907 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5908
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005909- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5910 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5911
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005912- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5913 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5914 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5915 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5916
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005917- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5918 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005919 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005920 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5921 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005922
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005923- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5924
5925
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005926Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005927-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005928
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005929- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005930 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005931 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5932 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5933
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005934- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5935 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5936
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005937- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5938 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5939 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5940 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5941
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005942- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5943 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5944 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5945
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005946- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5947
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005948- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5949
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005950- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5951 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5952 that are still imported into string.py).
5953
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005954- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5955
5956- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5957 Now it does.
5958
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005959- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5960
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005961- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5962 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5963 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5964 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5965 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005966 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5967 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005968
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005969- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5970 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5971 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5972 'help(object)'.
5973
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005974Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005975-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005976
5977- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005978 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005979 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5980 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5981
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005982- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005983 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5984 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005985
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005986C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005987-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005988
5989- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5990 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005991
5992----
5993
5994**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**