blob: 2c58dae2a8f474e1885cf96c4d7749d1e71f2c63 [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
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000015- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
16 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
17 was empty.
18
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000019- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
20 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
21
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000022- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
23present).
24
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000025- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
26 codes.
27
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000028- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
29 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
30 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
31
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000032- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
33 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
34
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000035- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000036 (fixes bug #1119418).
37
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000038- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
39
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000040- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
41 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
42
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000043- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
44 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
45 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
46
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000047- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
48
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000049- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
50 reference counts in some error exit cases.
51
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000052- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
53 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
54 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
55 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
56 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
57 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
58 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
59 realloc.
60
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000061- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
62 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
63
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000064- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
65 like their int counterparts.
66
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000067- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
68 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
69 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
70 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
71 for a longer write-up of the problem).
72
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000073- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
74 serializing floats.
75
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000076- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
77 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
78 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
79
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000080- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
81 278.
82
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000083- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
84 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
85 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
86 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +000087 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000088 PyNumber_*().
89 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
90
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000091- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
92 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
93 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
94 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
95
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000096- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
97 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
98 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
99 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
100 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
101
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000102- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
103 disabled caused a crash.
104
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000105- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
106 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
107
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000108- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000109 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
110
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000111- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
112
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000113- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000114 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
115 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
116 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000117
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000118- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
119
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000120- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
121 returning None.
122
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000123- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000124 ('\') with a specific error message.
125
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000126- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
127
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000128- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
129 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
130
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000131- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000132 an ferror() call.
133
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000134- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
135 list.sort().
136
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000137- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
138 (2+3) --> (5).
139
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000140- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
141
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000142- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
143 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000144
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000145- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
146 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
147 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
148
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000149- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
150 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
151 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
152
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000153Extension Modules
154-----------------
155
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000156- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
157 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
158
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000159- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
160
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000161- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
162 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
163
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000164- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
165 returns in cStringIO.c.
166
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000167- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
168 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
169
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000170- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
171
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000172- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
173
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000174- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
175 the file system encoding.
176
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000177- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
178 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000179
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000180- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
181
182- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000183 line without newlines.
184
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000185- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
186 on Windows.
187
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000188- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
189 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
190
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000191- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
192 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
193 for large or negative values.
194
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000195- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000196 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000197
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000198- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
199
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000200- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
201 if available on the platform.
202
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000203- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
204 available on the platform.
205
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000206- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
207 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
208
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000209- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
210
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000211- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
212 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
213 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
214
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000215- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
216
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000217- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
218 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
219
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000220- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000221 file size.
222
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000223- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
224
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000225- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
226 {remove_history,replace_history}
227
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000228- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
229 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000230
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000231- stat_float_times is now True.
232
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000233- array.array objects are now picklable.
234
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000235- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
236 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
237
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000238- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
239 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
240 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
241
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000242- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
243 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000244
245Library
246-------
247
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000248- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
249 "parent" argument.
250
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000251- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
252 for padding.
253
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000254- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
255 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
256
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000257- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
258 to get the correct encoding.
259
260- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
261 languages.
262
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000263- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
264
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000265- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
266
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000267- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
268
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000269- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
270 functionality.
271
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000272- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
273
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000274- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
275 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
276
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000277- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
278 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
279 match the Content-Length header.
280
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000281- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
282
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000283- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
284 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
285 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
286
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000287- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
288
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000289- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
290
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000291- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
292 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
293
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000294- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
295 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
296 Tkdnd.
297
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000298- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
299 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
300
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000301- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
302 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
303
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000304- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000305 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
306
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000307- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
308 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
309
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000310- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
311 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
312
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000313- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000314 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000315
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000316- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
317
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000318- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
319 error messages.
320
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000321- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
322
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000323- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
324 Bug #1224621.
325
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000326- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
327 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
328 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
329 terminates by raising StopIteration.
330
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000331- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
332
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000333- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
334 component of the path.
335
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000336- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
337 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
338 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
339 class at all.
340
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000341- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
342 files to PyPI.
343
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000344- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
345 them to PyPI.
346
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000347- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
348 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
349 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
350 work as expected.
351
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000352- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
353 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
354
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000355- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000356 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
357
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000358- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
359
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000360- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
361 to build.
362
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000363- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
364 symbolic links on Windows.
365
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000366- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000367 profile.py if available.
368
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000369- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
370
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000371- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
372 in LWPCookieJar.
373
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000374- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
375
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000376- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
377
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000378- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
379
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000380- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
381
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000382- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
383
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000384- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
385
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000386- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
387
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000388- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
389
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000390- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
391 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
392 be exploited in various ways.
393
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000394- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
395
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000396- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
397
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000398- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
399
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000400- Enhancements to the csv module:
401
402 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000403 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000404 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000405 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
406 reporting.
407 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
408 dictates.
409 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000410 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000411 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000412 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
413 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000414 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
415 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000416 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000417 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
418 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
419 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
420 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
421 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
422 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
423 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
424 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
425 without first creating a dialect class.
426 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
427 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
428 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000429 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000430 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
431 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000432 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
433 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
434 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
435 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000436 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
437 This has been fixed.
438
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000439- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
440 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
441 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
442 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
443
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000444- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
445
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000446- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
447 (Bug #951915).
448
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000449- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
450 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
451 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000452 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000453
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000454- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
455
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000456- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
457 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
458
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000459- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
460
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000461- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
462
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000463- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
464
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000465- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
466
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000467- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
468
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000469- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
470 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
471 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
472
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000473- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000474 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000475
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000476- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
477 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
478 tokenizer with very long source lines.
479
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000480- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
481 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
482
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000483- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
484 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000485
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000486- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
487 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
488
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000489- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
490 correctly.
491
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000492- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
493 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
494 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
495 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
496 between two lines.
497
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000498- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
499 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
500 handlers.
501
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000502- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000503 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
504 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000505
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000506- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
507 considering it exactly like a '*'.
508
509
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000510Build
511-----
512
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000513- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
514 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
515
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000516- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
517 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
518
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000519- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
520 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
521 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000522 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000523
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000524- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
525 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
526 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
527
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000528- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
529
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000530- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
531 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
532
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000533- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
534 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
535 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
536 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
537 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
538 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
539 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
540 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
541
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000542- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
543 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
544 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
545 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
546
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000547
548C API
549-----
550
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000551- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
552
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000553- Removed PyRange_New().
554
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000555
556Tests
557-----
558
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000559- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000560
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000561
562Documentation
563-------------
564
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000565- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
566
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000567- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
568
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000569- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
570
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000571- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
572
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000573- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
574
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000575- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
576
577- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
578
579- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
580
581- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
582
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000583- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
584 Closes bug #1166582.
585
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000586- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
587 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
588 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
589
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000590Mac
591---
592
593
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000594New platforms
595-------------
596
597- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
598
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000599
600Tools/Demos
601-----------
602
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000603- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
604 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
605 source files that need an encoding declaration.
606 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
607
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000608- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
609
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000610- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000611
612
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000613What's New in Python 2.4 final?
614===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000615
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000616*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000617
618Core and builtins
619-----------------
620
621- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
622 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
623 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
624
625
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000626What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
627==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000628
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000629*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000630
631Core and builtins
632-----------------
633
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000634- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
635 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
636 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
637
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000638
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000639Library
640-------
641
642- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
643 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
644 raised is re-raised.
645
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000646- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
647 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
648
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000649- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
650 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
651 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
652 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
653 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
654 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
655 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
656 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
657 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
658 by the slice are recomputed now.
659
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000660- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000661
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000662Build
663-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000664
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000665- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
666 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
667 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000668
669C API
670-----
671
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000672- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
673
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000674
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000675What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
676================================
677
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000678*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000679
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000680License
681-------
682
683The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
684is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
685changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
686Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
687intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
688durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
689the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
690License::
691
692 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
693
694says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
695to Python 2.1.1.
696
697The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
698License Version 2.
699
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000700Core and builtins
701-----------------
702
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000703- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
704 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
705 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
706 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
707 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
708 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
709 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
710 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
711 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
712 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
713
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000714- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000715
716Extension Modules
717-----------------
718
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000719- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
720 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
721 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
722 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000723
724Library
725-------
726
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000727- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
728 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
729 returned.
730
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000731- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
732
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000733- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
734 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
735
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000736- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
737
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000738- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
739 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000740
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000741- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
742
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000743- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
744
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000745- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000746 the source code is updated and reloaded.
747
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000748Build
749-----
750
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000751- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000752
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000753What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
754================================
755
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000756*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000757
758Core and builtins
759-----------------
760
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000761- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000762 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
763
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000764- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
765 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
766 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
767 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
768
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000769- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
770 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
771
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000772- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
773 constant.
774
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000775- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
776 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
777 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
778 large), and to anomalies such as
779 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
780 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
781 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
782 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000783
784Extension modules
785-----------------
786
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000787- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
788 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000789 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
790 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
791 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000792
793Library
794-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000795
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000796- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000797 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000798 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
799 --swig-cpp.
800
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000801- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
802 it is set.
803
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000804- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000805
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000806- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
807 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
808 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
809 Closes bug #1039270.
810
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000811- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000812
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000813 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000814 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
815 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
816 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
817 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
818 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
819 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
820 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
821 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
822 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
823 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
824 + Updates to documentation.
825
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000826- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
827 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
828 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
829 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
830
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000831- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000832
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000833- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
834 applications should use the getmember function.
835
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000836- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
837
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000838- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
839 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
840 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
841 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
842 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
843 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
844 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
845 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
846 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
847
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000848- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
849 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000850 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000851
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000852- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
853 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
854 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
855 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
856 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
857 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
858 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
859 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000860
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000861- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
862 the new public features (of which there are many).
863
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000864- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000865 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
866 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
867 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
868 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000869 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000870
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000871- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
872
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000873- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
874 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
875 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
876 options.
877
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000878- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
879 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
880 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
881 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
882 conditions under which non-string values work.
883
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000884Build
885-----
886
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000887- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
888 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
889 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
890
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000891- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
892 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
893 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
894 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
895 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000896
897C API
898-----
899
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000900- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
901 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
902
903- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
904
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000905- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
906 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
907 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
908 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
909 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
910 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
911 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
912 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
913 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
914
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000915- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
916
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000917- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
918 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
919 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000920
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000921Tests
922-----
923
924- test__locale ported to unittest
925
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000926Mac
927---
928
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000929- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
930 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
931 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000932
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000933Tools/Demos
934-----------
935
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000936- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
937 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
938 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
939 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
940 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000941
942
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000943What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
944=================================
945
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000946*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000947
948Core and builtins
949-----------------
950
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000951- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000952 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
953
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000954- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
955 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
956 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
957 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
958 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
959 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
960 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
961 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000962 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
963 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
964 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
965 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
966 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000967
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000968- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
969 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
970 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
971 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
972 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
973
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000974- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
975
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000976- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
977 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
978
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000979- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
980 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
981 modified the list.
982
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000983- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
984 functions is now writable.
985
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000986- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
987 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
988 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
989 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
990
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000991- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
992 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
993 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
994 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
995 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000996
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000997- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
998 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
999
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001000Extension modules
1001-----------------
1002
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001003- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1004
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001005- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1006 data.
1007
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001008- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1009 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1010 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1011 supposed to have been truncated away.
1012
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001013- Added socket.socketpair().
1014
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001015- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1016 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1017
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001018- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001019 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1020
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001021Library
1022-------
1023
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001024- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001025 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001026
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001027- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1028 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1029
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001030- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1031 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1032
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001033- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1034
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001035- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1036 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001037
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001038- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1039 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1040
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001041- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1042
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001043- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1044
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001045- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1046
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001047- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1048 Percivall.
1049
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001050- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1051 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1052
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001053- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1054 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1055 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001056 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001057
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001058- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1059 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1060 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1061 and exponent.
1062
1063- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1064
1065- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001066 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001067 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1068
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001069- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1070 to the readline module.
1071
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001072- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001073 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1074 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001075
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001076- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1077 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1078 contains symlinks.
1079
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001080- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1081 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1082
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001083- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1084 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1085 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1086
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001087- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1088 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1089 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1090 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1091 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1092 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1093 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1094 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1095 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1096 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1097 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1098 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1099 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1100
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001101- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1102
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001103Tools/Demos
1104-----------
1105
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001106- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1107 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1108
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001109- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1110
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001111Build
1112-----
1113
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001114- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1115 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1116 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1117 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1118 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1119 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1120 plans to do so.
1121
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001122- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1123 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1124
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001125- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1126 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1127
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001128- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1129 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1130
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001131- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1132 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1133
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001134- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1135 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1136
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001137C API
1138-----
1139
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001140..
1141
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001142Documentation
1143-------------
1144
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001145- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1146 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1147
1148- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1149 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1150 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001151
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001152New platforms
1153-------------
1154
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001155- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1156
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001157Tests
1158-----
1159
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001160..
1161
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001162Windows
1163-------
1164
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001165- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1166 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1167 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1168 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1169 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1170 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1171 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1172 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1173 the problem.
1174
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001175Mac
1176---
1177
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001178..
1179
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001180
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001181What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1182=================================
1183
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001184*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001185
1186Core and builtins
1187-----------------
1188
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001189- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1190 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1191 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1192 sensitive code.
1193
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001194- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001195 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001196
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001197 @staticmethod
1198 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001199
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001200 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001201
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001202- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1203 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1204 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1205 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1206 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1207 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1208 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1209 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1210 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1211 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1212 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1213
1214 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1215 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1216 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1217 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1218 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1219 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1220 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1221
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001222- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1223 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1224
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001225- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001226 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001227
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001228- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001229 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001230 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1231
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001232- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001233 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1234 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1235
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001236- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1237 types that support garbage collection.
1238
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001239- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1240
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001241- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1242 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1243 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1244 Jython.
1245
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001246- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1247
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001248- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1249 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1250
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001251- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1252 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1253 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001254
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001255- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1256 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1257 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1258
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001259Extension modules
1260-----------------
1261
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001262- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1263
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001264Library
1265-------
1266
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001267- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1268 TIS-620
1269
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001270- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1271 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1272 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1273 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1274 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1275 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1276 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1277 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1278 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1279 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1280
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001281- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1282
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001283- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1284 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1285 same as when the argument is omitted).
1286 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1287
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001288- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1289
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001290- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1291 schemes are offered.
1292
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001293- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1294
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001295- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1296 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1297 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1298
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001299- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1300
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001301- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1302 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1303
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001304- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1305 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1306 when dummy_threading is being used.
1307
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001308- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1309 from a tarfile.
1310
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001311- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001312 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001313
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001314- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1315 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1316 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1317 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1318
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001319- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1320 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1321
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001322- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1323 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1324 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1325 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1326 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1327 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1328 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1329 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1330 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1331 by some other method in progress).
1332
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001333- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1334 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1335 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001336
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001337- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1338
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001339- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1340 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1341 AM Kuchling.
1342
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001343- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1344 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1345 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1346
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001347- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1348 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1349 instead of unsigned.
1350
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001351- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001352 no longer part of the public API.
1353
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001354- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1355 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1356 string methods of the same name).
1357
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001358- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001359 SF patch 945642.
1360
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001361- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1362
1363 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1364
1365 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1366 DocTestSuites.
1367
1368- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1369 that provide thread-local data.
1370
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001371- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1372 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1373
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001374- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1375
1376- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1377 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1378 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1379
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001380- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1381
1382 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1383 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1384 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001385
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001386 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1387 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1388 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1389 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1390
1391 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1392 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1393
1394 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1395 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1396 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1397 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1398
1399 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1400 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1401 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1402 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1403 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1404
1405 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1406 wrapping help output.
1407
1408 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1409 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1410 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001411
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001412C API
1413-----
1414
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001415- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1416 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1417 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1418 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1419 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1420 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1421 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1422 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1423 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1424 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1425 its visible semantics have not changed.
1426
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001427- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1428 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1429
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001430Documentation
1431-------------
1432
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001433- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001434
1435 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001436 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001437
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001438 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001439
1440 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1441
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001442- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001443
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001444Tests
1445-----
1446
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001447- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001448 platforms that use the Makefile.
1449
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001450- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1451 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1452 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1453
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001454
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001455What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1456=================================
1457
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001458*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001459
1460Core and builtins
1461-----------------
1462
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001463- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1464 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1465 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1466 objects now (one object instead of three).
1467
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001468- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1469 Windows DLLs.
1470
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001471- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1472 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001473
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001474- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1475 a new .pyc magic.
1476
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001477- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1478 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1479 be there.
1480
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001481- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1482 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1483 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1484
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001485- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1486 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1487 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1488
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001489- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1490
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001491- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1492 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1493 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001494
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001495- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1496 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1497
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001498- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1499
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001500- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001501 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001502
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001503- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1504
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001505- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1506
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001507- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1508 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1509
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001510- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1511 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1512 Fixes bug #858016 .
1513
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001514- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1515 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1516 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1517
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001518- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1519 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1520 improves their performance (about 35%).
1521
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001522- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1523 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1524 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1525
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001526- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1527 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1528 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1529 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1530
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001531- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1532 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001533 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001534 length is not known).
1535
1536- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1537 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001538 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1539 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001540 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1541
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001542- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1543 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1544
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001545- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1546 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1547 keyword arguments.
1548
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001549- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1550 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1551 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1552
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001553- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1554 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1555 cases.
1556
1557- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1558 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1559 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1560 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1561 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1562 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1563 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1564 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1565 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1566 a release build.
1567
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001568- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1569 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1570
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001571- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001572 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001573
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001574- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1575 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1576 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1577 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1578 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1579 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1580 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1581 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1582 destroyed.
1583
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001584- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1585 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1586 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1587 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1588 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1589 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1590 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1591 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1592
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001593- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1594 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1595 character other than a space.
1596
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001597- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1598 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1599 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1600 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1601 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1602 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1603 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1604 attributes with the same name.
1605
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001606- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1607 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1608 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1609 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1610 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1611 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1612 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1613 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1614 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1615 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1616 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1617 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1618 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1619 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001620
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001621- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1622 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1623 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1624 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1625 This has been repaired.
1626
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001627- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1628
1629- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1630
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001631- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1632 over a sequence.
1633
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001634- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001635 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001636
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001637- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1638
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001639- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1640 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1641 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1642 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1643 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1644 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1645 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1646 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1647
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001648- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1649 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1650 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1651
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001652- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1653 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1654 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1655 freelist.
1656
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001657- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1658 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1659
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001660- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1661 number.
1662
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001663- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1664 a TypeError exception.
1665
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001666- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1667 820195.
1668
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001669- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1670 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1671 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1672
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001673- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001674 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1675 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001676
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001677- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1678 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1679 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1680
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001681- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1682 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001683 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001684
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001685- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001686 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1687 the first call.
1688
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001689
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001690Extension modules
1691-----------------
1692
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001693- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1694 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1695
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001696- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1697 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1698 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1699 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1700 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1701 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1702 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001703
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001704- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1705
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001706- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1707
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001708- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1709 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1710
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001711- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1712 fewer false positives.
1713
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001714- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1715 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1716
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001717- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001718 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1719
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001720- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001721 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001722 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001723 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1724 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001725
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001726- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1727 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1728 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1729 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1730
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001731- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1732 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1733 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1734 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1735 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1736 #897625.
1737
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001738- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1739 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1740
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001741- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1742 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1743 and pops on either side of the deque.
1744
1745- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1746 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1747
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001748- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1749 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1750 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1751 other functions that expect a function argument.
1752
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001753- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1754
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001755- os.getsid was added.
1756
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001757- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1758 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1759 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1760
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001761- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1762
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001763- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1764
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001765- readline.clear_history was added.
1766
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001767- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1768
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001769- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1770
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001771- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1772
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001773- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1774
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001775- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1776
1777- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1778
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001779- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1780
1781- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1782
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001783- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1784 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1785 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1786
1787- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1788 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1789 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1790 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1791 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1792 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1793 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1794
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001795- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1796 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1797 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1798 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001799
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001800- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001801 iterators from a single iterable.
1802
1803- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1804 of raising a TypeError exception.
1805
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001806- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1807 as parameter.
1808
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001809Library
1810-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001811
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001812- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1813
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001814- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1815 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1816 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001817
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001818- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1819 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1820 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001821
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001822- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001823
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001824- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1825 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001826
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001827- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1828 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1829
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001830- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1831
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001832- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001833 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001834
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001835- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001836 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001837
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001838- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1839
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001840- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1841 on cygwin and mingw32.
1842
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001843- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1844
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001845- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1846 module.
1847
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001848- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1849 installation scheme for all platforms.
1850
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001851- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001852 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001853
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001854- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1855 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1856 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1857
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001858- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1859 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1860 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1861
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001862- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1863
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001864- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1865
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001866- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1867 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1868
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001869- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1870 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1871 type pattern with the same value exists.
1872
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001873- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1874 when run from the command prompt).
1875
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001876- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1877 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1878
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001879- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1880 default sort).
1881
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001882- Added global runctx function to profile module
1883
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001884- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1885
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001886- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1887
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001888- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1889
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001890- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001891 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1892 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1893 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1894 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1895 accordingly.
1896
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001897- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1898 decoding standards.
1899
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001900- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1901 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1902 called for all requests.
1903
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001904- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1905 they are passed to the compiler.
1906
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001907- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1908 indent, width and depth.
1909
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001910- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1911 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1912
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001913- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1914 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1915
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001916- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1917
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001918- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1919
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001920- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1921
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001922- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1923 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1924
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001925- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001926 for better performance.
1927
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001928- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001929
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001930- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1931 a string).
1932
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001933- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1934
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001935- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1936
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001937- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1938
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001939- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1940
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001941- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1942 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1943 list of fieldnames.
1944
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001945- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1946 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1947
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001948- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1949
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001950- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1951 empty lists.
1952
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001953- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1954 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1955 and shelves.
1956
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001957- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1958 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1959
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001960- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001961 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1962 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001963
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001964- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1965 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001966 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001967
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001968- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001969 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1970 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1971
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001972- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1973 and removed in Py2.4.
1974
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001975- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1976
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001977- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1978
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001979Tools/Demos
1980-----------
1981
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001982- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1983 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1984
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001985- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1986
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001987- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1988 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1989 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1990 destination in situations where both files are given.
1991
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001992- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1993 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1994 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1995 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1996
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001997- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1998
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001999- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2000 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2001 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2002 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2003 now.
2004
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002005- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2006 in effect
2007
2008- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2009 C-c C-h
2010
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002011- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2012 -d option was given.
2013
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002014Build
2015-----
2016
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002017- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2018 build under OS X.
2019
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002020- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2021 --enable-profiling.
2022
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002023- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2024 is configured --with-tsc.
2025
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002026- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2027 on AMD64.
2028
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002029- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2030 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2031
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002032- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2033 removed.
2034
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002035- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2036 supported (see PEP 11).
2037
2038- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2039
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002040- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2041
2042- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2043 (see PEP 11).
2044
2045- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2046 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2047
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002048C API
2049-----
2050
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002051- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2052 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2053 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2054
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002055- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2056 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2057 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2058 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2059
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002060- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2061 generator objects.
2062
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002063- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2064 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002065 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2066 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002067
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002068- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2069 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2070
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002071- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2072 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2073 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2074 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2075 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2076
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002077- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2078 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2079 about 10% faster.
2080
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002081- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2082 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2083
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002084- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2085 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2086 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2087 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2088
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002089Windows
2090-------
2091
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002092- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2093 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2094 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2095 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2096
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002097- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2098 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2099 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2100
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002101
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002102What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2103===============================
2104
2105*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2106
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002107IDLE
2108----
2109
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002110- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2111 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2112 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2113 context-menu actions.
2114
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002115- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2116 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2117 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2118 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2119 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2120 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2121 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2122 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2123 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2124
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002125
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002126What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2127=============================================
2128
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002129*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002130
2131Core and builtins
2132-----------------
2133
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002134- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002135 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002136 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2137
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002138Extension modules
2139-----------------
2140
2141- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2142 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2143 than once. This has been fixed.
2144
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002145- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2146 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2147 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2148 call.
2149
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002150- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2151
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002152Library
2153-------
2154
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002155- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2156 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2157
2158- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2159 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2160 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2161 restored.
2162
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002163IDLE
2164----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002165
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002166- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002167
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002168Build
2169-----
2170
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002171- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2172 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2173
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002174C API
2175-----
2176
2177Windows
2178-------
2179
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002180- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2181 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2182
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002183- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2184
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002185Mac
2186---
2187
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002188- Various fixes to pimp.
2189
2190- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2191
2192- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2193 more problems than it solves.
2194
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002195
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002196What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2197=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002198
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002199*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2200
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002201Core and builtins
2202-----------------
2203
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002204- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2205 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2206
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002207- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2208 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002209 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002210
2211- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2212 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2213 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002214 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002215
2216- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2217 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002218
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002219- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2220 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2221 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2222
2223- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002224 770247.
2225
2226- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002227
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002228Extension modules
2229-----------------
2230
2231- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2232 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2233
2234- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2235
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002236- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2237
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002238- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2239 contained within the _strptime module.
2240
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002241- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2242 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2243
2244- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002245 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2246
2247- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2248 the find_class attribute, if present.
2249
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002250- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002251
2252 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2253 (SF bug 763298).
2254
2255 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002256 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2257 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2258 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002259
2260 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2261
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002262Library
2263-------
2264
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002265- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2266
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002267- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2268 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2269 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2270 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2271 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2272 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2273 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2274 or Tester().
2275
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002276- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2277 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2278 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2279 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2280 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2281 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2282 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2283 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2284 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002285
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002286 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002287
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002288- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2289 weren't before was an oversight.
2290
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002291- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2292 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2293
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002294- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2295 when there are no lines.
2296
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002297- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2298 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2299
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002300- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2301 to child processes.
2302
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002303- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2304
2305- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2306
2307- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2308 xmlrpclib.
2309
2310- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2311 responses.
2312
2313- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2314 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2315
2316- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2317 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2318 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2319
2320- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2321 used as patterns.
2322
2323- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2324 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2325 than Tk 8.3.
2326
2327- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2328
2329- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002330
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002331Tools/Demos
2332-----------
2333
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002334- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2335
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002336- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2337
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002338- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002339
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002340Build
2341-----
2342
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002343- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2344
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002345- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2346
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002347- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2348 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002349
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002350- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2351 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2352 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002353
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002354C API
2355-----
2356
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002357- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2358 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2359
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002360Windows
2361-------
2362
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002363- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2364 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2365 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2366 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2367 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2368 Python exception ::
2369
2370 thread.error: can't start new thread
2371
2372 is raised now.
2373
2374- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2375 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2376 instead of from DLL teardown.
2377
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002378Mac
2379---
2380
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002381- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002382 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002383 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2384 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2385 the executable in the bundle.
2386
2387- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002388
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002389- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2390
2391- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2392 on Panther.
2393
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002394What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2395================================
2396
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002397*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002398
2399Core and builtins
2400-----------------
2401
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002402- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2403 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2404 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2405 with the -i option.
2406
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002407- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2408 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2409
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002410- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2411 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2412
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002413- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2414 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2415 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2416 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2417 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2418 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2419 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2420 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2421 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2422 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2423 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2424 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2425 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002426
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002427- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2428 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2429 embedded in a lambda expression.
2430
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002431- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2432 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2433 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2434 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2435 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2436
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002437- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2438 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2439 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2440
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002441- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2442 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2443
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002444- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2445 It's writable again.
2446
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002447- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2448 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2449 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002450 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002451
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002452- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2453 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2454 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2455
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002456Extension modules
2457-----------------
2458
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002459- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2460 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2461
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002462- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2463 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2464 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2465 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2466
2467- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2468 collection.
2469
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002470- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2471 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2472 unique within a single program run.
2473
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002474- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2475 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2476
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002477- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2478 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2479
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002480- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2481 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002482
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002483- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2484
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002485- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2486 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2487
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002488- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2489 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2490 for many BSD-derived systems.
2491
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002492
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002493Library
2494-------
2495
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002496- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2497 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2498 primary ones:
2499
2500 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2501 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2502 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2503
2504 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2505 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2506 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2507 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2508 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2509 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2510
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002511- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2512 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2513 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2514 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2515 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2516 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2517 argument.
2518
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002519- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2520 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2521 in the archive.
2522
2523- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2524 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2525
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002526- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2527 569574).
2528
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002529- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2530 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2531 no more.
2532
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002533- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2534 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2535 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2536 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2537 code coverage.
2538
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002539- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2540 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2541 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002542 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2543 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002544
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002545- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2546 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2547 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002548 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002549
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002550- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2551
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002552- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2553 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2554 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2555 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2556
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002557- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2558 handling.
2559
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002560- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2561 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2562
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002563- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2564 in socket.py.
2565
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002566- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2567
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002568- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2569 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2570 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2571 opener with proxy support.
2572
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002573- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2574
2575- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2576
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002577Tools/Demos
2578-----------
2579
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002580- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2581
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002582- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2583
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002584- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2585 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002586
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002587- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2588 files.
2589
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002590Build
2591-----
2592
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002593- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002594 different root directory.
2595
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002596C API
2597-----
2598
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002599- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2600 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2601 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2602 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2603 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2604 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2605 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2606 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2607 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2608 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2609
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002610- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2611 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2612 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2613 from Python.
2614
2615
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002616New platforms
2617-------------
2618
2619None this time.
2620
2621Tests
2622-----
2623
2624- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2625 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2626
2627Windows
2628-------
2629
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002630- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2631
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002632- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2633 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2634 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2635 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2636 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2637 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2638 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2639 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2640 that's what it's for.
2641
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002642Mac
2643---
2644
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002645- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2646 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2647 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2648 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002649- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2650 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2651- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002652
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002653SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2654------------------------------------
2655
2656430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2657598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2658622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2659661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2660683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2661697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2662713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2663724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2664727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2665729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2666730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2667731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2668732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2669733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2670735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2671740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2672744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2673745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2674747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2675749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2676751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2677753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2678755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2679757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2680760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2681
2682
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002683What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2684================================
2685
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002686*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002687
2688Core and builtins
2689-----------------
2690
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002691- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2692 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2693
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002694- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2695 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2696 and cannot be strings).
2697
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002698- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2699 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2700 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2701 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2702
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002703- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2704 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2705 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2706 Python itself.
2707
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002708- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2709 the referenced object, if it has one.
2710
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002711- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2712 the thread started at
2713 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2714
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002715- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2716 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2717 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2718 placed on a list index.
2719
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002720- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2721 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2722 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2723 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2724
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002725- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2726 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2727 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2728 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2729 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2730 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2731 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2732
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002733- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2734 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2735 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2736 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2737 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2738
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002739- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2740 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002741
2742- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2743 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2744 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2745 #693195.)
2746
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002747- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2748 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002749
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002750- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002751 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002752 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2753 interpreter executions, would fail.
2754
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002755- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002756 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002757 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002758
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002759Extension modules
2760-----------------
2761
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002762- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2763 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2764 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2765 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2766
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002767- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2768 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2769
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002770- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2771 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2772 and Greg Chapman.)
2773
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002774- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2775 recursively.
2776
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002777- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002778 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2779 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2780 leaks.
2781
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002782- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2783
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002784- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2785 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2786 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2787 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2788 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2789 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2790 #705836.
2791
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002792- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002793 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2794
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002795- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2796 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2797 See SF bug #692416.
2798
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002799- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2800 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2801
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002802- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2803 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2804 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002805
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002806- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002807 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2808 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2809
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002810- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2811 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2812 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2813 timeouts to work properly.
2814
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002815Library
2816-------
2817
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002818- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2819 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2820 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2821 future release.
2822
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002823- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2824 for querying platform dependent features.
2825
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002826- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002827
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002828- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2829 pickle protocol versions.
2830
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002831- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2832 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2833 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2834
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002835- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2836
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002837- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2838 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2839 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2840 modules.
2841
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002842- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2843 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2844 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2845
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002846- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2847 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2848
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002849- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2850 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2851 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2852
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002853- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002854 MS Office extensions.
2855
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002856- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2857 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2858
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002859- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2860 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2861
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002862- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2863 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2864 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2865 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2866 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2867 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2868
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002869- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2870 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2871 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002872
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002873- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2874 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2875 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2876
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002877- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2878
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002879- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2880 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2881 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2882
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002883Tools/Demos
2884-----------
2885
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002886- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2887 See the module docstring for details.
2888
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002889Build
2890-----
2891
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002892- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2893 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002894
2895C API
2896-----
2897
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002898- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2899
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002900- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2901 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2902 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2903
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002904- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2905 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002906
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002907 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2908 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2909 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002910
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002911- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002912 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2913
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002914- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2915 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2916 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002917
2918New platforms
2919-------------
2920
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002921None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002922
2923Tests
2924-----
2925
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002926- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2927 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002928
2929Windows
2930-------
2931
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002932- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2933 function.
2934
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002935- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2936 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002937
2938Mac
2939---
2940
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002941- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2942 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002943
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002944- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2945 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002946
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002947- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2948 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2949 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002950
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002951- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002952 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2953 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002954
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002955- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2956 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002957
2958
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002959What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2960=================================
2961
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002962*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002963
2964Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002965-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002966
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002967- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2968 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2969 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2970
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002971- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2972 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2973 (SF patch #664376.)
2974
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002975- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2976 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2977 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2978 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2979 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2980 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002981 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002982
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002983- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2984 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2985 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2986 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002987 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002988
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002989- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2990 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2991 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2992 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2993 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2994 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2995 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2996 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2997 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2998 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2999 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3000
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003001- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3002 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3003 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3004 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3005 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3006 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3007
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003008- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3009 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3010
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003011- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3012 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3013 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3014 case.)
3015
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003016- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3017 passed as unicode strings.
3018
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003019- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3020 See SF bug #683467.
3021
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003022- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3023 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3024
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003025- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3026
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003027- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3028
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003029- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3030 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3031 arguments.
3032
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003033- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3034 See SF bug #667147.
3035
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003036- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003037 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003038 See SF bug #676155.
3039
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003040- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003041 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003042 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3043 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3044 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3045 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3046 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3047 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003048
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003049Extension modules
3050-----------------
3051
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003052- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3053 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3054 tp_as_number pointer.
3055
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003056- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3057 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3058 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3059 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3060 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3061
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003062- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3063
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003064- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3065
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003066- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003067 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003068 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3069 patch #678531.)
3070
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003071- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3072 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3073
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003074- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3075 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3076
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003077- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3078
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003079- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3080 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3081 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3082
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003083- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3084
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003085- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3086 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3087
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003088- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003089
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003090- datetime changes:
3091
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003092 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3093
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003094 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3095 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3096 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3097 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3098 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3099 now.
3100
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003101 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003102 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3103 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003104
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003105 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003106 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003107 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3108 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3109 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3110 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003111
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003112 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3113 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3114 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003115 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3116
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003117 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3118 by a later example coded by Guido.
3119
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003120 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003121 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3122 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3123 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003124 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3125 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3126
3127 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3128 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3129 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3130 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3131 tzinfo subclass instance.
3132
3133 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3134 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3135 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3136 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3137 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3138 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3139 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3140 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003141
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003142 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3143 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3144 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3145 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3146 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003147 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3148
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003149 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003150
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003151 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3152 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3153 as a naive datetime object.
3154
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003155 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3156 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3157 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3158
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003159 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3160 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3161 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3162 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3163 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3164 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3165 comparison.
3166
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003167 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3168 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3169 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3170 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003171 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003172
3173 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003174
3175 and ::
3176
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003177 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3178
3179 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3180 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3181 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3182 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3183
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003184 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3185 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3186 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3187 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3188 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3189
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003190 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3191 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003192 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3193 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003194
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003195Library
3196-------
3197
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003198- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3199 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3200
3201- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3202 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3203 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3204 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3205 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3206 See PEP 307 for details.
3207
3208- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3209 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3210
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003211- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3212 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003213 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003214 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3215 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003216 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003217
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003218- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3219 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3220
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003221- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3222 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3223 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3224
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003225- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3226
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003227- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3228 exception.
3229
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003230- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3231 class.
3232
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003233- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3234 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3235 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3236
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003237- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3238 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3239
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003240- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003241 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3242 See SF bug #659228.
3243
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003244- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3245 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3246 See SF patch #651082.
3247
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003248- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003249
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003250- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3251 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3252
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003253- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003254 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003255
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003256- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3257 DOS paths from other platforms.
3258
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003259Tools/Demos
3260-----------
3261
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003262- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3263 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3264 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3265 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3266 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3267 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3268 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3269 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3270 example:
3271
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003272 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3273 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003274
3275 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3276
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003277
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003278Build
3279-----
3280
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003281- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3282 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3283 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003284 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3285
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003286 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3287
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003288- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3289 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3290 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3291 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3292 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3293 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3294 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3295 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3296 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3297
3298- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3299 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3300 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3301 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3302
3303- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3304 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3305
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003306C API
3307-----
3308
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003309- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3310 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003311
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003312- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3313 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3314 tp_as_number pointer.
3315
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003316- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3317 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3318 (SF #681367)
3319
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003320- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3321 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3322 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3323 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003324
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003325Tests
3326-----
3327
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003328- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003329 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3330 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3331 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3332 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3333 pydoc.)
3334
3335- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3336
3337- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003338
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003339Windows
3340-------
3341
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003342- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3343 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3344 time).
3345
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003346- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3347 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3348
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003349- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3350 release without strong cryptography.
3351
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003352- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003353 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003354
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003355- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3356 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3357
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003358Mac
3359---
3360
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003361- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3362 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003363
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003364- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3365 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3366 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003367
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003368- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3369 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003370
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003371- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3372 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3373 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3374 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003375
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003376- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003377 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3378 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3379 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003380
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003381
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003382What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003383=================================
3384
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003385*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003386
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003387Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003388--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003389
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003390- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3391
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003392- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3393 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003394 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003395 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003396 a different meaning than before.
3397
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003398- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003399 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003400 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003401
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003402- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003403 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003404 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003405
3406- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3407 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3408 and deallocation.
3409
3410- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3411 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3412
3413- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3414 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3415 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3416 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3417 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3418
3419- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3420 now detected by the garbage collector.
3421
3422- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3423 [SF bug 519621]
3424
3425- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3426 identifier.
3427
3428- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3429 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3430 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3431 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3432 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3433 [SF bug 563060]
3434
3435- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3436 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3437 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3438 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3439 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3440
3441- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3442 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3443 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3444
3445- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3446
3447- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3448 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3449 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3450 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3451 state of the slots would be lost.)
3452
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003453Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003454-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003455
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003456- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003457 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3458 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3459 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3460 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003461 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3462 Jython 2.1.
3463
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003464- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003465 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003466 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3467 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3468 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3469 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3470 these, see PEP 302.
3471
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003472- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3473 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3474 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3475
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003476- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3477 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3478 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3479
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003480- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3481 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3482 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3483
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003484- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3485 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3486 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3487 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3488 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3489 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3490 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3491 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3492 releases or implementations.
3493
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003494- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003495 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3496 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003497
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003498- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3499 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3500
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003501- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3502 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3503 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3504
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003505- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3506 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3507
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003508- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3509 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003510 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3511 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003512
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003513- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3514 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3515 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3516 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3517 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3518
3519 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3520 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3521 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3522 pattern.
3523
3524 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3525 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3526 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3527 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3528
3529 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3530 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3531 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3532 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3533 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3534 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3535
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003536- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3537 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3538 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3539 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3540 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3541 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3542 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3543 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003544
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003545- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3546 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3547 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3548 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3549 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003550 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3551 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3552 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3553 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3554 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3555 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3556 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003557
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003558- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3559 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3560
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003561- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3562 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3563 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3564 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3565 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3566 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3567 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3568 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3569 to Zack Weinberg!
3570
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003571- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3572 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3573 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3574 type. This has been fixed now.
3575
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003576- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3577 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3578 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3579
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003580- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3581 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3582 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3583 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3584 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3585 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3586 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3587 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003588 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003589
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003590- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3591 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3592 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003593
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003594- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3595 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3596 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3597 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3598 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3599 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3600 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3601 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003602 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003603 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3604 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3605
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003606- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3607 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3608 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3609 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3610 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3611 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3612 this.)
3613
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003614- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3615 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003616 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003617 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003618 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3619 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003620 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3621 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003622
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003623- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3624 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3625 currently running.
3626
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003627- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3628 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3629 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3630 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3631
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003632- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3633 as directory names.
3634
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003635- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3636 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3637
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003638- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3639 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3640
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003641- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003642 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3643 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003644
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003645- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3646 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3647 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3648 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3649 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3650
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003651- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3652 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3653 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3654 removed.
3655
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003656- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3657 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3658 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3659
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003660- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3661 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3662 to __debug__.
3663
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003664- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3665 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3666 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3667
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003668- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3669 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3670 deprecated now.
3671
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003672- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3673 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3674 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003675
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003676- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3677 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3678 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3679 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3680 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003681
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003682- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3683 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3684
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003685- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3686 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3687 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003688 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003689 is backward compatible.
3690
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003691- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3692 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3693 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3694 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3695 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3696
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003697- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3698 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3699 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3700 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3701 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3702 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003703
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003704- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3705 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3706
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003707- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3708 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3709
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003710- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3711 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3712 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3713 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3714 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3715
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003716- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3717 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3718 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3719
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003720- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003721 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3722
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003723- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3724 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3725 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003726
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003727- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3728 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3729
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003730- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3731 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3732 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3733
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003734- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3735
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003736Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003737-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003738
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003739- Added three operators to the operator module:
3740 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3741 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3742 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3743
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003744- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3745
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003746- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3747 archives.
3748
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003749- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3750 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3751 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3752
3753 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3754
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003755- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3756 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3757 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003758 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003759
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003760- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3761 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3762 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3763 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003764 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3765 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3766 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3767 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003768
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003769- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3770 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003771
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003772- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3773
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003774- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3775 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3776
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003777- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3778 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3779 supported.
3780
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003781- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3782
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003783- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3784 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003785
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003786- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3787 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3788
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003789- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3790
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003791- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3792 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3793
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003794- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3795 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3796 functions but callable type objects.
3797
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003798- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003799 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003800 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003801
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003802- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3803 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003804
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003805- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3806 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003807
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003808- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3809 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3810 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3811 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3812
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003813- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3814 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003815
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003816- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3817 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3818 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3819 and __imul__.
3820
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003821- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003822 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3823 is called.
3824
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003825- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3826 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3827 interpreter was compiled.
3828
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003829- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3830 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3831 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003832 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003833 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3834 1, not 2.
3835
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003836- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3837 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3838 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3839 limit.
3840
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003841- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3842 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3843 bug #623464.
3844
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003845- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3846 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3847 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3848 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3849
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003850Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003851-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003852
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003853- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3854
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003855- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3856 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3857 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3858 with Python 2.3a2.
3859
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003860- os.path exposes getctime.
3861
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003862- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003863 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003864 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003865 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003866 unit tests of floating point results.
3867
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003868- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3869 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3870 has been increased.
3871
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003872- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3873 executed.
3874
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003875- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3876 postinstallation script.
3877
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003878- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3879 test the current module.
3880
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003881- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003882 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3883 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3884 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3885 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3886
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003887- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003888 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003889 Ward's Optik package.
3890
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003891- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3892 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3893 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3894 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3895
3896- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3897 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003898 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003899
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003900- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3901 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3902 shelf are binary pickles.
3903
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003904- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3905 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3906
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003907- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3908 modules are iterators now.
3909
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003910- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3911 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3912 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3913 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3914 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3915 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003916
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003917- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3918 with their entity value.
3919
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003920- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3921
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003922- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3923 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003924
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003925- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3926 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003927 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003928
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003929- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3930 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3931 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3932 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3933 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3934 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3935 main():
3936
3937 import locale
3938 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3939
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003940- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3941 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3942
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003943- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3944 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3945 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3946 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3947 to the new standard.
3948
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003949- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3950 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3951 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3952 an extension to the database.
3953
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003954- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3955 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3956 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3957 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003958 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003959
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003960- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003961 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003962
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003963- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3964 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3965 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3966 bounded integers.
3967
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003968- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3969 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3970 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3971 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3972 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3973 in existence.
3974
3975 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3976 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3977 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3978 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3979 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3980 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3981
3982 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3983 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3984 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3985 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3986
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003987- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3988 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3989 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3990
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003991- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3992
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003993- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3994 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3995 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3996 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3997
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003998- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3999 argument.
4000
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004001- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4002 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4003 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4004 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4005 [SF patch 560794].
4006
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004007- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4008 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4009 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004010 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4011 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4012 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004013
4014- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4015 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004016
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004017- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4018 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4019 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4020 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004021
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004022- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4023 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4024 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4025 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4026 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4027
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004028- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004029
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004030- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4031
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004032- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4033 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4034 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4035 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4036 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4037 identical to None.
4038
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004039- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4040 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4041 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4042 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4043 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4044 results now.
4045
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004046- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4047 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4048
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004049- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4050 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4051 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4052 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4053 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4054 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4055 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4056 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4057
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004058- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4059
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004060- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4061 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4062
4063- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4064 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4065 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4066 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4067 and other systems.
4068
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004069- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4070 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4071 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4072 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 +00004073 work well with these.
4074
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004075- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4076
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004077- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004078 connections.
4079
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004080- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4081 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4082 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4083
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004084- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4085 sets
4086
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004087- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4088 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4089 name.
4090
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004091- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4092 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4093 passed in.
4094
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004095- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004096 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004097 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4098 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004099
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004100- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4101
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004102- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4103
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004104- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4105 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4106 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4107
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004108- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4109 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4110 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4111 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004112 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004113
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004114- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004115 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004116 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004117
4118- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4119 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4120 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4121
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004122- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004123 the value of its expression argument.
4124
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004125- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4126 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4127 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4128
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004129- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4130 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4131 skipstone browser was included.
4132
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004133- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4134 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4135
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004136Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004137-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004138
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004139- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4140 names in addition to accepting file names.
4141
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004142- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4143 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4144 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4145 still used and useful.)
4146
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004147- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4148 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4149 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4150 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004151
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004152- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4153 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4154 the generated binary.
4155
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004156Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004157-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004158
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004159- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4160
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004161- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4162 except in the hands of experts.
4163
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004164- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004165 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4166 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4167 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004168
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004169- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4170 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4171 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4172 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4173 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4174 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4175 builds.
4176
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004177- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4178 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4179 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4180 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4181 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4182 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4183 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4184 new type.
4185
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004186- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004187
4188 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4189 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4190 positive infinities.
4191
4192 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4193 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4194 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4195 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4196 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4197 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4198 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4199
4200 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4201
4202 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4203
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004204- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4205 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4206 size of the executable.
4207
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004208- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4209 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4210 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4211 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004212
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004213- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4214
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004215- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4216 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4217 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004218
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004219- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4220 well as Unix.
4221
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004222- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4223 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4224 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4225 modules in the README file for details.
4226
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004227C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004228-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004229
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004230- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4231 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004232 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004233 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004234 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004235
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004236- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4237 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4238 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4239 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4240 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4241 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004242 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004243 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4244 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4245 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4246 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4247 aligned.)
4248
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004249- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4250 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4251 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4252
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004253- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4254 level.
4255
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004256- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4257 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4258 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4259 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4260 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4261
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004262- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4263 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4264 code.
4265
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004266- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4267 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4268 adjusting for negative indices.
4269
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004270- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4271 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4272 object.
4273
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004274- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4275 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4276 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4277
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004278- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4279 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004280
4281- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4282
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004283- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4284 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4285 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4286 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4287
4288- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4289
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004290- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004291
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004292- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004293 without going through the buffer API.
4294
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004295- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004296
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004297- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4298 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4299 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4300 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4301
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004302- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4303 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4304
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004305- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004306 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4307
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004308New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004309-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004310
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004311- OpenVMS is now supported.
4312
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004313- AtheOS is now supported.
4314
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004315- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4316
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004317- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4318
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004319Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004320-----
4321
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004322- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4323 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4324 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004325
4326Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004327-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004328
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004329- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4330 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4331 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4332 bugs.
4333 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004334 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004335 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4336 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004337 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004338
4339- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004340 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004341
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004342- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4343 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4344
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004345- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4346 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004347 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004348 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4349
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004350- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4351 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4352 use files" uninstall option).
4353
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004354- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4355
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004356- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4357 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4358
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004359- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4360 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4361 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4362
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004363- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4364 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4365 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4366 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4367 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004368 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4369 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4370 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004371
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004372- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004373 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004374 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4375 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4376 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4377 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4378 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4379 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4380 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4381 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4382 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4383 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4384 work around.
4385
4386- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4387 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4388 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4389 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4390 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4391 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4392 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4393 specified with O_CREAT too).
4394
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004395Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004396----
4397
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004398- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004399
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004400- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4401 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4402 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4403
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004404- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4405 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4406 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4407
4408- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4409 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4410 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4411 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4412 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4413 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4414 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4415 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004416
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004417- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4418 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4419 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004420
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004421- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4422 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4423 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4424 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4425 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004426
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004427- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4428 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4429 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004430
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004431- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4432 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004433
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004434- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4435 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4436 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4437 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4438 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004439
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004440- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4441 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4442 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4443
4444- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4445 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4446 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004447
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004448- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4449 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4450 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4451 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004452 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004453
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004454- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4455 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004456
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004457- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4458 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004459
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004460- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004461 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004462 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4463 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004464
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004465
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004466What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004467===============================
4468
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004469*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4470
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004471Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004472--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004473
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004474- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4475 with a custom metaclass.
4476
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004477Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004478-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004479
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004480- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4481 are proxies.
4482
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004483Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004484-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004485
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004486- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4487 very short strings.
4488
4489- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4490 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4491 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4492 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4493 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4494
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004495Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004496-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004497
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004498- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4499 close or delete time).
4500
4501- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4502 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4503
4504- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4505
4506- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004507 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004508
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004509Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004510-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004511
4512Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004513-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004514
4515C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004516-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004517
4518New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004519-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004520
4521Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004522-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004523
4524Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004525-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004526
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004527- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4528
4529- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4530 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4531
4532- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4533 deleted at process exit time.
4534
4535- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4536 in backslash.
4537
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004538Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004539----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004540
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004541- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4542 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4543 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4544
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004545
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004546What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004547===========================
4548
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004549*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4550
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004551Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004552--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004553
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004554- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4555 been extensively updated. See
4556
4557 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4558
4559 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4560
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004561- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4562 deleted!
4563
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004564- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4565 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4566 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4567 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4568 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4569
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004570- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4571
4572 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4573 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4574
4575 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4576 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4577 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4578 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4579 supported anyway.
4580
4581 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4582 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4583
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004584- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4585 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4586 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4587 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4588 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004589
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004590- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4591 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4592 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4593
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004594Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004595-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004596
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004597- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4598 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4599 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4600 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4601 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4602 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004603 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4604 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4605 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4606 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004607
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004608- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4609 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4610 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4611
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004612Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004613-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004614
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004615- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4616
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004617Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004618-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004619
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004620- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4621 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4622 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4623 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4624 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4625 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4626
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004627- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4628
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004629- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4630
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004631- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4632
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004633- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4634 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4635 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4636
4637- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4638
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004639Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004640-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004641
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004642- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4643 off a search on Google.
4644
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004645Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004646-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004647
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004648- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4649 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4650 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4651 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4652 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4653 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4654 other platforms should do likewise.
4655
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004656- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4657 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4658 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4659
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004660C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004661-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004662
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004663- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4664 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4665 producing key-value pairs.
4666
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004667- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004668 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004669 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4670 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4671 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4672 previously went unchallenged.
4673
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004674New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004675-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004676
4677Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004678-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004679
4680Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004681-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004682
4683Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004684----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004685
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004686- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4687 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004688
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004689- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4690 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4691 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4692 home.
4693
4694
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004695What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004696===========================
4697
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004698*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4699
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004700Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004701--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004702
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004703- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4704 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004705
4706 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004707 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004708
4709 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4710 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004711 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004712 This needs to be documented.
4713
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004714- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4715 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4716
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004717- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4718 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4719 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4720
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004721- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4722 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4723
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004724- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4725 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4726 class forbids it).
4727
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004728- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4729 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4730 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4731
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004732- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4733
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004734Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004735-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004736
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004737- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4738 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004739 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004740
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004741- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4742 (like 1 + '').
4743
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004744Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004745-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004746
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004747- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4748 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4749 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4750 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004751 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004752 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4753
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004754- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4755 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4756 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4757 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4758
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004759- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4760 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004761 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4762 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4763 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004764
4765- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4766 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004767
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004768- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4769 bytes on its input.
4770
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004771Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004772-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004773
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004774- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004775 convenience function.
4776
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004777- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4778 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4779 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004780 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4781 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4782 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4783 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4784 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4785 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004786
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004787- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4788 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4789 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4790 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4791
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004792- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4793 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4794 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4795
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004796- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4797 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4798 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4799 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4800
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004801- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4802 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004803 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004804 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4805 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4806 new -l and -e options.
4807
4808- statcache is now deprecated.
4809
4810- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4811 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004812 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004813 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4814 time properly taken into account.
4815
4816- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4817 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4818 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4819 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4820
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004821Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004822-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004823
4824Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004825-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004826
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004827- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4828 is built with libdb3 if available.
4829
4830- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4831
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004832C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004833-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004834
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004835- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4836 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4837 PySequence_Size().
4838
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004839- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4840
4841- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4842 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4843 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4844
4845- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4846 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4847
4848- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4849 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4850
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004851New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004852-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004853
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004854- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4855 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4856
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004857- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4858 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4859
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004860- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4861
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004862Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004863-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004864
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004865- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4866 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4867
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004868Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004869-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004870
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004871Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004872----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004873
4874- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4875 removed completely in the next release.
4876
4877- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4878 OSX.
4879
4880- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4881 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4882
4883- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4884
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004885
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004886What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004887===========================
4888
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004889*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4890
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004891Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004892--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004893
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004894- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004895 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004896 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004897 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4898 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004899 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4900 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004901 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4902 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004903
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004904- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4905 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4906
4907- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4908 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4909
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004910Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004911-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004912
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004913- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4914 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4915 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4916 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4917 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4918 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4919 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4920 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4921
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004922- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4923 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4924 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4925 example).
4926
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004927- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004928 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004929 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004930 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004931
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004932- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4933 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4934 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004935 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004936
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004937- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4938 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4939 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4940 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4941 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4942 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4943
4944 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4945
4946 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4947
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004948Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004949-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004950
4951- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4952
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004953- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4954
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004955- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4956 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004957
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004958- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4959 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4960 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4961 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4962 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4963 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004964 attributes.
4965
4966- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4967 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4968 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004969
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004970- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4971 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4972 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004973
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004974- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4975 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4976 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004977 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4978 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4979
4980- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4981 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004982
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004983Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004984-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004985
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004986- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4987 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4988
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004989- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4990 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4991 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4992 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4993
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004994- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4995 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4996 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4997 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4998
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004999 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5000 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5001 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5002 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5003 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5004 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5005 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5006 without losing information).
5007
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005008- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005009 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5010 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5011 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5012 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5013 module).
5014
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005015 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005016 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5017 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5018 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5019 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005020
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005021- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005022 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5023 encoding.
5024
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005025- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5026 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5027
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005028- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005029 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5030
5031- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5032 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5033 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5034 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5035
5036- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5037
5038- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5039 ON, and OFF.
5040
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005041- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5042 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5043
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005044Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005045-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005046
5047- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5048 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5049 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005050
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005051- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5052 been added: -X and -E.
5053
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005054Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005055-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005056
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005057- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5058 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5059
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005060C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005061-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005062
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005063- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5064 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5065 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5066 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5067 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5068
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005069- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5070 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5071 as long) arguments.
5072
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005073- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5074 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5075 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5076 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5077 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5078 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5079
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005080- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5081 input.
5082
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005083New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005084-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005085
5086Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005087-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005088
5089Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005090-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005091
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005092- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5093 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5094 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5095
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005096- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5097 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5098 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005099 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005100
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005101 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5102 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5103 import signal
5104 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005105
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005106 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005107 while 1:
5108 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005109 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005110 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5111 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5112 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5113 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005114
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005115
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005116What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5117===========================
5118
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005119*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5120
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005121Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005122--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005123
5124- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5125 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5126 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5127
5128- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5129 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5130 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5131 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5132 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5133 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5134 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005135
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005136- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005137 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005138 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5139 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5140 associate a docstring with a property.
5141
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005142- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5143 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5144 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5145 other built-in object types.
5146
5147- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5148 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5149 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5150 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5151 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5152
5153- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5154 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5155
5156- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5157 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005158 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005159 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5160 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5161 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5162 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5163 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5164
5165- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5166 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5167 class.
5168
5169- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5170 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5171 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5172 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5173
5174- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5175 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5176 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5177 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5178
5179- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5180 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5181
5182- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5183 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5184 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5185 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5186 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005187 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005188 with the same value as s.
5189
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005190- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5191
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005192Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005193----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005194
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005195- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5196
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005197- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5198 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5199 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5200 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5201 objects.
5202
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005203- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5204 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005205 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5206 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5207
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005208- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5209 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5210 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5211
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005212Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005213-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005214
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005215- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5216 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5217 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5218 by the instances.
5219
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005220- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5221 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5222 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5223
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005224- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5225 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5226 before the entire comparison is complete.
5227
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005228- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5229 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5230 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5231
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005232- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5233 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5234 getwriter().
5235
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005236- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5237 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5238
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005239- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005240 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5241 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5242
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005243- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5244 iterable object.
5245
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005246- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5247 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005248
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005249- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5250 authentication.
5251
5252- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5253 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005254
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005255- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005256 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5257 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5258 a sample driver.)
5259
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005260Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005261-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005262
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005263- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5264 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5265 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5266 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5267 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5268 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5269 kernel has large file support.
5270
5271- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5272 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5273 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5274 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5275 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5276
5277- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5278 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5279 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5280
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005281C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005282-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005283
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005284- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5285 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5286
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005287New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005288-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005289
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005290- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5291 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5292
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005293Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005294-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005295
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005296- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5297 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5298 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5299 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5300 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5301
5302- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5303 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5304 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5305 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5306
5307- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5308 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5309
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005310Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005311-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005312
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005313- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005314 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5315 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005316
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005317
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005318What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5319===========================
5320
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005321*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5322
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005323Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005324----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005325
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005326- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5327 big to represent as a C double.
5328
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005329- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5330 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5331 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5332 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5333 restriction).
5334
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005335- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5336 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5337 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5338 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5339 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5340
5341 >>> dir([])
5342 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5343 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5344 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5345 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5346 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5347 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5348 'reverse', 'sort']
5349
5350 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5351
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005352- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005353 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5354 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5355 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5356 OverflowError exception.
5357
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005358- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005359 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005360 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5361 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5362 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5363 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5364 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005365 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005366 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5367 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5368
5369 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5370 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5371 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5372 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005373
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005374- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005375 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5376 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5377 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5378 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5379 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5380 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5381 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5382 once it is created.
5383
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005384- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5385 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5386 (key, value) pairs.
5387
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005388- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005389 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5390 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5391
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005392- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5393 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5394 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5395 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5396 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005397
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005398- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005399 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5400 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5401
5402 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5403
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005404- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005405 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5406
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005407Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005408-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005409
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005410- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005411 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5412 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005413
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005414- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5415 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5416 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5417 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5418 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5419 in this area anymore).
5420
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005421- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5422 threading.Timer.
5423
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005424- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5425 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5426
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005427- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005428 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5429
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005430- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005431 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5432 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5433 converted to Python longs.
5434
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005435- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005436 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5437
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005438- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5439 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5440 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5441
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005442Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005443-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005444
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005445- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5446 division operators as per PEP 238.
5447
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005448Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005449-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005450
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005451- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5452 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5453 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5454 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5455
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005456C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005457-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005458
5459- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005460
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005461- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5462 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005463 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005464
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005465 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5466 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005467 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005468 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005469
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005470- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005471 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5472 module:
5473
5474 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005475
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005476 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5477 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005478
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005479 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5480 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005481
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005482 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5483
5484 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5485
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005486- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005487 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5488 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5489 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005490
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005491New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005492-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005493
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005494- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5495 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5496 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5497 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5498 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005499
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005500Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005501-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005502
5503Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005504-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005505
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005506- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5507 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5508 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5509 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005510 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5511 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5512 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5513 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5514 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005515
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005516- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005517 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5518
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005519
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005520What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5521===========================
5522
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005523*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5524
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005525Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005526-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005527
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005528- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5529 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5530
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005531- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5532 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5533 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005534
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005535- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5536 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5537 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5538 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005539
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005540- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5541
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005542- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005543
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005544Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005545-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005546
5547- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005548 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005549 the module docstring for details.
5550
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005551Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005552-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005553
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005554- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005555 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5556 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5557 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005558
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005559- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5560 Nick Mathewson.
5561
5562Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005563----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005564
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005565- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5566 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5567 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5568 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5569 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5570 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5571 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5572 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5573
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005574- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5575 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5576 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5577 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5578
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005579- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5580 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5581 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5582 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5583 come a long way).
5584
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005585- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5586 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5587 write filters for these warnings).
5588
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005589- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5590 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5591 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5592 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5593 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5594
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005595- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5596 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5597 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5598 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5599 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5600 older distribution.
5601
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005602Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005603-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005604
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005605- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5606 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005607 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005608
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005609- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5610 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5611 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5612
5613- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5614
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005615- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5616
5617- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5618
5619- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5620
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005621- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005622
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005623- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5624
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005625New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005626-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005627
5628C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005629-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005630
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005631- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5632 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5633 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5634 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5635 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5636 against buffer overruns.
5637
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005638- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005639 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5640 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005641 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5642 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5643 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5644
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005645- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5646 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5647 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5648 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5649 deprecated.
5650
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005651Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005652-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005653
5654- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5655 relevant is found.
5656
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005657
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005658What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005659===========================
5660
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005661*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5662
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005663Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005664----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005665
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005666- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5667 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5668 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5669 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5670 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5671 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5672 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5673 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005674 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005675 repaired.
5676
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005677- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005678 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005679 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5680 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5681 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5682 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5683 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5684 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5685 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5686 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5687
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005688- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5689 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5690 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5691 leading BMO character).
5692
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005693- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5694 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5695 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5696
5697 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5698 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5699 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005700
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005701 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5702 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5703 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5704 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5705 for various simple to use conversions.
5706
5707 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5708 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5709
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005710 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5711 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5712 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5713 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5714 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5715 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5716 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5717 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5718 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5719 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5720 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5721 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5722 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5723 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5724 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005725
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005726- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5727 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5728 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005729 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005730 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005731
5732 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005733 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5734 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5735 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5736 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5737 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005738 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5739 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005740
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005741 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5742 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5743 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005744 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005745
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005746- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5747 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5748 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5749 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5750 floating arithmetic,
5751
5752 x = 9007199254740992.0
5753 print long(x)
5754
5755 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5756 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5757 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5758 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5759 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5760 functions are of good quality).
5761
5762 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5763 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5764 algorithms to break.
5765
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005766- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5767 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5768 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5769 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5770 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5771 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5772 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5773 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5774 order.
5775
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005776- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5777 operation along the most common code paths.
5778
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005779- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5780 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5781
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005782- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5783 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5784 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5785 {}.update(UserDict())
5786
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005787- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5788 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5789 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5790 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5791 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5792 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5793 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5794 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5795
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005796- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005797 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005798
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005799 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005800 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5801 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005802 join() method of strings
5803 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005804 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5805 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005806 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005807 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005808
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005809- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5810 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5811
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005812- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5813 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5814
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005815- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5816 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5817 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5818 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5819
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005820- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5821 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005822 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005823 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5824 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005825
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005826- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5827
5828
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005829Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005830-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005831
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005832- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005833 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005834 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5835 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5836
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005837- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5838 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5839
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005840- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5841 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5842 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5843 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5844
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005845- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5846 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5847 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5848
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005849- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5850
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005851- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5852
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005853- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5854 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5855 that are still imported into string.py).
5856
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005857- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5858
5859- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5860 Now it does.
5861
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005862- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5863
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005864- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5865 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5866 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5867 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5868 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005869 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5870 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005871
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005872- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5873 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5874 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5875 'help(object)'.
5876
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005877Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005878-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005879
5880- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005881 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005882 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5883 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5884
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005885- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005886 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5887 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005888
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005889C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005890-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005891
5892- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5893 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005894
5895----
5896
5897**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**