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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000013- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
14 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
15
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000016- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000017 an ferror() call.
18
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000019- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
20 list.sort().
21
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000022- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
23 (2+3) --> (5).
24
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000025- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
26
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000027- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
28 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000029
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000030- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
31 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
32 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
33
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000034Extension Modules
35-----------------
36
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +000037- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
38 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +000039
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +000040- stat_float_times is now True.
41
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000042- array.array objects are now picklable.
43
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000044- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
45 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
46
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000047- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
48 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
49 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
50
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +000051- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
52 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000053
54Library
55-------
56
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +000057- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
58
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +000059- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
60 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
61 be exploited in various ways.
62
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +000063- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
64
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +000065- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
66
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +000067- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
68
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000069- Enhancements to the csv module:
70
71 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
72 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
73 PEP 305.
74 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
75 reporting.
76 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
77 dictates.
78 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000079 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000080 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000081 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
82 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000083 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
84 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +000085 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000086 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
87 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
88 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
89 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
90 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
91 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
92 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
93 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
94 without first creating a dialect class.
95 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
96 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
97 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +000098 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000099 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
100 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000101 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
102 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
103 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
104 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000105 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
106 This has been fixed.
107
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000108- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
109 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
110 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
111 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
112
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000113- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
114
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000115- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
116 (Bug #951915).
117
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000118- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
119 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
120 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
121 encoding alias table
122
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000123- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
124
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000125- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
126 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
127
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000128- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
129
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000130- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
131
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000132- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
133
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000134- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
135
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000136- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
137
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000138- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
139 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
140 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
141
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000142- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000143 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000144
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000145- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
146 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
147 tokenizer with very long source lines.
148
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000149- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
150 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
151
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000152- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
153 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000154
155Build
156-----
157
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000158- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
159 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
160
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000161- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
162 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
163 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
164 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
165 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
166 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
167 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
168 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
169
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000170- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
171 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
172 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
173 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
174
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000175
176C API
177-----
178
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000179- Removed PyRange_New().
180
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000181
182Tests
183-----
184
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000185- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000186
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000187
188Documentation
189-------------
190
191- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
192 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
193 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
194
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000195Mac
196---
197
198
199
200Tools/Demos
201-----------
202
203
204
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000205What's New in Python 2.4 final?
206===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000207
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000208*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000209
210Core and builtins
211-----------------
212
213- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
214 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
215 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
216
217
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000218What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
219==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000220
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000221*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000222
223Core and builtins
224-----------------
225
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000226- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
227 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
228 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
229
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000230
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000231Library
232-------
233
234- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
235 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
236 raised is re-raised.
237
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000238- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
239 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
240
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000241- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
242 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
243 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
244 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
245 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
246 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
247 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
248 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
249 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
250 by the slice are recomputed now.
251
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000252- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000253
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000254Build
255-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000256
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000257- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
258 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
259 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000260
261C API
262-----
263
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000264- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
265
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000266
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000267What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
268================================
269
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000270*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000271
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000272License
273-------
274
275The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
276is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
277changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
278Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
279intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
280durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
281the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
282License::
283
284 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
285
286says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
287to Python 2.1.1.
288
289The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
290License Version 2.
291
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000292Core and builtins
293-----------------
294
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000295- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
296 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
297 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
298 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
299 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
300 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
301 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
302 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
303 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
304 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
305
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000306- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000307
308Extension Modules
309-----------------
310
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000311- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
312 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
313 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
314 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000315
316Library
317-------
318
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000319- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
320 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
321 returned.
322
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000323- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
324
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000325- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
326 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
327
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000328- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
329
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000330- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
331 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000332
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000333- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
334
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000335- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
336
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000337- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000338 the source code is updated and reloaded.
339
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000340Build
341-----
342
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000343- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000344
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000345What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
346================================
347
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000348*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000349
350Core and builtins
351-----------------
352
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000353- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000354 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
355
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000356- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
357 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
358 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
359 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
360
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000361- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
362 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
363
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000364- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
365 constant.
366
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000367- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
368 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
369 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
370 large), and to anomalies such as
371 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
372 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
373 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
374 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000375
376Extension modules
377-----------------
378
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000379- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
380 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000381 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
382 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
383 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000384
385Library
386-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000387
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000388- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000389 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000390 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
391 --swig-cpp.
392
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000393- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
394 it is set.
395
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000396- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000397
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000398- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
399 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
400 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
401 Closes bug #1039270.
402
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000403- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000404
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000405 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000406 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
407 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
408 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
409 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
410 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
411 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
412 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
413 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
414 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
415 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
416 + Updates to documentation.
417
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000418- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
419 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
420 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
421 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
422
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000423- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000424
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000425- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
426 applications should use the getmember function.
427
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000428- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
429
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000430- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
431 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
432 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
433 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
434 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
435 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
436 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
437 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
438 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
439
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000440- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
441 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000442 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000443
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000444- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
445 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
446 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
447 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
448 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
449 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
450 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
451 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000452
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000453- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
454 the new public features (of which there are many).
455
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000456- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000457 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
458 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
459 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
460 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000461 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000462
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000463- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
464
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000465- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
466 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
467 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
468 options.
469
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000470- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
471 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
472 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
473 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
474 conditions under which non-string values work.
475
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000476Build
477-----
478
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000479- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
480 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
481 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
482
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000483- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
484 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
485 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
486 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
487 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000488
489C API
490-----
491
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000492- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
493 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
494
495- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
496
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000497- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
498 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
499 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
500 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
501 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
502 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
503 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
504 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
505 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
506
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000507- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
508
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000509- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
510 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
511 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000512
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000513Tests
514-----
515
516- test__locale ported to unittest
517
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000518Mac
519---
520
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000521- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
522 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
523 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000524
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000525Tools/Demos
526-----------
527
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000528- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
529 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
530 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
531 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
532 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000533
534
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000535What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
536=================================
537
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000538*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000539
540Core and builtins
541-----------------
542
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000543- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000544 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
545
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000546- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
547 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
548 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
549 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
550 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
551 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
552 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
553 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000554 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
555 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
556 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
557 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
558 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000559
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000560- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
561 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
562 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
563 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
564 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
565
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000566- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
567
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000568- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
569 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
570
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000571- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
572 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
573 modified the list.
574
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000575- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
576 functions is now writable.
577
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000578- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
579 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
580 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
581 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
582
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000583- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
584 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
585 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
586 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
587 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000588
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000589- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
590 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
591
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000592Extension modules
593-----------------
594
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000595- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
596
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000597- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
598 data.
599
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000600- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
601 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
602 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
603 supposed to have been truncated away.
604
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000605- Added socket.socketpair().
606
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000607- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
608 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
609
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000610- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000611 versions of Python, have now been removed.
612
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000613Library
614-------
615
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000616- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000617 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000618
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000619- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
620 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
621
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000622- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
623 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
624
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000625- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
626
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000627- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
628 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000629
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000630- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
631 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
632
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000633- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
634
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000635- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
636
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000637- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
638
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000639- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
640 Percivall.
641
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000642- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
643 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
644
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000645- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
646 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
647 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000648 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000649
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000650- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
651 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
652 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
653 and exponent.
654
655- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
656
657- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
658 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
659 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
660
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000661- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
662 to the readline module.
663
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000664- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000665 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
666 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000667
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000668- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
669 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
670 contains symlinks.
671
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000672- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
673 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
674
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000675- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
676 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
677 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
678
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000679- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
680 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
681 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
682 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
683 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
684 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
685 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
686 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
687 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
688 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
689 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
690 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
691 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
692
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000693- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
694
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000695Tools/Demos
696-----------
697
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000698- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
699 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
700
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000701- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
702
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000703Build
704-----
705
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000706- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
707 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
708 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
709 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
710 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
711 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
712 plans to do so.
713
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000714- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
715 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
716
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000717- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
718 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
719
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000720- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
721 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
722
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000723- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
724 GNU/k*BSD systems.
725
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000726- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
727 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
728
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000729C API
730-----
731
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000732..
733
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000734Documentation
735-------------
736
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000737- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
738 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
739
740- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
741 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
742 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000743
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000744New platforms
745-------------
746
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000747- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
748
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000749Tests
750-----
751
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000752..
753
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000754Windows
755-------
756
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000757- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
758 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
759 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
760 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
761 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
762 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
763 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
764 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
765 the problem.
766
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000767Mac
768---
769
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000770..
771
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000772
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000773What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
774=================================
775
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000776*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000777
778Core and builtins
779-----------------
780
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000781- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
782 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
783 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
784 sensitive code.
785
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000786- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000787 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000788
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000789 @staticmethod
790 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000791
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000792 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000793
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000794- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
795 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
796 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
797 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
798 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
799 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
800 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
801 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
802 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
803 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
804 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
805
806 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
807 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
808 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
809 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
810 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
811 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
812 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
813
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000814- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
815 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
816
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000817- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000818 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000819
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000820- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000821 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000822 which was missing for no apparent reason.
823
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000824- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000825 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
826 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
827
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000828- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
829 types that support garbage collection.
830
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000831- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
832
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000833- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
834 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
835 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
836 Jython.
837
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000838- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
839
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000840- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
841 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
842
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000843- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
844 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
845 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000846
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000847- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
848 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
849 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
850
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000851Extension modules
852-----------------
853
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000854- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
855
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000856Library
857-------
858
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000859- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
860 TIS-620
861
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000862- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
863 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
864 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
865 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
866 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
867 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
868 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
869 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
870 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
871 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
872
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000873- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
874
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000875- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
876 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
877 same as when the argument is omitted).
878 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
879
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000880- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
881
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000882- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
883 schemes are offered.
884
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000885- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
886
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000887- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
888 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
889 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
890
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000891- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
892
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000893- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
894 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
895
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000896- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
897 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
898 when dummy_threading is being used.
899
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000900- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
901 from a tarfile.
902
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000903- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000904 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000905
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000906- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
907 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
908 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
909 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
910
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000911- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
912 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
913
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000914- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
915 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
916 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
917 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
918 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
919 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
920 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
921 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
922 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
923 by some other method in progress).
924
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000925- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
926 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
927 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000928
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000929- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
930
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000931- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
932 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
933 AM Kuchling.
934
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000935- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
936 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
937 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
938
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000939- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
940 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
941 instead of unsigned.
942
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000943- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000944 no longer part of the public API.
945
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000946- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
947 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
948 string methods of the same name).
949
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000950- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000951 SF patch 945642.
952
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000953- doctest unittest integration improvements:
954
955 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
956
957 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
958 DocTestSuites.
959
960- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
961 that provide thread-local data.
962
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000963- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
964 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
965
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000966- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
967
968- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
969 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
970 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
971
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000972- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
973
974 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
975 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
976 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000977
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000978 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
979 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
980 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
981 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
982
983 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
984 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
985
986 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
987 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
988 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
989 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
990
991 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
992 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
993 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
994 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
995 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
996
997 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
998 wrapping help output.
999
1000 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1001 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1002 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001003
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001004C API
1005-----
1006
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001007- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1008 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1009 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1010 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1011 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1012 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1013 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1014 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1015 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1016 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1017 its visible semantics have not changed.
1018
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001019- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1020 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1021
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001022Documentation
1023-------------
1024
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001025- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001026
1027 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001028 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001029
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001030 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001031
1032 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1033
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001034- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001035
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001036Tests
1037-----
1038
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001039- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001040 platforms that use the Makefile.
1041
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001042- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1043 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1044 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1045
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001046
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001047What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1048=================================
1049
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001050*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001051
1052Core and builtins
1053-----------------
1054
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001055- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1056 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1057 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1058 objects now (one object instead of three).
1059
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001060- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1061 Windows DLLs.
1062
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001063- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1064 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001065
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001066- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1067 a new .pyc magic.
1068
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001069- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1070 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1071 be there.
1072
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001073- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1074 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1075 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1076
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001077- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1078 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1079 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1080
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001081- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1082
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001083- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1084 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1085 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001086
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001087- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1088 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1089
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001090- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1091
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001092- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001093 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001094
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001095- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1096
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001097- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1098
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001099- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1100 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1101
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001102- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1103 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1104 Fixes bug #858016 .
1105
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001106- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1107 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1108 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1109
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001110- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1111 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1112 improves their performance (about 35%).
1113
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001114- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1115 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1116 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1117
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001118- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1119 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1120 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1121 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1122
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001123- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1124 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1125 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1126 length is not known).
1127
1128- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1129 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001130 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1131 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001132 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1133
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001134- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1135 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1136
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001137- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1138 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1139 keyword arguments.
1140
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001141- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1142 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1143 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1144
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001145- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1146 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1147 cases.
1148
1149- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1150 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1151 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1152 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1153 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1154 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1155 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1156 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1157 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1158 a release build.
1159
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001160- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1161 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1162
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001163- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001164 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001165
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001166- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1167 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1168 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1169 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1170 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1171 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1172 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1173 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1174 destroyed.
1175
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001176- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1177 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1178 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1179 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1180 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1181 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1182 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1183 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1184
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001185- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1186 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1187 character other than a space.
1188
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001189- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1190 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1191 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1192 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1193 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1194 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1195 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1196 attributes with the same name.
1197
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001198- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1199 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1200 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1201 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1202 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1203 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1204 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1205 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1206 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1207 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1208 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1209 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1210 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1211 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001212
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001213- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1214 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1215 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1216 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1217 This has been repaired.
1218
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001219- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1220
1221- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1222
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001223- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1224 over a sequence.
1225
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001226- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001227 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001228
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001229- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1230
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001231- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1232 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1233 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1234 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1235 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1236 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1237 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1238 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1239
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001240- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1241 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1242 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1243
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001244- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1245 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1246 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1247 freelist.
1248
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001249- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1250 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1251
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001252- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1253 number.
1254
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001255- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1256 a TypeError exception.
1257
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001258- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1259 820195.
1260
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001261- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1262 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1263 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1264
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001265- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001266 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1267 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001268
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001269- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1270 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1271 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1272
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001273- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1274 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001275 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001276
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001277- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001278 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1279 the first call.
1280
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001281
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001282Extension modules
1283-----------------
1284
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001285- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1286 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1287
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001288- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1289 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1290 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1291 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1292 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1293 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1294 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001295
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001296- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1297
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001298- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1299
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001300- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1301 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1302
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001303- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1304 fewer false positives.
1305
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001306- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1307 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1308
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001309- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001310 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1311
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001312- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001313 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001314 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001315 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1316 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001317
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001318- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1319 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1320 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1321 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1322
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001323- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1324 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1325 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1326 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1327 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1328 #897625.
1329
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001330- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1331 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1332
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001333- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1334 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1335 and pops on either side of the deque.
1336
1337- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1338 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1339
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001340- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1341 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1342 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1343 other functions that expect a function argument.
1344
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001345- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1346
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001347- os.getsid was added.
1348
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001349- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1350 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1351 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1352
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001353- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1354
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001355- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1356
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001357- readline.clear_history was added.
1358
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001359- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1360
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001361- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1362
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001363- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1364
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001365- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1366
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001367- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1368
1369- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1370
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001371- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1372
1373- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1374
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001375- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1376 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1377 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1378
1379- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1380 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1381 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1382 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1383 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1384 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1385 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1386
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001387- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1388 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1389 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1390 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001391
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001392- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001393 iterators from a single iterable.
1394
1395- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1396 of raising a TypeError exception.
1397
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001398- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1399 as parameter.
1400
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001401Library
1402-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001403
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001404- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1405 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1406 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001407
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001408- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1409 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1410 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001411
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001412- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001413
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001414- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1415 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001416
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001417- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1418 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1419
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001420- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1421
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001422- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001423 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001424
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001425- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001426 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001427
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001428- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1429
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001430- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1431 on cygwin and mingw32.
1432
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001433- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1434
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001435- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1436 module.
1437
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001438- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1439 installation scheme for all platforms.
1440
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001441- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001442 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001443
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001444- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1445 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1446 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1447
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001448- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1449 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1450 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1451
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001452- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1453
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001454- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1455
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001456- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1457 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1458
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001459- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1460 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1461 type pattern with the same value exists.
1462
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001463- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1464 when run from the command prompt).
1465
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001466- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1467 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1468
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001469- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1470 default sort).
1471
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001472- Added global runctx function to profile module
1473
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001474- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1475
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001476- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1477
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001478- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1479
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001480- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001481 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1482 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1483 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1484 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1485 accordingly.
1486
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001487- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1488 decoding standards.
1489
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001490- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1491 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1492 called for all requests.
1493
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001494- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1495 they are passed to the compiler.
1496
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001497- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1498 indent, width and depth.
1499
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001500- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1501 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1502
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001503- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1504 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1505
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001506- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1507
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001508- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1509
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001510- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1511
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001512- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1513 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1514
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001515- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001516 for better performance.
1517
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001518- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001519
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001520- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1521 a string).
1522
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001523- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1524
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001525- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1526
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001527- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1528
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001529- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1530
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001531- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1532 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1533 list of fieldnames.
1534
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001535- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1536 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1537
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001538- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1539
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001540- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1541 empty lists.
1542
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001543- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1544 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1545 and shelves.
1546
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001547- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1548 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1549
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001550- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001551 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1552 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001553
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001554- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1555 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001556 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001557
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001558- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001559 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1560 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1561
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001562- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1563 and removed in Py2.4.
1564
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001565- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1566
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001567- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1568
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001569Tools/Demos
1570-----------
1571
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001572- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1573 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1574
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001575- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1576
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001577- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1578 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1579 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1580 destination in situations where both files are given.
1581
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001582- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1583 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1584 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1585 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1586
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001587- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1588
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001589- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1590 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1591 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1592 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1593 now.
1594
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001595- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1596 in effect
1597
1598- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1599 C-c C-h
1600
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001601- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1602 -d option was given.
1603
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001604Build
1605-----
1606
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001607- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1608 build under OS X.
1609
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001610- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1611 --enable-profiling.
1612
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001613- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1614 is configured --with-tsc.
1615
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001616- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1617 on AMD64.
1618
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001619- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1620 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1621
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001622- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1623 removed.
1624
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001625- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1626 supported (see PEP 11).
1627
1628- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1629
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001630- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1631
1632- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1633 (see PEP 11).
1634
1635- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1636 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1637
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001638C API
1639-----
1640
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001641- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1642 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1643 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1644
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001645- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1646 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1647 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1648 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1649
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001650- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1651 generator objects.
1652
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001653- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1654 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001655 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1656 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001657
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001658- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1659 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1660
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001661- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1662 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1663 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1664 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1665 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1666
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001667- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1668 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1669 about 10% faster.
1670
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001671- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1672 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1673
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001674- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1675 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1676 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1677 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1678
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001679Windows
1680-------
1681
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001682- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1683 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1684 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1685 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1686
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001687- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1688 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1689 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1690
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001691
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001692What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1693===============================
1694
1695*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1696
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001697IDLE
1698----
1699
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001700- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1701 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1702 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1703 context-menu actions.
1704
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001705- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1706 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1707 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1708 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1709 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1710 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1711 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1712 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1713 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1714
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001715
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001716What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1717=============================================
1718
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001719*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001720
1721Core and builtins
1722-----------------
1723
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001724- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001725 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001726 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1727
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001728Extension modules
1729-----------------
1730
1731- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1732 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1733 than once. This has been fixed.
1734
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001735- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1736 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1737 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1738 call.
1739
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001740- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1741
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001742Library
1743-------
1744
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001745- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1746 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1747
1748- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1749 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1750 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1751 restored.
1752
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001753IDLE
1754----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001755
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001756- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001757
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001758Build
1759-----
1760
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001761- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1762 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1763
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001764C API
1765-----
1766
1767Windows
1768-------
1769
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001770- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1771 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1772
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001773- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1774
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001775Mac
1776---
1777
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001778- Various fixes to pimp.
1779
1780- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1781
1782- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1783 more problems than it solves.
1784
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001785
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001786What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1787=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001788
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001789*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1790
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001791Core and builtins
1792-----------------
1793
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001794- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1795 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1796
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001797- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1798 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001799 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001800
1801- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1802 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1803 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001804 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001805
1806- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1807 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001808
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001809- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1810 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1811 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1812
1813- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001814 770247.
1815
1816- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001817
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001818Extension modules
1819-----------------
1820
1821- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1822 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1823
1824- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1825
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001826- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1827
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001828- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1829 contained within the _strptime module.
1830
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001831- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1832 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1833
1834- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001835 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1836
1837- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1838 the find_class attribute, if present.
1839
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001840- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001841
1842 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1843 (SF bug 763298).
1844
1845 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001846 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1847 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1848 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001849
1850 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1851
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001852Library
1853-------
1854
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001855- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1856
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001857- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1858 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1859 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1860 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1861 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1862 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1863 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1864 or Tester().
1865
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001866- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1867 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1868 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1869 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1870 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1871 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1872 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1873 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1874 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001875
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001876 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001877
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001878- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1879 weren't before was an oversight.
1880
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001881- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1882 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1883
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001884- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1885 when there are no lines.
1886
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001887- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1888 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1889
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001890- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1891 to child processes.
1892
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001893- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1894
1895- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1896
1897- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1898 xmlrpclib.
1899
1900- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1901 responses.
1902
1903- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1904 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1905
1906- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1907 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1908 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1909
1910- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1911 used as patterns.
1912
1913- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1914 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1915 than Tk 8.3.
1916
1917- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1918
1919- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001920
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001921Tools/Demos
1922-----------
1923
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001924- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1925
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001926- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1927
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001928- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001929
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001930Build
1931-----
1932
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001933- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1934
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001935- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1936
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001937- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1938 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001939
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001940- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1941 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1942 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001943
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001944C API
1945-----
1946
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001947- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1948 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1949
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001950Windows
1951-------
1952
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001953- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1954 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1955 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1956 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1957 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1958 Python exception ::
1959
1960 thread.error: can't start new thread
1961
1962 is raised now.
1963
1964- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1965 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1966 instead of from DLL teardown.
1967
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001968Mac
1969---
1970
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001971- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001972 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001973 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1974 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1975 the executable in the bundle.
1976
1977- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001978
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001979- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1980
1981- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1982 on Panther.
1983
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001984What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1985================================
1986
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001987*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001988
1989Core and builtins
1990-----------------
1991
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001992- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1993 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1994 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1995 with the -i option.
1996
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001997- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1998 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1999
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002000- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2001 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2002
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002003- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2004 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2005 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2006 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2007 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2008 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2009 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2010 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2011 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2012 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2013 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2014 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2015 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002016
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002017- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2018 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2019 embedded in a lambda expression.
2020
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002021- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2022 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2023 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2024 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2025 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2026
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002027- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2028 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2029 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2030
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002031- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2032 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2033
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002034- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2035 It's writable again.
2036
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002037- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2038 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2039 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002040 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002041
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002042- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2043 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2044 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2045
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002046Extension modules
2047-----------------
2048
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002049- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2050 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2051
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002052- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2053 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2054 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2055 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2056
2057- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2058 collection.
2059
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002060- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2061 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2062 unique within a single program run.
2063
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002064- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2065 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2066
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002067- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2068 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2069
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002070- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2071 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002072
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002073- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2074
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002075- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2076 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2077
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002078- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2079 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2080 for many BSD-derived systems.
2081
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002082
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002083Library
2084-------
2085
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002086- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2087 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2088 primary ones:
2089
2090 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2091 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2092 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2093
2094 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2095 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2096 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2097 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2098 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2099 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2100
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002101- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2102 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2103 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2104 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2105 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2106 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2107 argument.
2108
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002109- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2110 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2111 in the archive.
2112
2113- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2114 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2115
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002116- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2117 569574).
2118
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002119- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2120 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2121 no more.
2122
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002123- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2124 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2125 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2126 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2127 code coverage.
2128
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002129- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2130 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2131 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002132 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2133 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002134
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002135- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2136 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2137 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002138 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002139
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002140- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2141
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002142- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2143 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2144 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2145 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2146
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002147- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2148 handling.
2149
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002150- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2151 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2152
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002153- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2154 in socket.py.
2155
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002156- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2157
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002158- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2159 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2160 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2161 opener with proxy support.
2162
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002163- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2164
2165- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2166
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002167Tools/Demos
2168-----------
2169
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002170- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2171
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002172- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2173
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002174- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2175 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002176
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002177- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2178 files.
2179
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002180Build
2181-----
2182
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002183- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002184 different root directory.
2185
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002186C API
2187-----
2188
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002189- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2190 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2191 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2192 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2193 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2194 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2195 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2196 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2197 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2198 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2199
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002200- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2201 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2202 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2203 from Python.
2204
2205
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002206New platforms
2207-------------
2208
2209None this time.
2210
2211Tests
2212-----
2213
2214- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2215 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2216
2217Windows
2218-------
2219
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002220- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2221
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002222- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2223 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2224 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2225 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2226 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2227 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2228 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2229 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2230 that's what it's for.
2231
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002232Mac
2233---
2234
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002235- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2236 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2237 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2238 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002239- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2240 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2241- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002242
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002243SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2244------------------------------------
2245
2246430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2247598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2248622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2249661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2250683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2251697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2252713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2253724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2254727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2255729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2256730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2257731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2258732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2259733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2260735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2261740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2262744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2263745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2264747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2265749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2266751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2267753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2268755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2269757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2270760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2271
2272
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002273What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2274================================
2275
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002276*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002277
2278Core and builtins
2279-----------------
2280
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002281- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2282 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2283
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002284- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2285 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2286 and cannot be strings).
2287
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002288- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2289 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2290 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2291 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2292
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002293- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2294 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2295 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2296 Python itself.
2297
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002298- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2299 the referenced object, if it has one.
2300
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002301- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2302 the thread started at
2303 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2304
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002305- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2306 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2307 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2308 placed on a list index.
2309
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002310- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2311 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2312 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2313 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2314
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002315- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2316 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2317 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2318 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2319 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2320 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2321 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2322
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002323- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2324 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2325 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2326 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2327 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2328
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002329- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2330 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002331
2332- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2333 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2334 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2335 #693195.)
2336
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002337- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2338 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002339
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002340- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002341 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002342 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2343 interpreter executions, would fail.
2344
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002345- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002346 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002347 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002348
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002349Extension modules
2350-----------------
2351
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002352- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2353 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2354 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2355 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2356
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002357- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2358 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2359
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002360- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2361 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2362 and Greg Chapman.)
2363
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002364- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2365 recursively.
2366
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002367- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002368 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2369 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2370 leaks.
2371
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002372- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2373
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002374- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2375 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2376 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2377 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2378 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2379 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2380 #705836.
2381
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002382- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002383 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2384
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002385- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2386 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2387 See SF bug #692416.
2388
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002389- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2390 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2391
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002392- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2393 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2394 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002395
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002396- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002397 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2398 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2399
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002400- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2401 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2402 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2403 timeouts to work properly.
2404
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002405Library
2406-------
2407
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002408- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2409 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2410 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2411 future release.
2412
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002413- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2414 for querying platform dependent features.
2415
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002416- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002417
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002418- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2419 pickle protocol versions.
2420
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002421- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2422 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2423 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2424
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002425- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2426
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002427- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2428 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2429 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2430 modules.
2431
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002432- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2433 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2434 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2435
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002436- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2437 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2438
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002439- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2440 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2441 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2442
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002443- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002444 MS Office extensions.
2445
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002446- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2447 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2448
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002449- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2450 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2451
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002452- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2453 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2454 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2455 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2456 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2457 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2458
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002459- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2460 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2461 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002462
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002463- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2464 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2465 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2466
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002467- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2468
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002469- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2470 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2471 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2472
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002473Tools/Demos
2474-----------
2475
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002476- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2477 See the module docstring for details.
2478
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002479Build
2480-----
2481
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002482- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2483 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002484
2485C API
2486-----
2487
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002488- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2489
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002490- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2491 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2492 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2493
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002494- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2495 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002496
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002497 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2498 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2499 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002500
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002501- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002502 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2503
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002504- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2505 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2506 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002507
2508New platforms
2509-------------
2510
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002511None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002512
2513Tests
2514-----
2515
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002516- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2517 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002518
2519Windows
2520-------
2521
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002522- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2523 function.
2524
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002525- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2526 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002527
2528Mac
2529---
2530
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002531- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2532 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002533
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002534- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2535 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002536
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002537- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2538 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2539 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002540
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002541- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002542 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2543 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002544
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002545- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2546 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002547
2548
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002549What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2550=================================
2551
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002552*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002553
2554Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002555-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002556
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002557- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2558 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2559 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2560
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002561- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2562 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2563 (SF patch #664376.)
2564
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002565- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2566 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2567 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2568 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2569 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2570 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002571 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002572
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002573- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2574 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2575 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2576 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002577 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002578
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002579- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2580 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2581 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2582 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2583 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2584 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2585 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2586 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2587 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2588 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2589 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2590
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002591- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2592 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2593 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2594 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2595 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2596 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2597
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002598- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2599 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2600
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002601- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2602 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2603 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2604 case.)
2605
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002606- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2607 passed as unicode strings.
2608
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002609- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2610 See SF bug #683467.
2611
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002612- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2613 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2614
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002615- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2616
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002617- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2618
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002619- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2620 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2621 arguments.
2622
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002623- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2624 See SF bug #667147.
2625
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002626- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002627 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002628 See SF bug #676155.
2629
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002630- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002631 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002632 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2633 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2634 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2635 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2636 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2637 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002638
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002639Extension modules
2640-----------------
2641
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002642- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2643 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2644 tp_as_number pointer.
2645
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002646- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2647 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2648 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2649 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2650 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2651
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002652- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2653
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002654- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2655
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002656- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002657 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002658 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2659 patch #678531.)
2660
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002661- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2662 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2663
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002664- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2665 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2666
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002667- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2668
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002669- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2670 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2671 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2672
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002673- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2674
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002675- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2676 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2677
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002678- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002679
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002680- datetime changes:
2681
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002682 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2683
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002684 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2685 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2686 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2687 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2688 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2689 now.
2690
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002691 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002692 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2693 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002694
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002695 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002696 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002697 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2698 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2699 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2700 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002701
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002702 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2703 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2704 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002705 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2706
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002707 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2708 by a later example coded by Guido.
2709
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002710 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002711 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2712 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2713 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002714 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2715 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2716
2717 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2718 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2719 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2720 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2721 tzinfo subclass instance.
2722
2723 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2724 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2725 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2726 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2727 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2728 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2729 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2730 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002731
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002732 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2733 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2734 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2735 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2736 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002737 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2738
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002739 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002740
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002741 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2742 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2743 as a naive datetime object.
2744
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002745 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2746 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2747 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2748
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002749 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2750 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2751 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2752 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2753 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2754 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2755 comparison.
2756
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002757 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2758 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2759 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2760 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002761 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002762
2763 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002764
2765 and ::
2766
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002767 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2768
2769 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2770 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2771 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2772 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2773
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002774 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2775 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2776 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2777 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2778 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2779
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002780 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2781 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002782 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2783 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002784
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002785Library
2786-------
2787
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002788- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2789 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2790
2791- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2792 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2793 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2794 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2795 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2796 See PEP 307 for details.
2797
2798- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2799 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2800
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002801- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2802 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002803 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002804 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2805 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002806 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002807
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002808- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2809 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2810
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002811- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2812 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2813 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2814
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002815- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2816
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002817- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2818 exception.
2819
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002820- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2821 class.
2822
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002823- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2824 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2825 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2826
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002827- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2828 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2829
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002830- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002831 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2832 See SF bug #659228.
2833
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002834- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2835 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2836 See SF patch #651082.
2837
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002838- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002839
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002840- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2841 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2842
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002843- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002844 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002845
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002846- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2847 DOS paths from other platforms.
2848
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002849Tools/Demos
2850-----------
2851
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002852- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2853 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2854 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2855 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2856 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2857 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2858 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2859 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2860 example:
2861
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002862 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2863 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002864
2865 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2866
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002867
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002868Build
2869-----
2870
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002871- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2872 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2873 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002874 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2875
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002876 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2877
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002878- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2879 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2880 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2881 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2882 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2883 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2884 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2885 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2886 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2887
2888- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2889 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2890 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2891 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2892
2893- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2894 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2895
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002896C API
2897-----
2898
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002899- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2900 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002901
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002902- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2903 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2904 tp_as_number pointer.
2905
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002906- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2907 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2908 (SF #681367)
2909
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002910- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2911 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2912 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2913 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002914
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002915Tests
2916-----
2917
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002918- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002919 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2920 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2921 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2922 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2923 pydoc.)
2924
2925- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2926
2927- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002928
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002929Windows
2930-------
2931
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002932- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2933 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2934 time).
2935
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002936- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2937 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2938
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002939- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2940 release without strong cryptography.
2941
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002942- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002943 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002944
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002945- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2946 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2947
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002948Mac
2949---
2950
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002951- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2952 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002953
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002954- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2955 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2956 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002957
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002958- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2959 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002960
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002961- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2962 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2963 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2964 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002965
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002966- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002967 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2968 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2969 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002970
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002971
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002972What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002973=================================
2974
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002975*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002976
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002977Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002978--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002979
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002980- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2981
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002982- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2983 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002984 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002985 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002986 a different meaning than before.
2987
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002988- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002989 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002990 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002991
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002992- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002993 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002994 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002995
2996- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2997 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2998 and deallocation.
2999
3000- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3001 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3002
3003- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3004 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3005 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3006 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3007 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3008
3009- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3010 now detected by the garbage collector.
3011
3012- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3013 [SF bug 519621]
3014
3015- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3016 identifier.
3017
3018- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3019 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3020 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3021 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3022 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3023 [SF bug 563060]
3024
3025- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3026 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3027 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3028 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3029 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3030
3031- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3032 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3033 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3034
3035- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3036
3037- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3038 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3039 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3040 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3041 state of the slots would be lost.)
3042
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003043Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003044-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003045
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003046- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003047 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3048 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3049 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3050 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003051 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3052 Jython 2.1.
3053
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003054- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003055 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003056 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3057 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3058 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3059 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3060 these, see PEP 302.
3061
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003062- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3063 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3064 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3065
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003066- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3067 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3068 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3069
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003070- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3071 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3072 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3073
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003074- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3075 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3076 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3077 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3078 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3079 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3080 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3081 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3082 releases or implementations.
3083
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003084- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003085 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3086 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003087
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003088- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3089 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3090
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003091- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3092 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3093 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3094
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003095- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3096 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3097
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003098- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3099 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003100 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3101 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003102
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003103- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3104 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3105 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3106 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3107 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3108
3109 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3110 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3111 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3112 pattern.
3113
3114 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3115 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3116 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3117 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3118
3119 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3120 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3121 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3122 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3123 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3124 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3125
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003126- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3127 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3128 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3129 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3130 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3131 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3132 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3133 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003134
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003135- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3136 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3137 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3138 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3139 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003140 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3141 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3142 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3143 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3144 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3145 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3146 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003147
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003148- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3149 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3150
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003151- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3152 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3153 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3154 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3155 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3156 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3157 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3158 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3159 to Zack Weinberg!
3160
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003161- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3162 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3163 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3164 type. This has been fixed now.
3165
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003166- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3167 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3168 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3169
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003170- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3171 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3172 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3173 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3174 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3175 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3176 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3177 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003178 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003179
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003180- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3181 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3182 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003183
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003184- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3185 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3186 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3187 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3188 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3189 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3190 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3191 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003192 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003193 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3194 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3195
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003196- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3197 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3198 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3199 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3200 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3201 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3202 this.)
3203
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003204- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3205 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003206 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003207 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003208 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3209 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003210 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3211 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003212
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003213- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3214 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3215 currently running.
3216
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003217- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3218 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3219 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3220 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3221
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003222- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3223 as directory names.
3224
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003225- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3226 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3227
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003228- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3229 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3230
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003231- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003232 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3233 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003234
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003235- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3236 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3237 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3238 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3239 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3240
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003241- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3242 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3243 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3244 removed.
3245
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003246- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3247 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3248 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3249
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003250- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3251 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3252 to __debug__.
3253
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003254- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3255 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3256 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3257
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003258- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3259 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3260 deprecated now.
3261
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003262- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3263 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3264 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003265
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003266- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3267 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3268 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3269 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3270 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003271
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003272- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3273 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3274
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003275- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3276 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3277 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003278 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003279 is backward compatible.
3280
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003281- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3282 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3283 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3284 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3285 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3286
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003287- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3288 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3289 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3290 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3291 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3292 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003293
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003294- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3295 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3296
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003297- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3298 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3299
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003300- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3301 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3302 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3303 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3304 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3305
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003306- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3307 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3308 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3309
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003310- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003311 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3312
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003313- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3314 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3315 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003316
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003317- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3318 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3319
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003320- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3321 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3322 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3323
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003324- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3325
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003326Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003327-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003328
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003329- Added three operators to the operator module:
3330 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3331 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3332 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3333
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003334- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3335
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003336- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3337 archives.
3338
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003339- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3340 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3341 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3342
3343 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3344
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003345- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3346 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3347 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003348 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003349
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003350- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3351 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3352 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3353 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003354 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3355 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3356 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3357 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003358
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003359- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3360 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003361
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003362- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3363
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003364- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3365 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3366
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003367- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3368 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3369 supported.
3370
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003371- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3372
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003373- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3374 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003375
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003376- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3377 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3378
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003379- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3380
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003381- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3382 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3383
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003384- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3385 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3386 functions but callable type objects.
3387
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003388- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003389 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003390 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003391
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003392- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3393 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003394
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003395- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3396 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003397
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003398- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3399 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3400 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3401 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3402
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003403- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3404 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003405
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003406- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3407 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3408 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3409 and __imul__.
3410
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003411- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003412 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3413 is called.
3414
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003415- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3416 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3417 interpreter was compiled.
3418
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003419- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3420 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3421 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003422 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003423 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3424 1, not 2.
3425
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003426- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3427 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3428 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3429 limit.
3430
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003431- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3432 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3433 bug #623464.
3434
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003435- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3436 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3437 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3438 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3439
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003440Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003441-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003442
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003443- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3444
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003445- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3446 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3447 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3448 with Python 2.3a2.
3449
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003450- os.path exposes getctime.
3451
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003452- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003453 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003454 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003455 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003456 unit tests of floating point results.
3457
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003458- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3459 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3460 has been increased.
3461
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003462- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3463 executed.
3464
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003465- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3466 postinstallation script.
3467
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003468- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3469 test the current module.
3470
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003471- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003472 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3473 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3474 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3475 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3476
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003477- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003478 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003479 Ward's Optik package.
3480
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003481- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3482 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3483 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3484 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3485
3486- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3487 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003488 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003489
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003490- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3491 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3492 shelf are binary pickles.
3493
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003494- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3495 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3496
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003497- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3498 modules are iterators now.
3499
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003500- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3501 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3502 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3503 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3504 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3505 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003506
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003507- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3508 with their entity value.
3509
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003510- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3511
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003512- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3513 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003514
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003515- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3516 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003517 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003518
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003519- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3520 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3521 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3522 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3523 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3524 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3525 main():
3526
3527 import locale
3528 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3529
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003530- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3531 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3532
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003533- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3534 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3535 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3536 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3537 to the new standard.
3538
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003539- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3540 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3541 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3542 an extension to the database.
3543
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003544- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3545 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3546 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3547 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003548 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003549
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003550- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003551 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003552
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003553- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3554 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3555 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3556 bounded integers.
3557
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003558- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3559 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3560 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3561 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3562 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3563 in existence.
3564
3565 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3566 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3567 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3568 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3569 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3570 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3571
3572 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3573 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3574 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3575 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3576
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003577- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3578 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3579 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3580
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003581- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3582
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003583- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3584 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3585 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3586 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3587
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003588- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3589 argument.
3590
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003591- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3592 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3593 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3594 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3595 [SF patch 560794].
3596
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003597- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3598 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3599 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003600 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3601 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3602 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003603
3604- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3605 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003606
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003607- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3608 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3609 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3610 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003611
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003612- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3613 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3614 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3615 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3616 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3617
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003618- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003619
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003620- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3621
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003622- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3623 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3624 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3625 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3626 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3627 identical to None.
3628
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003629- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3630 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3631 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3632 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3633 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3634 results now.
3635
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003636- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3637 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3638
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003639- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3640 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3641 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3642 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3643 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3644 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3645 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3646 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3647
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003648- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3649
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003650- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3651 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3652
3653- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3654 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3655 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3656 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3657 and other systems.
3658
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003659- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3660 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3661 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3662 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 +00003663 work well with these.
3664
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003665- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3666
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003667- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003668 connections.
3669
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003670- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3671 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3672 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3673
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003674- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3675 sets
3676
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003677- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3678 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3679 name.
3680
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003681- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3682 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3683 passed in.
3684
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003685- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003686 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003687 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3688 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003689
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003690- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3691
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003692- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3693
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003694- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3695 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3696 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3697
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003698- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3699 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3700 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3701 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003702 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003703
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003704- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003705 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003706 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003707
3708- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3709 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3710 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3711
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003712- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003713 the value of its expression argument.
3714
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003715- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3716 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3717 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3718
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003719- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3720 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3721 skipstone browser was included.
3722
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003723- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3724 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3725
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003726Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003727-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003728
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003729- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3730 names in addition to accepting file names.
3731
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003732- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3733 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3734 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3735 still used and useful.)
3736
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003737- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3738 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3739 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3740 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003741
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003742- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3743 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3744 the generated binary.
3745
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003746Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003747-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003748
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003749- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3750
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003751- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3752 except in the hands of experts.
3753
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003754- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003755 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3756 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3757 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003758
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003759- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3760 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3761 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3762 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3763 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3764 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3765 builds.
3766
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003767- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3768 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3769 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3770 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3771 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3772 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3773 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3774 new type.
3775
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003776- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003777
3778 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3779 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3780 positive infinities.
3781
3782 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3783 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3784 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3785 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3786 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3787 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3788 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3789
3790 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3791
3792 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3793
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003794- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3795 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3796 size of the executable.
3797
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003798- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3799 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3800 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3801 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003802
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003803- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3804
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003805- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3806 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3807 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003808
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003809- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3810 well as Unix.
3811
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003812- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3813 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3814 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3815 modules in the README file for details.
3816
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003817C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003818-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003819
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003820- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3821 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003822 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003823 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003824 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003825
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003826- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3827 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3828 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3829 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3830 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3831 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003832 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003833 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3834 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3835 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3836 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3837 aligned.)
3838
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003839- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3840 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3841 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3842
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003843- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3844 level.
3845
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003846- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3847 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3848 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3849 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3850 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3851
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003852- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3853 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3854 code.
3855
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003856- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3857 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3858 adjusting for negative indices.
3859
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003860- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3861 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3862 object.
3863
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003864- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3865 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3866 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3867
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003868- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3869 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003870
3871- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3872
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003873- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3874 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3875 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3876 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3877
3878- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3879
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003880- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003881
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003882- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003883 without going through the buffer API.
3884
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003885- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003886
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003887- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3888 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3889 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3890 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3891
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003892- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3893 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3894
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003895- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003896 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3897
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003898New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003899-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003900
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003901- OpenVMS is now supported.
3902
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003903- AtheOS is now supported.
3904
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003905- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3906
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003907- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3908
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003909Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003910-----
3911
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003912- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3913 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3914 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003915
3916Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003917-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003918
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003919- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3920 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3921 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3922 bugs.
3923 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003924 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003925 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3926 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003927 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003928
3929- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003930 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003931
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003932- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3933 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3934
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003935- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3936 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003937 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003938 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3939
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003940- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3941 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3942 use files" uninstall option).
3943
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003944- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3945
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003946- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3947 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3948
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003949- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3950 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3951 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3952
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003953- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3954 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3955 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3956 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3957 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003958 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3959 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3960 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003961
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003962- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003963 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003964 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3965 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3966 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3967 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3968 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3969 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3970 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3971 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3972 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3973 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3974 work around.
3975
3976- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3977 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3978 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3979 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3980 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3981 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3982 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3983 specified with O_CREAT too).
3984
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003985Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003986----
3987
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003988- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003989
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003990- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3991 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3992 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3993
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003994- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3995 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3996 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3997
3998- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3999 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4000 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4001 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4002 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4003 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4004 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4005 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004006
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004007- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4008 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4009 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004010
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004011- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4012 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4013 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4014 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4015 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004016
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004017- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4018 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4019 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004020
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004021- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4022 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004023
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004024- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4025 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4026 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4027 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4028 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004029
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004030- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4031 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4032 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4033
4034- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4035 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4036 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004037
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004038- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4039 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4040 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4041 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004042 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004043
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004044- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4045 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004046
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004047- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4048 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004049
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004050- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004051 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004052 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4053 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004054
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004055
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004056What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004057===============================
4058
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004059*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4060
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004061Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004062--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004063
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004064- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4065 with a custom metaclass.
4066
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004067Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004068-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004069
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004070- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4071 are proxies.
4072
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004073Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004074-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004075
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004076- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4077 very short strings.
4078
4079- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4080 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4081 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4082 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4083 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4084
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004085Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004086-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004087
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004088- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4089 close or delete time).
4090
4091- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4092 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4093
4094- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4095
4096- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004097 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004098
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004099Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004100-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004101
4102Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004103-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004104
4105C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004106-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004107
4108New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004109-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004110
4111Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004112-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004113
4114Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004115-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004116
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004117- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4118
4119- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4120 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4121
4122- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4123 deleted at process exit time.
4124
4125- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4126 in backslash.
4127
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004128Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004129----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004130
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004131- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4132 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4133 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4134
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004135
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004136What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004137===========================
4138
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004139*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4140
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004141Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004142--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004143
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004144- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4145 been extensively updated. See
4146
4147 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4148
4149 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4150
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004151- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4152 deleted!
4153
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004154- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4155 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4156 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4157 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4158 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4159
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004160- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4161
4162 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4163 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4164
4165 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4166 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4167 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4168 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4169 supported anyway.
4170
4171 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4172 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4173
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004174- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4175 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4176 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4177 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4178 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004179
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004180- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4181 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4182 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4183
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004184Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004185-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004186
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004187- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4188 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4189 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4190 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4191 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4192 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004193 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4194 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4195 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4196 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004197
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004198- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4199 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4200 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4201
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004202Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004203-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004204
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004205- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4206
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004207Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004208-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004209
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004210- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4211 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4212 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4213 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4214 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4215 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4216
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004217- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4218
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004219- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4220
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004221- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4222
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004223- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4224 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4225 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4226
4227- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4228
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004229Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004230-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004231
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004232- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4233 off a search on Google.
4234
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004235Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004236-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004237
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004238- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4239 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4240 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4241 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4242 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4243 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4244 other platforms should do likewise.
4245
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004246- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4247 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4248 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4249
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004250C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004251-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004252
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004253- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4254 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4255 producing key-value pairs.
4256
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004257- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004258 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004259 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4260 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4261 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4262 previously went unchallenged.
4263
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004264New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004265-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004266
4267Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004268-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004269
4270Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004271-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004272
4273Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004274----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004275
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004276- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4277 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004278
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004279- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4280 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4281 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4282 home.
4283
4284
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004285What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004286===========================
4287
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004288*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4289
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004290Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004291--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004292
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004293- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4294 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004295
4296 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004297 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004298
4299 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4300 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004301 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004302 This needs to be documented.
4303
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004304- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4305 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4306
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004307- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4308 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4309 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4310
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004311- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4312 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4313
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004314- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4315 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4316 class forbids it).
4317
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004318- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4319 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4320 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4321
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004322- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4323
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004324Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004325-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004326
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004327- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4328 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004329 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004330
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004331- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4332 (like 1 + '').
4333
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004334Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004335-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004336
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004337- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4338 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4339 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4340 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004341 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004342 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4343
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004344- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4345 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4346 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4347 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4348
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004349- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4350 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004351 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4352 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4353 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004354
4355- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4356 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004357
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004358- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4359 bytes on its input.
4360
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004361Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004362-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004363
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004364- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004365 convenience function.
4366
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004367- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4368 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4369 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004370 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4371 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4372 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4373 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4374 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4375 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004376
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004377- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4378 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4379 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4380 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4381
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004382- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4383 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4384 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4385
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004386- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4387 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4388 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4389 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4390
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004391- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4392 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004393 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004394 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4395 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4396 new -l and -e options.
4397
4398- statcache is now deprecated.
4399
4400- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4401 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004402 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004403 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4404 time properly taken into account.
4405
4406- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4407 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4408 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4409 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4410
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004411Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004412-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004413
4414Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004415-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004416
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004417- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4418 is built with libdb3 if available.
4419
4420- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4421
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004422C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004423-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004424
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004425- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4426 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4427 PySequence_Size().
4428
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004429- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4430
4431- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4432 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4433 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4434
4435- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4436 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4437
4438- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4439 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4440
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004441New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004442-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004443
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004444- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4445 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4446
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004447- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4448 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4449
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004450- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4451
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004452Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004453-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004454
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004455- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4456 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4457
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004458Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004459-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004460
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004461Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004462----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004463
4464- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4465 removed completely in the next release.
4466
4467- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4468 OSX.
4469
4470- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4471 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4472
4473- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4474
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004475
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004476What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004477===========================
4478
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004479*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4480
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004481Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004482--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004483
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004484- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004485 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004486 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004487 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4488 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004489 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4490 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004491 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4492 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004493
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004494- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4495 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4496
4497- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4498 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4499
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004500Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004501-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004502
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004503- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4504 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4505 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4506 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4507 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4508 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4509 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4510 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4511
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004512- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4513 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4514 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4515 example).
4516
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004517- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004518 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004519 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004520 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004521
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004522- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4523 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4524 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004525 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004526
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004527- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4528 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4529 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4530 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4531 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4532 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4533
4534 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4535
4536 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4537
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004538Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004539-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004540
4541- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4542
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004543- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4544
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004545- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4546 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004547
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004548- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4549 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4550 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4551 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4552 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4553 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004554 attributes.
4555
4556- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4557 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4558 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004559
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004560- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4561 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4562 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004563
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004564- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4565 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4566 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004567 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4568 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4569
4570- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4571 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004572
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004573Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004574-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004575
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004576- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4577 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4578
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004579- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4580 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4581 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4582 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4583
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004584- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4585 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4586 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4587 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4588
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004589 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4590 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4591 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4592 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4593 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4594 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4595 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4596 without losing information).
4597
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004598- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004599 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4600 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4601 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4602 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4603 module).
4604
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004605 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004606 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4607 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4608 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4609 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004610
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004611- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004612 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4613 encoding.
4614
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004615- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4616 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4617
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004618- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004619 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4620
4621- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4622 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4623 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4624 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4625
4626- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4627
4628- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4629 ON, and OFF.
4630
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004631- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4632 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4633
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004634Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004635-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004636
4637- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4638 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4639 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004640
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004641- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4642 been added: -X and -E.
4643
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004644Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004645-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004646
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004647- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4648 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4649
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004650C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004651-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004652
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004653- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4654 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4655 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4656 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4657 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4658
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004659- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4660 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4661 as long) arguments.
4662
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004663- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4664 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4665 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4666 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4667 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4668 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4669
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004670- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4671 input.
4672
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004673New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004674-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004675
4676Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004677-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004678
4679Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004680-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004681
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004682- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4683 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4684 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4685
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004686- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4687 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4688 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004689 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004690
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004691 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4692 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4693 import signal
4694 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004695
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004696 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004697 while 1:
4698 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004699 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004700 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4701 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4702 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4703 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004704
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004705
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004706What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4707===========================
4708
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004709*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4710
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004711Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004712--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004713
4714- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4715 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4716 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4717
4718- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4719 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4720 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4721 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4722 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4723 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4724 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004725
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004726- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004727 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004728 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4729 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4730 associate a docstring with a property.
4731
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004732- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4733 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4734 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4735 other built-in object types.
4736
4737- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4738 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4739 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4740 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4741 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4742
4743- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4744 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4745
4746- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4747 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004748 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004749 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4750 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4751 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4752 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4753 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4754
4755- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4756 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4757 class.
4758
4759- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4760 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4761 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4762 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4763
4764- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4765 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4766 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4767 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4768
4769- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4770 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4771
4772- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4773 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4774 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4775 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4776 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004777 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004778 with the same value as s.
4779
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004780- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4781
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004782Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004783----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004784
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004785- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4786
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004787- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4788 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4789 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4790 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4791 objects.
4792
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004793- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4794 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004795 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4796 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4797
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004798- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4799 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4800 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4801
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004802Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004803-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004804
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004805- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4806 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4807 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4808 by the instances.
4809
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004810- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4811 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4812 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4813
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004814- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4815 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4816 before the entire comparison is complete.
4817
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004818- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4819 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4820 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4821
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004822- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4823 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4824 getwriter().
4825
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004826- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4827 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4828
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004829- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004830 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4831 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4832
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004833- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4834 iterable object.
4835
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004836- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4837 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004838
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004839- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4840 authentication.
4841
4842- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4843 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004844
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004845- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004846 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4847 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4848 a sample driver.)
4849
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004850Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004851-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004852
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004853- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4854 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4855 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4856 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4857 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4858 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4859 kernel has large file support.
4860
4861- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4862 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4863 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4864 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4865 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4866
4867- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4868 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4869 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4870
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004871C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004872-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004873
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004874- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4875 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4876
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004877New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004878-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004879
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004880- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4881 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4882
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004883Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004884-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004885
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004886- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4887 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4888 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4889 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4890 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4891
4892- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4893 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4894 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4895 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4896
4897- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4898 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4899
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004900Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004901-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004902
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004903- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004904 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4905 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004906
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004907
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004908What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4909===========================
4910
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004911*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4912
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004913Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004914----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004915
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004916- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4917 big to represent as a C double.
4918
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004919- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4920 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4921 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4922 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4923 restriction).
4924
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004925- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4926 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4927 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4928 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4929 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4930
4931 >>> dir([])
4932 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4933 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4934 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4935 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4936 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4937 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4938 'reverse', 'sort']
4939
4940 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4941
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004942- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004943 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4944 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4945 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4946 OverflowError exception.
4947
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004948- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004949 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004950 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4951 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4952 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4953 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4954 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004955 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004956 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4957 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4958
4959 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4960 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4961 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4962 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004963
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004964- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004965 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4966 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4967 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4968 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4969 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4970 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4971 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4972 once it is created.
4973
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004974- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4975 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4976 (key, value) pairs.
4977
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004978- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004979 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4980 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4981
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004982- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4983 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4984 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4985 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4986 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004987
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004988- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004989 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4990 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4991
4992 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4993
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004994- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004995 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4996
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004997Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004998-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004999
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005000- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005001 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5002 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005003
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005004- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5005 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5006 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5007 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5008 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5009 in this area anymore).
5010
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005011- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5012 threading.Timer.
5013
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005014- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5015 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5016
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005017- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005018 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5019
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005020- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005021 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5022 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5023 converted to Python longs.
5024
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005025- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005026 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5027
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005028- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5029 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5030 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5031
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005032Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005033-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005034
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005035- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5036 division operators as per PEP 238.
5037
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005038Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005039-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005040
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005041- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5042 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5043 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5044 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5045
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005046C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005047-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005048
5049- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005050
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005051- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5052 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005053 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005054
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005055 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5056 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005057 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005058 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005059
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005060- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005061 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5062 module:
5063
5064 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005065
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005066 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5067 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005068
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005069 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5070 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005071
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005072 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5073
5074 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5075
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005076- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005077 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5078 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5079 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005080
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005081New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005082-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005083
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005084- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5085 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5086 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5087 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5088 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005089
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005090Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005091-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005092
5093Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005094-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005095
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005096- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5097 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5098 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5099 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005100 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5101 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5102 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5103 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5104 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005105
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005106- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005107 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5108
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005109
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005110What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5111===========================
5112
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005113*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5114
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005115Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005116-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005117
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005118- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5119 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5120
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005121- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5122 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5123 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005124
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005125- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5126 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5127 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5128 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005129
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005130- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5131
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005132- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005133
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005134Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005135-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005136
5137- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005138 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005139 the module docstring for details.
5140
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005141Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005142-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005143
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005144- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005145 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5146 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5147 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005148
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005149- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5150 Nick Mathewson.
5151
5152Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005153----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005154
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005155- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5156 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5157 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5158 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5159 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5160 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5161 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5162 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5163
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005164- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5165 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5166 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5167 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5168
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005169- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5170 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5171 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5172 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5173 come a long way).
5174
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005175- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5176 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5177 write filters for these warnings).
5178
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005179- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5180 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5181 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5182 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5183 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5184
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005185- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5186 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5187 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5188 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5189 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5190 older distribution.
5191
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005192Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005193-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005194
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005195- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5196 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005197 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005198
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005199- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5200 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5201 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5202
5203- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5204
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005205- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5206
5207- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5208
5209- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5210
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005211- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005212
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005213- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5214
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005215New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005216-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005217
5218C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005219-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005220
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005221- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5222 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5223 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5224 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5225 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5226 against buffer overruns.
5227
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005228- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005229 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5230 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005231 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5232 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5233 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5234
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005235- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5236 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5237 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5238 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5239 deprecated.
5240
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005241Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005242-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005243
5244- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5245 relevant is found.
5246
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005247
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005248What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005249===========================
5250
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005251*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5252
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005253Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005254----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005255
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005256- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5257 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5258 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5259 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5260 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5261 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5262 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5263 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005264 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005265 repaired.
5266
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005267- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005268 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005269 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5270 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5271 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5272 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5273 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5274 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5275 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5276 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5277
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005278- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5279 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5280 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5281 leading BMO character).
5282
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005283- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5284 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5285 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5286
5287 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5288 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5289 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005290
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005291 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5292 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5293 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5294 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5295 for various simple to use conversions.
5296
5297 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5298 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5299
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005300 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5301 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5302 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5303 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5304 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5305 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5306 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5307 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5308 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5309 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5310 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5311 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5312 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5313 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5314 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005315
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005316- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5317 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5318 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005319 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005320 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005321
5322 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005323 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5324 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5325 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5326 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5327 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005328 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5329 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005330
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005331 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5332 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5333 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005334 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005335
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005336- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5337 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5338 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5339 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5340 floating arithmetic,
5341
5342 x = 9007199254740992.0
5343 print long(x)
5344
5345 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5346 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5347 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5348 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5349 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5350 functions are of good quality).
5351
5352 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5353 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5354 algorithms to break.
5355
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005356- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5357 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5358 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5359 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5360 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5361 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5362 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5363 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5364 order.
5365
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005366- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5367 operation along the most common code paths.
5368
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005369- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5370 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5371
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005372- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5373 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5374 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5375 {}.update(UserDict())
5376
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005377- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5378 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5379 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5380 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5381 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5382 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5383 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5384 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5385
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005386- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005387 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005388
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005389 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005390 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5391 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005392 join() method of strings
5393 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005394 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5395 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005396 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005397 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005398
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005399- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5400 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5401
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005402- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5403 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5404
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005405- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5406 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5407 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5408 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5409
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005410- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5411 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005412 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005413 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5414 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005415
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005416- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5417
5418
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005419Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005420-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005421
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005422- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005423 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005424 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5425 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5426
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005427- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5428 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5429
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005430- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5431 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5432 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5433 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5434
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005435- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5436 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5437 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5438
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005439- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5440
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005441- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5442
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005443- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5444 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5445 that are still imported into string.py).
5446
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005447- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5448
5449- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5450 Now it does.
5451
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005452- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5453
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005454- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5455 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5456 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5457 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5458 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005459 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5460 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005461
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005462- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5463 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5464 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5465 'help(object)'.
5466
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005467Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005468-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005469
5470- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005471 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005472 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5473 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5474
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005475- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005476 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5477 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005478
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005479C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005480-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005481
5482- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5483 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005484
5485----
5486
5487**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**